It was a pretty painful day last month when the once promising Portable N64 commission I was building decided to implode on me. Never had I seen this kind of paint failure before, nor would have ever thought that after 3 weeks of being sealed that this could have even happened. But, regardless of belief, here we are and the paint is still cracking everyday, but is still as smooth as the day the last coat of clear was applied.
One may argue though that this is actually a pretty cool effect, giving it an aged and more rustic tone, but most of the time technology and rustic don’t blend well and in this case it prompted a total redo of the project and “The GoldeN64” became the “iSore 64”.
With this demotion, certain components like the Power Management system and custom controller board were downgraded, making this a battery power only and single player system. But the hits didn’t stop there. The expansion pak was also reverted back the original jumper pak and biggest kicker was I had to downgrade to a V2 of the Mini64 controller board which did not have a built in memory chip, but 32 test points to hard wire a memory card, which however is not done in this system. So the features are pretty bare. But I had to do this because I still need to complete the commission I originally started and those features and components are pretty expensive and low supply.
The video and pics below demonstrate just how nasty this failure was. It was very sad to see it fall so far, but it’s for sale now and perhaps will get picked up by a buyer that can add in the missing features and bring her back to her former glory?
Downing's Basement 