Retro Game Console Care: Tips & Tricks for Collectors

Tips & Tricks to Take Care of Your Retro Console!

Getting into retro gaming is a fun and rewarding experience. There are many consoles to choose from that uniquely showcase the evolution of the gaming industry, from the days of quarters and arcades to the early 2000s graphics race. Here are some helpful tips and tricks to learn to get the most out of your retro games and consoles.

Cartridge Consoles – Before CD games and Blu-Ray games came around, consoles played cartridges of all shapes and sizes. Many consoles of this era (80s–late 90s) were made to last, featuring an internal design that had minimal components compared to the disc-reading consoles that would come later. If your N64 or SNES is not displaying the game even when turned on, your first order of business would be to clean the cartridges. The brass pins on the cartridges are subject to the elements in the air which cause them to corrode. Cleaning these pins with 91% alcohol and a bit of brass cleaner almost always gets your games to work. Secondly, you are going to want to look at changing out the power adapter, as these can go bad over time. Your console will generally have a power indicator such as a red light on a SNES or N64, but not all consoles have a light or indicator of proper power output. You can also carefully rub an alcohol-soaked cotton tip into the pin reader of the console to clean out any potential corrosion and dust in the pin reader.

Let’s say you have a Nintendo 64 console that gets power, and you cleaned the game pins and pin reader correctly, but you still do not have image output, there is another trick you can try. The Nintendo 64 was built to last and rarely do they ever go bad, so you are going to want to open the front lid where it says, “memory expansion” and swap out the booster pack with a new one. The booster pack is essentially just RAM for your console to play and process the games, and popping in a new booster pack almost always solves this issue when your games are not reading.

When storing your retro game cartridges and consoles, be sure to keep them in an indoor, temperature-controlled, low-humidity environment, as corrosion in these consoles and games is very commonly due to them being exposed to the harsher elements of the garage or a storage unit, and can lead to more complicated issues with your consoles.

Disc Reading Consoles – Disc reading consoles can be a little more difficult to diagnose and fix yourself and will often need professional help from your local game shop. However, there are some important aspects to know about them and to correctly diagnose the issue yourself.

You fire up your GameCube, place a disc in the console, and get ready to play, but instead of loading up that Super Smash Bros Melee you were excited to play, it spins to the main menu. This can be a sign that your disc drive has expired. To be sure, always try multiple games so that you can know for sure that it is not the discs themselves. The same issue will also occur in PlayStation 2 consoles and other disc-reading consoles from that time. What your GameCube will need is a “Disc Drive Recap,” which is a specialty fix involving soldering and replacing the capacitors to the disc drive, which is what allows the disc drive to power up and read the games. Now that GameCubes are about 25 years old at the time of this blog, we see a lot of GameCubes coming to our shop to get repaired every week. This repair is highly successful at bringing your GameCube back to life.

If your PS2 also has the same disc-reading issue, PlayStation consoles generally need their entire laser replaced, which is a very routine repair that we offer in store for PlayStation 2 consoles. As with cartridge-reading consoles, you want to keep your Cubes, PS2, and the like in a temperature-controlled environment. Our store being based in hot and humid Florida, we have seen consoles come in the shop almost destroyed by the outdoor elements. Keeping your consoles indoors and stored safely also prevents pesky insects from crawling inside of them. These bugs love consoles almost as much as we do, but for different reasons in that they use them as homes to lay eggs in. The eggs and insect excrement have the nasty effect of frying motherboards and can destroy your console. So, before you put that XBOX in the garage, maybe consider somewhere else you can tuck it away inside of the house so that it is safe.

Discs do not get corrosion the way that cartridges do, but they can become easily scratched, which can impair your console’s ability to read it, or worse – ruin your game. Be sure to keep your discs in their original case, or a CD sleeve to protect it. There are many “homemade” methods to remove scratches, but we strongly encourage you to NOT follow them, as the “toothpaste method” will almost certainly ruin your game long-term. Instead, we suggest you visit us, or your local retro shop, where your discs can be resurfaced. In our store, we have a professional-grade disc resurfacing machine that buffs the discs at a high rate of spin and employs a special liquid solution to remove surface scratches. This method is worth the time, as we have saved thousands of games that were considered broken, even titles such as Silent Hill and high-value RPG games have been brought back from the brink to looking brand new, and more importantly – reading again!

In summary, keeping your games and consoles in a clean and temperature-controlled environment will go a long way in preserving their conditions and ensuring that they work for years to come. When in doubt about your cartridge, grab some 91% alcohol and clean the pins. When your disc isn’t reading, try resurfacing the game before you look at getting the laser on your console fixed. We have been doing our part in preserving retro gaming for you to enjoy for over 16 years, and these are some of the tips and tricks we can pass onto you so that you can preserve your games for yourself, and the next person!

Check out our thoroughly cleaned and tested consoles! We have everything from Game Boy Advance to PlayStation 2 and so much more to choose from. You can trust that each console has been thoroughly inspected, cleaned, tested, refurbished, and is ready to enjoy!