my oldest nes died b/c of a defective power port, but now i have 2 systems, one works great (except someone switched the first and second controlelr ports), and the other is missing sheilding, and starts acting weird sometimes, but in the long run they are a damned durable system.You know why they made the nes cart load like it does? its to aviod scraping the contacts off, but what it ended up doing by not abrading them is allowing them to corode, which is why it can be hard to make the system boot a cart sometimes. Get some intresting info from reading the pattent for a system...