Is the N64 Self-Cleaning? (and misc faq problems)

[flamepanther]

Blowing in cartridges introduces moisture from your breath, and causes the metal contacts to gradually corrode. It's bad.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, but you know what, I use to blow in my cartridges for years. None of them have corroded contacts.

[flamepanther]

Yeah, but you know what, I use to blow in my cartridges for years. None of them have corroded contacts.

Sure. It's very gradual, depending on who's doing the blowing, etc. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes it just makes the contacts a little less shiny or take a little more cleaning. In some very rare cases it can destroy a game or a console (I have seen this).

It's like when we say "smoking causes cancer" it doesn't mean that everyone who smokes gets cancer, instantly or even years later.

[Hobie-wan]

Yeah, but you know what, I use to blow in my cartridges for years. None of them have corroded contacts.

It's a thin film though, not mountains of green and black like you would see from carts that got really damp. How many of those carts got to the point you had to blow in them every rime you played them on your NES? I guarantee if you took a cart that had been blown in for a long time and did a clean and polish on half of the pins like they used to do with those car polish commercials on junkyard hoods you'd see a difference.

[Ziggy]

I haven't done it since I was young, but we always use to blow in our SNES carts. I never remember having problems getting them to work. It was just kind of a force of habit.

[Hobie-wan]

The only SNES carts I've had issues with were ones that actually got wet in someone's shed since the cart slot is not a piece of crap like the NES one.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, I remember the pics of that. The Mario Kart cart, right?

[Hobie-wan]

Yeah, I remember the pics of that. The Mario Kart cart, right?

Plus Chrono Trigger, Zelda LTTP, and Final Fight. MK was the worst though. Got everything working again on all of them except for the saving on MK.