But that was 1993 - this is 2023! 30 years later, all this stuff is now nearing 50 years old, and that's a LONG LONG time for any consumer product, TV, car, computer, game console, or otherwise. And some of these items have been in regular use since they were made in the 1970's or 1980's. Things do get old, and they do wear out.

And even if you are like the guys I mentioned, knowing how to change pickups in your Stratocaster is not going to give you the skillset needed to properly troubleshoot and fix vintage electronics. Electric guitars are a simple beast - they're simply pickups, pots, switches, capacitors, and a 1/4" phono jack most of the time in a VERY simple DC circuit that produces no voltage, or has no live voltage going through it in dangerous amounts. I don't need to worry my Kramer strat is going to electrocute me while I adjust a High Voltage pot with a plastic screwdriver - but my 30 year old Mitsubishi TV that has 37,000 volts going through the neck of the picture tube while I adjust focus and voltage on the flyback transformer will!

The first thing is we need to let go of all the bullshit we grew up with. If you're a regular consumer whose reliving their Nintendo dreams - stop blowing in your bloody cartridges, it fixes nothing. Actaully, I lost a copy of Blades of Steel because the contacts inside CORRODED from such a b.s. myth. Most of the goofey rituals we did as kids came about because they seemed to work for reasons we did not know or understand, because most people would fail a regular science class. The reason blowing in your nintendo cartridges worked is because the particulate from your breath would humidify the connectors, and humidity makes a decent enough electrical connection - but humidity does another thing you DON'T want on bare copper contacts - it corrodes them, making the problem of blowing on it worse every time, till one day you pop open your cartridge, and find that gross turquoise colored crap starting to grow on the pins of your cartridge that now refuses to work 100% of the time.

Which leads me to #2, the wear and tear of your cartridge connectors and ISA Slots in legacy computer systems. Look, NONE Of these devices were designed to last beyond 5-10 years use. It was assumed, when you got a game console in the 1970's-1990's, due to the fact most Boomer adults saw them as "toys" rather than sophisticated digital entertainment back then, that by the time you were 18, you were so busy out shagging and drinking alcohol every night, that they could quietly toss your video games in the garbage, and you'd never notice, because you're too busy making other things wet with your breath now. Your 486 was only intended to be on your desktop 3-5 years, and then you'd be forking out another $1500 you can't afford on another one of the "Latest and greatest Microsoft and Intel creations of computer technology" so you can "connect to the internet, play the lastest in 3D multimedia, make bigger spreadsheets, write longer manifestos to your auntie, and download bigger pr0n and w@rez files to your hard disk!". These days, most *normal* people assume that these "legacy" systems and devices are long gone memories of an ancient time period when your father climbed the corporate ladder selling buggy whips and everyone smoked cigarettes for health reasons.

Honestly, it's quite astounding how well everything has lasted. The cream truly rises to the top in 30-40 years. Anything man-made that lasts that long is a testament to the greatness of legacy engineering. But just because ol' faithful Nintendo is reliable now, does not mean that things don't wear out later. SO yes, you will need to learn to change out your 72 pin connectors, replace capacitors with a 500 degree soldering iron, maybe even disable that NES10 lockout chip that serves no real purpose whatsoever except irritating present-day indie devs. There's no way around it - if you want to own a Nintendo, or a 486, or a CRT TV in 2023 - you're going to have to learn to fix it yourself.

There is no "Frank's TV Repair" anymore. He lost his business to Best Buy's Geek Squad in 2005, now old Frank sits in the nursing home on meds reciting "CTC2930 Chassis" over and over in his sleep. His shop is now either torn down and replaced with another STarbucks, or is currently the hideout of the local Urban Explorers once they're kicked out of the local shutdown 100 year old and presumably haunted Psych Ward. They just sit in his office and gaze at the faded "Super Mario Nintendo World Class Service" stickers and "Zenith - The Quality Goes in before the Badge Goes On" placards all about the place, wondering why a song by Ghost was so popular before it was ever written. All the while smashing the screen in on a Sony PVM with a baseball bat for Gen Z Amusement.

