Contact Cleaner is a Retro-Gamer's best friend

I once had a box with 78 (seemingly) dead Atari 2600 cartridges in my possession. Using Isopropyl Alcohol and/or 409 on the cartridge contacts didn't get them to work again. So, I picked up some electrical contact cleaner from Home Depot and decided to use that instead. I had heard about a name brand contact cleaner called DeoxIT from a popular YouTube channel called John's Arcade. John routinely used the stuff to clean electrical contacts inside of arcade games and pinball tables that he would service, repair and restore. Home Depot didn't have the DeoxIT brand, just some generic looking product from a company called CRC. I bought a can anyway because I figured that I had nothing to lose if the cartridges were indeed actually dead.

Thankfully, at least some of these carts were not dead. Of the 78 total, I have managed to get 41 cartridges working again. That brings my overall count of working cartridges for Atari 2600 to a whopping 225. That puts it way in the lead fot system with the most individual titles. The closest second would be the NES at 146. I find this to be rather amazing and impressive.

I haven't given up on the cartridges that still don't work. Some of them couldn't be cleaned and then re-tested because of a small plastic door in the cartridge shell that protects the contacts/circuit board from the outside world. The 2600 console can push that plastic shield back but, my fingers can't. Also, I don't want to try to take these old cartridges apart because that would ruin the labels. A lot of those games already have really bad labels right now. No need for me to make that worse. Besides, I may not be able to get them back together again in quite the right way. I have no trouble taking apart cartridges for Nintendo systems but, I've never done it with an Atari cartridge before.

Here's a picture of the 2 shelves that I now have holding loose Atari 5200 games. The one on the left used to hold them all but, it's now completely filled with 200 of them. Another 11 loose carts are on the top shelf of the small shelf to the right. The other 14 carts I have for the Atari 2600 are in boxes on another shelf or on two display easels on top of the shelves picture here. Those games on the display easels are Battlezone and Solaris for Atari 2600, Asteroids for Atari 7800 and Alien vs. Predator the Jaguar.

Yes, I know there are a LOT of duplicates. That happens when you acquire old Atari games in bulk from garage sales...
And retro game stores looking to clear out inventory...

I decided to use the contact cleaner on another few problem cartridges as well, this time for the Atari 5200 and Jaguar.

The 4 Jaguar games that I cleaned now work like new. Now I can play Wolfenstein 3d, Club Drive, Checkered Flag and a 2nd copy of Tempest 2000 again! Yay! I might even write reviews for these titles some day. All of them are pretty unique titles that you won't find anywhere else. The Jag version of Wolf3d was very different from all the others. Also, despite Checkered Flag being released on the Atari Lynx in 1991, the 1994 Jaguar version is a completely different experience.

The 2 carts for the 5200 though, still don't work. One tried and did get to the start-up screen but, always had display errors and never passed that screen. Looking at the contacts on those 2 problem carts, I can see a fair amount of corrosion that the quick once-over with the contact cleaner didn't remove. I'll have to work on them a little more at a later date. That being said, getting the 5200 carts to work again would be purely academic. Like many 5200 owners, I don't have any working controllers for that system. :P

So, for my final verdict, I'd say that contact cleaner is well worth having around in one's game room. Isopropyl Alcohol usually works fine but, it's good to have a cleaning product that's industrial strength as well. Considering how terrible all of those old 2600 carts looked before I started this experiment, I'm genuinely amazed that ANY of them started working again.

- Publius