Failing Media (Part 2 of 2)

My other hobby, retrogaming, also suffers from failing media.

First, you’ve got old cartridges. Atari 2600 is as far back as I go, and I would group Atari 2600, 5200, Intellivision, Colecovision, and all the other classic systems together. Other than Intellivision carts which seem to have a higher failure rate than the others, it’s pretty rare that I find one of these that either doesn’t work or can’t be coaxed back into working with a bit of cleaning. For Atari 2600 games, I’d guess my success rate is near 99%. For Intellivision it’s much lower, but since most of my Intellivision games came from the same seller, maybe that person had a large collection of non-working games. Hard to tell.

Next up are Nintendo (NES) cartridges. The problem with the NES wasn’t the games as much as it was the connecting pins inside the console itself. There are a lot of myths and legends behind the act of blowing on your cartridges like a harmonica (which pretty much everyone did at one point in time) before inserting them into the NES. Everyone agrees that this helped, although many disagree why. While as kids we thought we were “blowing the dust out of the carts,” what it appears we were doing was actually improving the poor connection between the cartridge and the systems connector by covering the contacts with a layer of spit. Like earlier carts, I’ve seen a pretty high survival rate of NES carts; the systems, however, typically need repairing (see replacing the NES 72 pin connector). There are other NES (top loading) systems and newer 3rd party clones that don’t have this problem and as all my gaming friends know you could write a hundred pages about the issue.

All newer cartridge-based games, from the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis to the Nintendo 64 all have extremely high survival rates — 99%+, in my experience. At one point I had almost 500 Sega Genesis games and I think I had two that didn’t work. In my opinion you have to work pretty hard at breaking one of these things, like storing them underwater, outside, in a toilet, etc.

That leaves us with CD and DVD-based media which, again, as long as they are treated properly seem to have a really good success rate. Like the NES, the actual consoles seem to have more problems than the media. The original PlayStation had some wonky laser issues and certain Xbox 360s have a propensity to scratch people’s discs, but unscratched disc-based games seem to be holding out just fine.

As many of you already know, I also collect arcade games — those big, giant, almost archaic behemoths. There are so many things that go wrong with these machines over time that you could write a book about it (oh wait I did), but here’s just a few things I see. Arcade monitors use paper capacitors; they’re located in the worst possible place (heat rises …) and as a result, most of these capacitors are brittle and/or just worn out. Lots of old machines also contained batteries for various reasons; those are all suspect at this point. The actual electronics depend on the machine itself, but there are plenty of parts still available for repairs. Most of the moving parts (joysticks, buttons, coin mechs, etc) can be fixed or replaced. Arcade games don’t really fall under “media” but since I was talking about games I thought I’d throw it in.