I’ve had so much fun trying to find the right holder that, at the end of all this, I’m probably going to just use regular tabbed CR2032 / BR2032 cells! :)

The trouble with fitting a replacement battery holder into a Super Nintendo cartridge is that there’s considerably less room inside the plastic shell than you might expect. The original battery is quite compact, but some of the replacement holders are rather enormous by comparison.

I’d been experimenting with several different types, including a couple fitted to Super Mario All-Stars and one of my homemade flash cartridges. I think I’d tried four or five different holders by this point, and none was making life particularly easy.

One holder looked lovely on the circuit board but was simply too tall for the cartridge to close properly. Another was low enough to fit inside the shell, but it hung over the edge of the PCB instead. Apparently getting both the height and the position right was asking too much!

The flash cartridge was particularly awkward because I’d already fitted a socket for its ROM chip. There wasn’t much room to move things around without the battery holder interfering with something else.

I did eventually find a Panasonic holder that could be fitted quite neatly, although I had to adjust the pins a little because they didn’t line up exactly with the existing holes. It was a tight fit near the edge of the board, but with a little care I managed to get it sitting reasonably flush.

There was also a short piece of green Kynar wire involved. I rather liked the result because the wire blended in with the PCB. Unless you looked closely, you might not even realise it was there!

Unfortunately, finding a holder that fitted on one cartridge didn’t mean I had a solution for every SNES game. Different boards have different component layouts, and the cartridge shells don’t leave much room for anything taller than the original battery.

I briefly considered cutting away some of the plastic to make everything fit. That would certainly work around the clearance problem, although the resulting cartridge might look like some sort of enormous homemade monster. Tempting, isn’t it?

The more I experimented, the more attractive the ordinary tabbed battery option became. A replacement holder would be lovely for making future battery changes easier, but not if I had to butcher the cartridge shell just to get it inside.

I suppose I’ll keep experimenting with the holders I’ve already bought. There must be a combination that fits without requiring a Dremel and a small act of divine intervention!

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