And you think Nintendo, Sega, or Atari are actually interested in supporting your 40 year old aging legacy system? Nintendo wants you to buy a Switch and buy the hew full HD remastered Mario and SOnic, and Atari wants you to buy a 2600+ and forget about that old woodgrain RF beast that smells like Patchoulli and 40 year old Cigarettes that you cling to. They want money. You want your old shit. So they'll compromise, and sell you old shit, packaged in new ways. I'm not saying what htey are doing is bad at all, it's making retro accessible to everyone, and might be your best path if you want to use dedicated hardware but don't want ot learn about "Ohms Law" to do it. But if you think NIntendo will fix your Grey Brick Gameboy - you might as well just ship them a box with an actual brick in it.

The mixed-media recyclers - aka, the garbagemen, pick up your old, dilapidated electronics. And then one of two things happens...

1. They pick up the items in question, and take them to a landfill, where then, they attempt to resell them in their makeshift store, assuming they even have one, one last time before they are tossed out into the field and run over by a bulldozer - seeping lead, mecury, cadmium, phosphorous, silicon, and other contaminants into the ground that takes 1000000 years to dissappear.....or....
2. The items are quietly separated and put on a barge to a 3rd world country, who will disassemble the items using non-OSHA approved methods that are cancer giving and life threatening, and then those parts will turn up on AliExpress as either fake chips, real "New-Old-Stock" chips, or be used to fund their struggling economy through the highly dangerous and almost wasteful to the point of not being worth it gold-extraction process. And the rest, well, it's polluting the environment, just like the landfill is.

So what's the alternative? Well, everyone IN recycling whines about how hard or non-lucrative it is to recycle certain things, at least, the people doing the actual recycling, vs. the pencilneck geek who sprouts a bunch of real science on how it could be done with zero financial info - or conveniently the pencilneck white collar criminal who will spew their financial numbers but knows only slightly more about science than Donald J. Trump - which isn't much! Hey, I'm not saying I'm Neil Degrasse Tyson either, but I know one thing for a fact....a scientifically proven, ultimate solution to the whole problem of e-waste that actually works......

USE THAT SHIT UNTIL IT DIES! Then, when it's completley unusuable, use it for PARTS!

Find a platform, a device, a solution, that you really like, and buy more than one of them. Then learn electronics, and interchange the parts yourself. That is the 100% honest to god truth how I do all these ancient hobbies. It's not because I'm rich, it's because I was smart about how I went about it. All of my CRT's have their focus, voltage, color gain, convergence, geometry, and whatever-else, done by me. All of my game consoles are re-capped when they NEED to be, and are watched over by me. All of my vintage computers are assembled, configured, and maintained by (points to self) - this guy here. If you love it that much, you owe it to yourself, and those devices, to learn how to nurse them like you would a pet or a aging relative. This stuff doesn't take care of itself ya' know.

If we all did this in the communities we belong to, pollution would be down, prices on vintage devices and goods would go down due to supply vs. demand, and we could generate more jobs as more people might be able to create a lucrative business model around such things. That's why things like Computer Reset a few years ago were so great, so much stuff got rescued and given a good home, rather than sent to another country to give an entire block of families cancer due to gold extraction.

EVERYTHING on this website, save for my truck, lawnmower and bicycle - runs on ELECTRICITY. I'm sure you're now going "no duh!". Well...almost all of the devices on this page, are what we call "DIRECT CURRENT" devices - meaning, they require a positive and negative lead to work.

So almost every single connector on your TV, game console, or whatever, has a positive and negative lead. The Negative lead is called the "Ground" while the positive lead is called the "Hot" though there's really no hotness to it without the negative lead. The first thing I suggest you learn, is to make you rown cables. Because god only knows how long they will keep producing things like RF, A/V, and even VGA cables at this point. RF has been around since the 1930's, A/V since the 1970's, and VGA since 1987. The most common thing to go wrong with these old devices, are old cables. Solder gets old, and "cold" and lets go. The wires inside corrode, split, and fray giving a bad or no signal on one of the two leads. The connector ends tarnish and corrode and won't pass electricity across them well enough anymore. Making your own cables, and learning to fix the ones you have, not just saves you money, but helps you understand what makes a CLEAN signal. There's a reason my Atari 2600 looks AV Modded even though it's on RF to some people - because I use good quality cables, some of which I have soldered together myself.

