I was playing Pokemon Red on my couch last Saturday and knocked a whole mug of coffee onto my Game Boy Pocket. The console still works fine after drying out for a day, but the cartridge slot is now sticky and my save file is gone. Has anyone else had a drink disaster kill their game data but leave the system alive?
Yesterday I cracked 500 cartridges in my NES collection after snagging a dusty copy of Gradius off Facebook Marketplace for $8. I did the math and realized I've been hunting since 2010 when I found my first lot at a garage sale for $20. What got me is that I never planned to hit a specific number, it just kind of happened over time with thrift store runs and eBay bids. Most of the games are common titles like Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt, but there's maybe 30 rare ones in there too. Anyone else hit a milestone by accident and stop to think about how much time you actually put in?
I bought a Commodore 64 off eBay from a seller in Ohio who swore it was fully working, but when I plugged it in a faint burning smell came out after about 2 minutes. Popped the case open and found a forgotten half-eaten cheese sandwich crust wedged between the motherboard and the shielding, which had been slowly shorting things out over the years. Anyone else ever gotten a retro machine with food stashed inside?
I just recapped my C64 last weekend after it started showing vertical bars on boot. Old caps were crusty, three had leaked onto the board. Used a $15 soldering iron from Harbor Freight and it did fine, no lifted pads or anything. Took me about 2 hours total since I had to clean up the leaked electrolyte first. Has anyone else dealt with capacitor goo eating through traces on these old boards? Mine had some damage I had to scrape back and bridge with wire.
I was digging through a dusty back corner at a Goodwill off Route 66 last weekend and spotted an Apple IIe with the green monitor still attached. Plugged it in at the store and the CRT flickered to life with that classic amber glow, but I noticed the floppy drive was jammed with a crumpled up receipt from 1992. Has anyone else run into old paper jams in retro drives and found a way to gently clean them out without wrecking the read heads?
I keep a little tally on the wall of how many times my C64 boots without a fault. Got to 127 yesterday which is a new record for me after I recapped the power supply last summer. Anyone else track random milestones like this with their retro gear?
I was trying to fix a dead RAM chip on my TRS-80 Model I and used plumber's acid flux. A guy named Frank at the local retro computer meetup in Portland saw my board and said "you're gonna eat through those traces in 3 months." He was right, I had to redo the whole thing with rosin flux and it worked way better. Has anyone else ruined a vintage board using the wrong solder supplies?
Picked up a beat up SNES at a thrift store last month and noticed the previous owner scrubbed the cartridge label clean off. Then it hit me that all those YouTube guides telling you to use alcohol are actually stripping the print over time. Anyone else switch to just compressed air and a soft brush?
Guy down the street saw my shop sign and brought over a dusty C64 from his attic. Said it stopped working in 1992 and he never bothered to fix it. I spent a Saturday cleaning the PSU pins and reseating every chip inside. Booted right up on the third try and he just stood there with his mouth open. Anyone else have a random neighbor show up with vintage gear they forgot about?
Last weekend I found my childhood NES in a box from when we moved back in 2014. I figured it was done for with all that dust and who knows what else. After about 3 hours of cleaning the pins with rubbing alcohol and a old toothbrush, it actually fired up. I hooked it up to my dad's old CRT TV in the garage and played Super Mario Bros for 20 minutes straight. It felt like being 8 years old again but my thumbs started hurting way faster than I remembered. Has anyone else had luck bringing a console back from the dead with just some basic cleaning?