19 Apr
2016
19 Apr
'16
8:43 a.m.
How long will they last?
Probably a long time, but dump them all anyways! You never know!
Why does blowing on them help? (mosture? cleaning
action?)
The moisure makes the connection work better or something, so that is
where it comes from. Cleaning the contacts is best, and if it's a NES you
can replace the "finger module" or the slots on other systems.
Are some better than others in terms of longevity?
The card edge connectors would probably be where the reliability comes in.
Can they be refurbished ?
Depending on the system there are reproduction labels made. A lot of the
older game system carts you will find the labels coming off or
deteriorating. It depends on how they were stored I'd guess. Moisture and
heat.
Remember when folks would publish apps on carts to
enhance the copy
protection ?
I think it was used more because the intro cost to the system was cheaper.
Floppy drives were expensive, you could sell carts to people with basic
systems.
There were units for some of the game systems like the SNES that sat on
top, and allowed you to copy the rom cart contents to floppy disks. Then
you could re-load the contents of the rom cart from the floppy disks into
RAM in the "console copier" and then play the pirated games. Also on the
home computers people dumped rom carts and made binary executables.
Remember the ones like Starfox for the SNES that had
coprocessors embedded
on them? Those were neat.
Yes, I think there were only two for the SNES but I could be wrong. Check
out Pitfall II on the Atari 2600, it has a sound processor in the cart.
In the documentary "Stella at 20" the engineers of the Atari 2600 talk
about how they cut ?4? pins off the Atari 2600 cart to shave costs. The
next year the costs were so much lower it was a neglible price cut, but
had the pins been left there it would have allowed more memory space to be
accessable in the cart leading to tons of expansion possibilities.
Re: Rare Neo Geo carts
Sprites" ? Sure!
Yep, have a 4 slot MVS at home and run a 161 in 1 cart in it. Sure I'd
love to have piles of Magical Drop 3's and stuff, but just not gonna
embrace the video-games-are-beanie-babies thing. Some of the N64 and SNES
games are more now than they were new.
But if you want to see real bubble, look into collecting A list pinball
titles.
I have some 90's consoles in my collection and I
fondly remember a few
systems that took carts that family and friends owned back in the 80's and
90's. I thought the Colecovision Adam was awesome. My cousin had one and I
was so jealous. The C64, 80's 8bit Atari PCs, the IBM PC Jr, and others all
had cartridge ports, too.
Yep, and the same damn games on all of them :-) AtariSoft! Parker Bros!
Etc. Frogger and the Qbert and the Centipede and the Defender.
--
Ethan O'Toole