New games, new machines, dumb mistakes

[HoshiChiri]

I recently acquired an Atari Lynx, based largely on Metal Jesus' buying guide bringing up games that actually looked good to me (that's two because of you, man!) When it arrived, I popped in the copy of Blue Lightning it came with and- nothing. OK, no big deal, the batteries it came with must be dead. I replaced the batteries. Nothing. OK, I'm sure it's fine, I must have put them in wrong. So I checked the batteries- no, they're fine. Oh no, my system's dead. Did it break in the mail? What do I tell the guy I bought it from? Ok, calm down- let's try one of the other games & make sure it's no the cart. I put in Switchblade 2, which is a later cart with the curved end. And it booted up just fine. Oh thank god, it's not broken. What's wrong with Blue Lightning, though? This is when I looked at the back of the system for the first time, and realized the labels were facing in & I'd put Blue Lightning in backwards. Well... how was I supposed to know that?! Most labels face out!

 

So, it got me thinking- have you ever thought you had a broken game or console becuase you made a stupid mistake? This isn't the first time I've run into this! Wizard of Wor? Had to check here to find out I needed to use the right controller port. I had a friend call me over becuase the Dreamcast I gave her wouldn't turn on. She didn't have the power plug in all the way. Me & her both thought the copy of Bomberman 2nd Attack she'd driven 2 hours to get was busted becuase it had no sound. While we were being bummed, my fiancé grabbed the controller, went into the options menu, and turned the mute button off. (And then proceeded to tease us about it.)

[Eltigro]

I know there are lots of people who think their Jaguar is broken when it won't power up with no game inserted.

[DJ Clae]

My Jaguar showed a corrupted boot screen with no game inserted.

 

I bought a used Neo Geo at a game store in the 90's. It was actually exchanged for the first one they gave me, which had cart slot problems. Well, the second one would randomly reset after being on for a while. I didn't understand at the time, but now I'm quite sure that was a power supply issue. The Neo has three different official AC adapters released for it, and you need the one that matches the voltage of your system. The guy at the store simply swapped out the console and let me keep my same AC adapter without checking this. That's probably why it didn't work right.

 

I ended up returning it again, and didn't try buying another AES for a year or so.

[PFG 9000]

Just a few months ago I had a freak-out over my TurboGrafx/TurboCD/TurboBooster. I bought it about two years ago, and it was a fairly pricey purchase ($350 or so, IIRC). I picked up a few games for it, as well as a Japanese system card ($40) and a converter ($110) to use it.

 

(The Turbo is a quirky system, if you're not familiar with it...the CD games were published in different "tiers," with later tiers requiring more advanced system cards to play. The system card is sorta like Bios and a RAM expansion on a game cartridge that you need to have inserted into the cartridge slot while you run CD games. The cartridge slot is region locked by reversing the order of the cartridge pins, so you can buy a converter to "fix" this. You put a cartridge in the converter, and then plug the converter into the cartridge slot.)

 

After some time, I could no longer run CD games, and it seemed like my system card was dead. So I bought another system card, this time the most powerful type, the Arcade Pro card, which set me back $90. It worked great, and I was able to play everything on the console. But after a few more months, it stopped reading the system card again! I freaked out, thinking I was somehow frying my system cards, or even my system itself, and I didn't want to keep sinking money into the system if the same issue was just going to keep happening.

 

I asked around here but didn't get the answers I needed, so I registered at the PCEngineFX forums to ask the experts there. Eventually I was told that it's possible to insert a cartridge TOO far. All I had to do was pull my converter out a hair, and now everything works perfectly. Every system card, every game. Problem solved.