ELi5: why did old cartridge games not boot up properly and people would end up blowing on them?
In: Technology
It was actually a myth. Re-seating the cartridge is what got the games to load properly
People widely believed that dust or debris might have gotten between contactors on the game boards, so we would blow on them thinking it dusted them off.
If anything, this probably put excess moisture on our games and made them corrode quicker
Generally it was because the contacts weren’t making good…contact. People would blow on them to remove dust. What people were actually doing was exposing them to moisture and making corrosion worse and degrading the contacts. Often what actually worked just fine was inserting and removing the cart a couple of times to clean things up.
Speaking specifically of the NES, the console and every game had a microchip in them that had to be able to talk to each other and, if they weren’t able to, the console would reboot. This usually causes a “boot loop”, flashing the power light and TV screen.
People believed that taking the cartridge out, blowing on them, and reinserting it cleaned dust or something off and allowed it to work. However, it was most likely just re-seating the cartridge that fixed the problem.
The NES has a design flaw. They designed it to be more like a VCR with the front loading as an effort to get around the stigma about video games from the crash of 1983 by selling it more like the “entertainment system” it was named rather than a video game console. However, the front loading design made it so the connector in the console would wear out over time, making it less reliable.
Contacts get corroded or junk on them. I never blew on them but would use a pencil eraser on them. Always did the trick.
I vividly remember having such a hard time on the NES, however, I never had issues with the SNES and N64. Wonder why.
In addition, today as the carts are really old, sometimes the game won’t boot because the battery in the cartridge needs to charge, so you just leave it on a min and then start it over.
When I got my own N64, I put the carts back into the box every time i removed them from the system…
Shocker, never had to try twice to load a game.
In my headcannon, all the old games cartridge where better because we where all high from hyperventilating before playing them.
If blowing on them didn’t work a properly applied wack would free up the bits and allow them to flow better.
Basically there were contact pads on either side of the console, dust, debris, etc. Would get on the pads and they couldn’t get proper connection. So blowing was a way to get them clean.
The other issue is that because you had to insert and remove cartridges it would inevitably wear out the pads on the console. And eventually it would get so worn down they wouldn’t work. Though this did usually take a lot to happen.
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