General Category > General Discussion
Are EM shields necessary in old consoles?
Jeff:
I've tried searching around for this but I couldn't get a straight answer. Consoles tend to have these metal plates inside of them and I've read that they're either useless, decrease RF interference, help with electrical grounding, needed for the 32x, and a lot of sarcastic responses. Can someone explain how necessary they are, because it seems like you need to remove it to have room for mods.
Blumpkin:
The only one that I'm fairly certain that I removed the plating on was on the orginal Xbox. I clear cased my old school Xbox years ago and it ran fine without the metal crap around the guts of the console.
I'm not sure if the fat PS2 and fat 360 had the same stuff. But I've clear cased those too and they worked just fine.
As long as the metal isn't attached to grounding wires I don't think that it'll matter if you remove them. But also be aware that all the consoles that I've modded aren't wi-fi capable. Not sure if that makes any difference.
Jeff:
On a genesis (model 2 at least) there are patches of ground pins that lay underneath and make contact to the plate. That's what makes me the most concerned.
However, to make room for RCA ports I cut off a bit of a corner leaving a patch of grounds exposed. It didn't break or explode yet.
Ozzy_98:
They are legally required to be made on there. Without them, they generate RF noise, so you'd get crappy pictures on your tv if using a RF cable (Or to much lesser extend, "rca" connectors). Without RF shielding, they generate more RF noise than the FCC allows.
When I was a kid, when I used my C-64, it messed up my parent's TV down stairs.
KalessinDB:
I've never gone out of my way to remove them, but I know to install the A/V jacks on my Colecovision, a bit of the shielding had to be removed. Also, I (like most people) don't have the metal plates used to connect the Genesis to the Sega CD, and I've never had a problem.
Like others have said, they were legally required to be there, but if you have to remove part of them to do a mod, I wouldn't worry about it personally.