Another thing to learn is about power protection. A lot of these devices have a "fuse" somewhere in them that prevents them from damage in a power spike, or prevents a short circuit (which is coming next) from destroying expensive parts. Fuses can be found all over these things - in the "wall wart" (a big box with a transformer in it that steps the voltage down from 120 volts alternating current to something like 9 volts direct current), inline with the power cable, on the back near a power connector, inside the power supply, or even inside the case and soldered to a circuit board somewhere. Now, sometimes, a fuse being replaced, will be the only problem. Maybe lightning hit the device during a thunderstorm perhaps. But sometimes, it could be a sign of further issues. But fuses are cheap, just look at the tiny text on the ends of the fuse, and replace it with the same voltage and rating of fuse, and if it blows again, you know if the problem is more than just a fuse, or if someone was just stupid and left the TV plugged in during a thunderstorm.

If replacing a fuse does not work, it's likely something else is SHORTED OUT. Shorting out is when the positive lead and negative lead of a DC circuit are bridged, stopping it from working. This could be something as simple as one of those notorious "Tantulum" capacitors that look like a Pac-Man Ghost with legs and no eyes shorting out inside, all the way to a rare and hard to find IC that has shorted out inside and needs replaced.

Another common problem with old electronics is the concept of a n "Open Circuit" - ie, the electricity can't flow where it's supposed to go, because the roads been disconnected. This is a huge problem with the NES10 chip and old NES systems with the VCR-type load mechanism. Actually, that's 100% the reason why, because the metal bridge (the pins in the 72 pin connector) no longer touch the pads that allow the electricity to step down off the cartridge and into the Nintendo (or vice versa). And the same thing can happen due to a failed component, such as a damaged or bad resistor, or capacitor, or even a dead IC.

And all this stuff can be checked with a device called a "Multimeter" or "Voltohmeter". A little box with a digital readout that can be altered to tell you how much current, voltage, or ohms resistance can can/is/should flow through a component.

Let's start with Televisions and Monitors - since that's the common thread among all our devices. They all used a big glass tube known as a "Cathode Ray Tube" or "CRT" originally. These Cathode Ray Tube Devices: TV's, Computer Monitors, Professional Video Monitors (PVMS), and even the viewfinders on old Camcorders and projectors on old Projection TVs - all work in much the same way.

A device inside the picture tube called the "Electron Gun" - shoots high voltage at some phosphorous coating inside the part we call the "screen". This phosphorous stays lit up when hit by the electron gun long enough that what the human eye sees is a continuous image instead of a single beam of light - about 60 times a second (60 Hz) for an American device. The gun scans back and fourth during this duration before jumping back up to the top corner and starting over again to produce the next image in the series that creates what we see as movement on screen. This is where that environmentally bad phosphorous comes from. And a part of how it can do all this, is the Picture tube is literally a VACUUM TUBE - just like the little lightbulb looking thingies in your Uncle's guitar amplifier. Difference is, these tubes can make pictures. There's no air inside, so it's also basically a fancy schmancy lightbulb.

But to get an image on the screen - how does it do this? Well, there's at least one connection on your monitor or TV set, and if it's a TV Set, it likely has a piece inside called a "tuner" that was designed to pickup "Analog" TV Broadcasts....so let's explain "Analog TV" quickly for you guys.

Way way way back in the olden days, before there was an "internet" and if you had a computer it ran on vacuum tubes, sat in a room as big as a Winco, and the various "admins" all looked like scientists in white coats with Mathmatician and Engineering degrees so high not even Steve Wozniak could touch them - since computing cost a ton of money and hardly did anything interesting to the average consumer at all - we used a DIFFERENT form of "networking" - called the "Air waves". Basically put, radio frequencies were sent out by a multi-million watt transmission tower somewhere, and then picked up by the "Rabbit ears" - long silver antenna found on the TV set or Radio you were using, and then put back together as sounds and/or a picture when you tuned into a specific frequency or "Channel". Those channels, ot make it easy for the regular Johnny Q Public to understand - were designated as "bands" of frequencies, and then each TV manufacturer just had to get within those bands and list them as "Channel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7...etc). So instead of saying "I'm tuning into 63.77591Hz" you'd say "I'm Tuning into Channel 3 - CBS" and left it at that.

