Craigslist Finds - A Glitchy, Broken SNES w/ 5 games

These would have cost much more at a game shop. Still, ugh.

Just off the high from buying a $30 SNES and selling it for $50, I set out to replicate my success with another SNES, this time purchased for $25 from a nice family on Craigslist.  The set included Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Donkey Kong Country 3, Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat 2.  Not bad for the price, and selling the SNES with Mario World and my existing Player's Choice copy of Mario All-Stars should have made it a very, very sweet deal.

But this SNES hides a terrible, dark secret.  It hates Mode 7.

When presented with a Mode 7 effect to process, it responds with "LOL I DUNNO LIKE THIS MAYBE" and spits out some garbage vaguely similar to what's supposed to be on the screen.

Yoshi has a segmented tongue!

The opening is the obvious glitch, but watch Yoshi's tongue, too.  Weird, but not as weird as this:

Yikes.

As you can see, it's a much harder game when Mode 7 goes nuts.  Eventually I learned to drive from the bottom half of the screen rather than the top for demo purposes.

So, can we fix it?  No, probably not.  I've checked over and thoroughly cleaned the cartridge connector and can't find any issues.  The games work just fine in my SNES.  From what I've read, this issue is caused by a bad PPU - meaning it'd either need a donor PPU or a whole new board, and I don't have the right kind of equipment to swap the chip anyway.

Of course, I just purchased a pretty decent stack of games for $25 and got an entertainingly glitchy SNES to go with it.  What's to complain about?