Expansion Pack Insanity

codeman · Post by **codeman** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 5:51 pm

Sooo...I'm relocating the expansion pack. I soldered a wire to every point on the board (pain in the butt) and now I'm 5 wires away from having them all soldered to the expansion pack.
The problem is...i have 5 wires, and only 4 spots left!?!
I then counted the connection points on the expansion pack and I only counted 35 rather than 36. Is there something I'm missing?!
I counted several times, and can't for the life of me find out what I did wrong....I checked and I didn't skip a connection either, they're all populated. What's going on?!?!

Kurt_ · Post by **Kurt_** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 6:34 pm

Weird. Tim did this a while back, and has a picture of it on this site somewhere. But it seems it's no longer on his site thing.

Krepticor · Post by **Krepticor** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 6:45 pm

ground?

codeman · Post by **codeman** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 7:45 pm

I don't think it's ground. On the N64 board, the pins have a silkscreen label for pin 1 and pin 36. On the expansion pack board there is a label for pin 1 and pin 36, but on the expansion board I only count 35 contacts!!!
I just figured it would be a one-to-one connection until i got to the last few wires and realized something was wrong...this is puzzling. Any ideas timmeh? Or anyone else for that matter!

superdeformed · Post by **superdeformed** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 10:46 pm

I remember doing the exact same thing when I was working on the expansion pack and having to resolder the entire thing

. After looking at the horribly low quality pictures I have saved, I'm pretty sure that the extra connection is a ground on the left end of the expansion pack (when looking at it from the back of the N64 mobo). If you still have the connector try and line things up, or if you've plugged in and removed the expansion pack enough you'll probably see a line from the connector on bare board (where there is no copper pad).

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Sun Jun 17, 2007 11:22 am

hahaha. I did that too. having to shift like 25 wires over one pin.

I dont remember what the exact reason was... I think maybe the last pin on one of the ends gets shorted to the ground beside it by a contact inside the connector. so it dosent count as a pin on circuit board.

codeman · Post by **codeman** » Sun Jun 17, 2007 11:39 am

Well, that's a little reassuring then at least. Do you happen to remember which pin it was? I threw out the connector already, I thought this was going to be an easy part....ha

superdeformed · Post by **superdeformed** » Sun Jun 17, 2007 12:55 pm

I compared my other expansion pack (still in the factory case) with a jumper pack, and it looks like the connection on the left end (the really wide pad, seen here) is taking the place of 3 pins. If you have a jumper pack lying around somewhere, you can look at it and see that in between the very end pin (higher level on the very end of the board) and the next low pin (near the edge of the board, part of the same copper trace), there's another higher level pin that isn't connected to anything, which is the one that's just merged with the pad on the expansion pack.

Hopefully that actually makes sense...I'd take a better picture of how I have it set up, but I would have to disassemble my entire N64 to get to it, which I'd rather not have to do

.

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Sun Jun 17, 2007 3:29 pm

just follow the traces and make sure the expansion pack ram chip is hooked up to the other two chips pin-for-pin (mostly).