You ever had a dead cart?

[armonigann]

I was just thinkin'.. out of my entire collection (around 1k of carts)
I've never run across a dead SMS cart. I've had dead NES, intell, atari, coleco( damn burgertime!), hell even a dead genesis cart.

Is it just me or have I just been lucky?

[Tonto]

Maybe once, but it's a bit hazy. Usually just blowing the dust or giving it a wipe means they work as good as new.

[Tears of Opa-Opa]

I've actually had a Transbot Sega card that didn't work at all.
It looked in good shape but I couldn't get it to work even after cleaning it.

That was the only one I ran into out of about 300-400 SMS games.

[racort]

Something like: shinobiman.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=accessories&action=display&thread=7849

sms cartridges are very hard XD

[Tears of Opa-Opa]

The Transbot I had would just give a black screen. I tried it quite a few times and cleaned it a couple times. I also tried other cards in that system and they worked fine. I tried it in a different SMS and it didn't work in that one either. Again, it looked normal. It was in good shape with some surface scratches from being put in the card slot. The contacts looked fine.

[grolt]

I still can't get the copy of Bubble Bobble I have to work. I've cleaned it, taken it apart and all that, and everything looks sound. It will not give me any kind of indicators when I put the cart in though, it might as well be an empty one. It's a pretty hard one for me to get, so I just keep holding on to it hoping that one day it will just up and work for me. Hasn't happened yet!

[brian]

I loaned Golden Axe II to a guy back in highschool, got it back dead... I can occasionally get the BIOS screen but usually I just get a black screen. I've opened it up, checked it all out, everything looks prestine, but it will not load up anymore.
I also have a copy of Duke Nukem 64 that fell out of my friends pocket one winter into a snowbank in the driveway. Couldn't be found. A few days later we assumed the snowblower found it as it made an awful sound and 'something' went flying, but still no sign of the cart though. That spring (may) when the snow melted there by the woods was Duke Nukem 64, badly beaten as the snow blower most obviously did grab it, very rusty after being in the elements so long, a handful of Q-Tips some alcohol later Duke Nukem 64 works fine.
To this day Golden Axe II still doesn't work... what the hell did Jaques do to that poor game??

[Retrobob]

I've only had one cart that wouldn't work - Dynamite Duke, was even resistant to cleaning so I bought another and binned the cart.

[Transatlantic Foe]

I had a defective Sonic Chaos cart (bought brand new, so not ageing or dirty) where the game would randomly crash for no reason - sometimes it'd be the hard crash you get if you accidentally whack the console while playing, sometimes the screen would corrupt but gameplay would continue. It got taken back and I got Desert Strike instead.

[ninjabearhug]

Oct 26, 2010 3:57:32 GMT Retrobob said:

I've only had one cart that wouldn't work - Dynamite Duke, was even resistant to cleaning so I bought another and binned the cart.

Snap! Only SMS cart I've had that I couldn't get to work was Dynamite Duke too. I've had a lot that needed a good clean to get working but that was the only dead one.

Had quite a few for other systems, mainly NES, but quite a few EA Mega Drive games too, they seem more fragile than the normal shaped carts.

[ShadowAngel]

NES seem to make the most problem, i have two cartridges for it that just won't work (Goonies 2 and Snake Rattle & Roll)
Nothing ever happened to any of my Sega games, they seem to outlive everything, even my completely smashed-to-pieces Eternal Champions "Cartridges" (It's not even a cartridge anymore, but basically just the PCB) is still working just fine.
Never had any problems with Master System games, even if they start up immediately, mostly they just need to be cleaned.

[Melanogaster]

A few months back I came across a Wanted cartridge that was about to be the first dead SMS one that I had ever seen. I had already cleaned it with the heavy stuff we normally use on Tec Toy carts but the problem remained the same -- black screen upon turning the console on. I thought about leaving it alone/throwing it away, but the fact that this would mean I would've seen a dead SMS cart kept me going. Finally I decided to run a continuity test with a multimeter on the cart's connectors and eventually discovered that some of them were unresponsive. Even though they were all visually identical and there was no apparent reason to doubt their functionality, life has taught us that kids around here cannot be trusted and that we won't always believe the things they would do with videogame cartridges, so I decided to ignore what I saw and instead vigorously rubbed some steel wool on the connectors -- a couple of minutes later, the game was up and running... Which was cool for the next five minutes or so, since the game actually sucks.