So when Computerized entertainment came in the 1970's, they needed a way to HIJACK those frequencies without drawing the ire of the Federal Communications Commission - ie the FCC - while still getting their blocky little pictures on screen for a game of Pong or Haunted House. This was done by basically putting a little switchbox on the back of the TV that was setup to broadcast the game console or computer's output over that frequency in a way the TV's analog tuner could pick it up, while not interfering with the local TV and Radio Stations. This was done by creating a 75 Hz RF Signal out of the game console, then taking that signal, putting it on a switch between your Rabbit Ears, and flipping the switch to "GAME/COMPUTER" when you wanted to play the game - and if you're clever, you might have guessed by now, I'm referring to the RF SWITCH! That little metal box in the back of your TV that used to send Pitfall to your TV from the Atari 2600! THAT is why all these old consoles have a "CH A/B/2/3/blah/blah" switch on the back. And that's why if you plug an Atari 2600's RCA direct into the Video-In port on your modern 4K UHD TV, it won't work, and why even if it did, you would not have sound - sinc ethe video and sound are combined into the same signal.

But the problem with RF is that the analog signal was always competing with the digital signal, and sometimes even, the internal circuitry of the device itself was prone to taking interference from stray radio frequencies - leading to the oldschool "interference patterns" on screen when using an old console like a Atari 2600 or Intellivision. This problem was also a issue for people who were rich, well-to-do, and expected their $1500 VCR or LaserDisc player would give them "darn near theater quality" picture quality without it looking like it's raining pixels inside Mad Max's house due to the looney Ham guy down the street. So then A/V - a more direct connection started being used, as well as SCART in Europe, S-VIDEO toward the end of the 80's, and later adding VGA, HDMI, DVI, and DisplayPort technologies to the ever growing list of lunacy to attach digital devices to your television. These all took the TV Tuner out of the equation.

At hte same time, Computers required better graphics capabilities than a regular, affordable Television could muster, so by the mid 1980's, dedicated Computer monitors became their own, separate thing. They worked just like TV's, just the Electron gun had a more precise beam, and the components allowed for a finer "pixel" to be produced, causing Computer monitors to deviate from a regular Television for about 2-3 more decades until meeting back together sometime in the late 2000's/early 2010's.

Moving further back in the signal chain is the device attached to the screen itself - which in our cases here, will almost ALWAYS be something that could, in some respect, be considered a COMPUTER.

What is a computer? A device that uses mathmatics to carry out a task. EVERY single game console, or actual computer, is a Computer! All a game console is, is a very limited computer, with a dedicated purpose (playing games). They all have a expensive high speed chip called a Central Processing Unit - or CPU - that interprets on/off pulses of electricity as a way to produce sound, images, and carry out mathmatical operations. I don't give a rats ass how old the device is, evne the original Atari Pong consoles - those were computers. No, they did not have a CPU "CHIP" per-Se, but they had a "CPU" in the form of discreet, specific Transistors on the motherboard - that's all a CPU is - a collection of Transistors on a chip configured to carry out mathmatics. Today's chips can carry billions and billions of Transistors on a chip the size of a Wheat Thin. While yes, there are "technologies" that make the newer ones subjectively "better" and obviously "Faster" - they all operate on the same logic - 0100101001111010100101010010 - always have, always will. That chip - is what we refer to on old consoles or computers when we say Z80, or 6502, or 8088, or 2A03, or 386, or Pentium. The way they speak in binary is called the "language" of the "machine" or "Machine language" - aka x86, 6502, RISC...what have you.

And all these old consoles with cartridges, those cartridges were the same thing as a Floppy Disk, Hard Disk, Optical Media, or a SDCARD - DATA STORAGE. So you plug in Berzerk, turn on the ATari, the Atari tells the TV show show a playfield with a little man and a bunch of robots - and you hit Reset, tells the Atari to start a game and go.

The Atari reads information from the player, sends that to the "Stella" Chip, Stella chip sends to the CPU or Cartridge, which talks to each other, then sends the results ot the TIA - ro "Teleivision INterface Adapter" chip - which then shows you blowing up robots on a TV screen. There ya' are in simplified terms as to what's going on.