Can cartridges just fail? Can they be repaired?

[edladdin]

I have a small number of dead carts as well... My childhood copy of Air-Sea Battle, a couple 5200 games - Ms. Pac-Man and Pitfall 2.

 

The rest of them that are not frequent-play games seem to wake back up with a fresh, gentle cleaning of just rubbing alcohol on a q-tip. .

[Nukey Shay]

Bit rot seems to be more associated with EPROM and EEPROMs than mask ROMs. That's because those ROMs were designed to be rewritten, which is odd that they loved to use them in arcade games.

Not odd at all. Mask ROM chips are cheaper to produce as the production quantity becomes larger. Cartridge games can easily offset this cost because the quantity produced is often in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands (or even millions BITD). Compare that to arcade games which were produced in the single hundreds or thousands...or even more limited quantities today.

[Video]

Its more common for a contact, trace, or independent resistor to go bad or break, and those are all easy to track and fix. Good maskroms can go bad but its rare. Most chips I have go bad are typically cheaper ROMs in epoxy blob type chips.

 

Despite the age of tech, little is known about how long a ROM can last. We're in the range of 60ish years of ic chips now and most failures are either extreme situations (power spikes or physical damage) or bad initial runs.

[sn8k]

As long as the pins are there. Anything within reason can be brought back. Missing pins or damaged ones can be repaired by desoldering fully and replating with liquid gold. I can see the actual board failing somewhere. 99% of clone systems destroy games with their death grip connectors. Please stop putting your good games in cheap shitty consoles. Ive only encountered one clone that doesnt have a deathgrip, and thats the Supaboy S. Hyperkin has stepped up and raised that bar high. Every thing else ive seen and used is bullshit.

[Osgeld]

yea those damn cheap shitty sunnyvale 4 switchers, get your liquid gold and only bother with those cheap shitty 4 switch atari hyperkin nes clones god dammit!

[+rbairos]

Thought Id separate my cartridge questions to an appropriate thread.

I recently bought this lot:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/273425-broken-light-sixer-price-suggestion/?p=3921441

But seem to have a lot of bad carts.
Maybe 2 of 6 worked. Im afraid to test more in case Im frying them or something.

But one for example, Activision Tennis, Ive cleaned with isopropyl alcohol, radio-shack head contact cleaner, and even disassembled the cart and used white eraser.
Ive checked all the edge connectors back to the pins with a multimeter.
I have some deoxit arriving in the mail, but doesn't seem hopeful since it already passed the multimeter test.

They all fail to work on my modded Flashback 2, even though that unit works with 4/4 carts Ive bought at vintage shops.
I know the FB2 has some compatibility issues with some carts, but these should all work fine from what Ive read.

Is it possible I just got a lot of bad carts??

Thanks,
Rob

Edited December 30, 2017 by rbairos

[RamrodHare]

 

Is it possible I just got a lot of bad carts??

 

Thanks,

Rob

 

 

 

Out of 100 + carts, I've only had one bad one. For you to have 4 out of 6 be bad, well, that just seems odd to me. Common carts are cheap, you could buy a few from someone here who has verified that they work. If you get them and they don't work, then it's very possible that it's your console killing them.

[+rbairos]

Update: In a last ditch effort, I reassembled Activision Tennis, and tried it one last time.. It worked!

Then I tried Frostbite. didnt work.
Reinserted it several times, worked.

Same with Pressure Cooker!

So Im thinking theres probably lots of oxidation on these carts and will take some more rigorous cleaning.

Hopefully the deoxit makes this efficient work.

Thanks for the insight.

Edited December 30, 2017 by rbairos

[RamrodHare]

I'm glad they work! Sometimes it takes some scrubbing, just don't scrub too much.

[Jinks]

Activisions are the worst. They like to be inserted. Power on. Power off remove cart and reinsert and power on. Repeat 15 or so times and play game. Atari games are way more stable. Imagics are like that too.. a little unreliable.

[simbalion]

I've had some games that will only play at an odd angle in the cartridge slot. Activision games definitely come to mind and it sucks when you have a 2600 with a really tight cart slot. The 7800 is a bit looser on the cart slot, so you get some wiggle room.