Last December a friend of mine came back from the UK for a vacation and brought me this NES, with a few cartridges, as a gift. When I saw Zelda and Zelda II I told him that those could sell for a nice price, and after looking for loose cartridges sold in similar conditions, I made him a reasonable offer.

Here’s the exploded view of the console – or “control deck” as it was called back then:

And this is the exploded view of the controller:

This UK unit has a “NES VERSION” marking on the front, while my Italian one shows “MATTEL VERSION”.

The labels on the bottom are different of course:

Here’s the motherboard.

On the front there are two buttons for power and reset, and two connectors for the controllers; on the side there’s a couple of RCA connectors for composite video and mono audio. On the back there’s the RF output, and the connector for the external AC adapter.

These are the cartridges (or “Game Paks” as marketed by Nintendo) that I got with the unit: the “usual” Super Mario Bros games, plus The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II – The Adventures of Link.

One last picture with a transparent effect on the top of the case: