Retr0Bright, Continued

After my generally successful test run with Retr0Bright, I wanted to use on some items from my "primary" collection, not just extras.  I selected three items.  First was a badly yellowed Capcom Fighter Power GS arcade joystick for the Sega Genesis – a great arcade-style stick that also works with older consoles such as the Atari 2600.  This controller, which I had purchased secondhand, had apparently been left out in the sun a lot – it had yellowed inconsistently and was now an ugly, marbled mess.  I also selected my uniformly yellowed late-model TI-99/4a, and my main SNES console, which had darkened considerably since I received it for Christmas in 1991.

I hadn't bothered to disassemble the first SNES that I Retr0Brighted, since I didn't care as much about how well it turned out.  I wanted to be more thorough this time, so I unscrewed it using a special security bit.  I also took apart the TI and the Capcom joystick.  I prepared the gel as before and put everything in the sun.  Once again, after about two hours, I wiped off the old gel, applied a fresh coat, and left everything out a few more hours.  Here are the results:

Much to my surprise, the Capcom stick – the most severely and inconsistently yellowed item of the lot – turned out the best.  The plastic had returned to a shiny off-white.  Even the area that had been protected by a price tag, and had remained mostly white while becoming surrounded by a sea of dark yellow, had all but disappeared as the shell reverted to uniform coloration.  It's hard to see in the photo, but there is still just a hint of yellowing in certain areas, but considering what happened to my TI/99, I decided not to treat the Capcom stick any further.

The TI obviously whitened considerably.  Unfortunately, there is "blooming" over its entire surface.  The bloom is particularly bad on the bottom part of the shell (not pictured), which is a darker plastic than the top.  I left the gel applied for too long.  I believe I made this mistake because the TI's original color is a shade of beige.  It's supposed to be slightly yellow, which makes it difficult to tell when the de-yellowing process had completed.

Even after a full four hours in the sun, the SNES was still partially yellow.  Luckily I had saved some gel, and was able to apply another treatment when the sun came up the next day.  Here is how the console looked after the second treatment:

It's pretty good!  Not quite as perfect as the console I whitened in my initial test, but that's not too surprising considering how much more yellow it was initially.  Best of all, there's no "bloom" whatsoever.

Now that all of my treatments are done and my gel has been used up, I thought I'd share some of the things I learned:

• First, make sure you have large containers for the activated and unactivated gel prepared ahead of time.  If you follow the original Retr0Bright recipe calling for 1 pint of hydrogen peroxide, you will end up with a hefty amount of the stuff.  Plus, it will tend to foam up a bit after you add the "oxy," so you need sufficiently large tubs.
• The gel is quite sticky (by design, to make sure it adheres to the plastic).  But that means it'll stick to other stuff, like your skin.  Be sure to wear gloves!
• Again, because it's sticky, the gel can be extremely annoying to clean off, particularly in areas with lots of nooks and crannies like air vents.  You'll need to use cotton swabs and/or toothpicks to get it all.  Some sites suggest running your plastics through a dishwasher on a cool cycle, but this only works if you can completely disassemble everything first.  None of my pieces were that easy to take apart, unfortunately.  I literally spent a couple hours painstakingly cleaning the gel (mostly from the vent areas), and was pretty thoroughly sick of doing it by the time I finished.
• Speaking of irritating: no matter how careful you are, there's a good chance you'll get a little of the gel on your fingers, particularly while cleaning it off.  It stings, but doesn't do any real damage if you wash it off quickly.  But if you have particularly sensitive skin, you may want to reconsider using Retr0Bright.
• Apply a little extra gel to the edges of your pieces, because it does tend to drip off.
• Wrapping the pieces in plastic wrap helps prevent the gel's drying prematurely.  However, it can be a pain to wrap your pieces, particularly while wearing gloves.  I found it convenient to put some wrap down before painting the gel on, then folding the wrap up and over the pieces after applying the gel.
• Watch carefully for "bloom".  It's hard to see it happening, particularly through the foamy gel and plastic wrap, and in the bright sunlight.
• Be extra careful when treating items that are supposed to have some degree of yellow or beige tint; it's hard to know when they're done.

Although I'm mostly happy with my results, I'm disappointed by the bloom on my TI.  Between this, and how tired I got of wiping gel off of my stuff, I elected not to treat my 130XE or VIC-20.  They aren't as yellowed as my other pieces, and I decided that Retr0Brighting them wasn't worth the risk or the hassle.  In general, that's what I would recommend: if it's only slightly yellow, let it mellow.  Items with moderate yellowing are the best candidates; severe yellowing is easy to over-treat.  SNES consoles seem to be very treatable... but honestly I wouldn't bother opening them up first; that just makes them harder to clean.

I'm glad to be finished with my Retr0Bright experiments, and don't plan to conduct any more any time soon.  I may again some day, but if so I'll probably try it with less powerful peroxide first, to see if it helps prevents "bloom."

Retro Collector vs. Retro Hardware - Round Two: Retr0Bright

By now, I suspect most retro game collectors have heard of "Retr0Bright," a chemical concoction of hydrogen peroxide, "oxy" laundry booster and gelling agents that can turn old, yellowed plastics back to their original color.  Retr0Bright isn't a commercial product; it's a recipe you mix together yourself, provided you're able to buy the ingredients.  The original Retr0Bright recipe calls for hydrogen peroxide at a strength roughly five times greater than what you can buy in most drugstores, although apparently beauty supply stores sell it in that concentration.  You can also order all the ingredients through Amazon.com.  (Some other online recipes claim that the less powerful peroxides will also work, with repeated applications.)

Mixing my own Retr0Bright is something I've wanted to try for a while now.  I have a few consoles and controllers that are looking downright sickly from the yellow discoloration.  I had a few days off from work over the holidays, so I finally decided to play mad scientist and mix up some noxious potions in my laboratory (aka my kitchen).  I purchased 15% hydrogen peroxide and xanthan gum from Amazon, and glycerine and generic-brand "oxy" laundry booster from local grocery and drug stores.  Total cost including shipping was probably about $25 (leaving me with a whole bunch of leftover "oxy" to freshen up my laundry).

Mixing the gel isn't difficult; just a few seconds with the blender is all you need.  Remember that hydrogen peroxide, especially at this strength, is quite caustic.  I wore splash goggles and latex gloves just to be safe.  After mixing, you are left with a sticky off-white paste that can be safely stored in a dark container.  I put mine in an old plastic tub covered with duct tape. 

You're not supposed to add the "oxy" until you are ready to actually use the gel.  That means you need to prepare your consoles (or whatever yellowed plastics you're treating) first.  You should clean them thoroughly to remove any dirt or other contaminants from the plastic's surface.  Since this was my first time using Retr0Bright, I didn't want to risk damaging any of my favorite pieces.  I selected my "backup" SNES console, which I picked up for free at an SC3 party, and which had only moderate discoloration.  The other item I selected for my first Retr0Bright run was an NES 2 dogbone controller with severe yellowing.  This thing was so badly discolored that I couldn't possibly make it any worse.

My yellowed dogbone controller,
shown next to a modern reproduction
so you can see the color contrast.

My backup SNES. The yellowing
on this was actually a little more
severe than this photo indicates.

I cleaned both items and took apart the dogbone so that I could apply the gel to just the controller's outer shell.  I also covered the SNES's Power and Reset buttons with tape to protect them.  Then I prepared the gel itself.  I knew from reading the Retr0Bright wiki that "oxy" doesn't really dissolve in the gel mixture; you need to pre-dissolve it in a small amount of hot water first.  Even with this trick, I found dissolving the "oxy" to be one of the more difficult parts of the entire endeavor.  I stirred it and stirred it and was still left with several undissolved crystals.  Eventually I decided it had dissolved as much as it was going to, and I added it to the gel mixture I had made earlier.  (For this first run, I didn't need to use all the gel, so I put a smaller portion of it into a glass bowl before adding the "oxy."  The rest of the gel I kept in my duct-taped tub.)  Then I painted the gel onto my controller and SNES using a cheap paintbrush, covered the gel-coated items with plastic wrap, and left them out in the Southern California sunshine on top of an old towel in my back patio.

This picture was taken about two hours in.  Note the "oxy" foam.

After about two hours in the sun, I checked the items.  They seemed less yellow, although it was hard to tell for certain in the bright sunlight and through the gummy gel.  The gel seemed to have dried up a bit, as the wiki warned it would.  So I wiped off my items with a wet towel and applied a fresh coat of activated gel.  It was at this point I discovered that the activated gel, which I had stored in a dark pantry, had increased in volume several times and was threatening to spill out of its container.  Luckily I had covered the bowl with plastic wrap, or else I'd have had quite a mess on my hands.  I painted new gel onto my items, covered them again, and let them sit in the sun again.

After about three hours, the items looked about right and the sun was going down anyway, so I declared the experiment complete.  I unwrapped the items, wiped them off with damp paper towels, and took a look.  Here's what I saw:

As you can see, the SNES is pretty much perfect!  The formerly yellowed areas have regained their original, bluish tint.  The area that was formerly covered up by a sticker (and hence had not yellowed) can no longer be seen – meaning that it is now the same color as the surrounding plastic.  This is a great result!

The dogbone controller is also improved, although not as perfect as the SNES.  Although the severe yellowing is totally gone now, there are still sections of plastic that are more yellow than others.  Some yellowing is clearly evident near the edges of the shell; I suspect this is because gravity caused some of the gel to drip off the edges during the UV-exposure period.  More worrisome are sections of bleached plastic.  This seems to be what the wiki refers to as "bloom" and can apparently happen if you leave the gel applied for too long a period of time.  Unfortunately, even though I monitored the items while they were baking in the sun, I didn't notice the "bloom" until I totally unwrapped them and cleaned off all the gel.  Still, when you consider how ugly this particular controller was before the Retr0Bright treatment, the difference is striking.  Even with the "bloom" it still looks much better than before.  This stuff really can work wonders!

That said, there were definitely some downsides to my experiences with Retr0Bright. In my next blog post, I'll describe my later Retr0Bright experiment, and go into some of the useful tips I discovered and some pitfalls I fell into.

Retro Collector vs. Retro Hardware - Round One: The TurboGrafix-16 Composite Cable

It has been some time since I've had the energy to post here.  Work and other obligations have kept me busy during the latter part of 2011.  Nevertheless I have found some time to work on improving my retro game collection.  I emphasize "improve" because most of my efforts of late have been that of making better the things that I already own.  I think this is a common theme among us retro collectors.  While we love our vintage hardware, we are sometimes at odds with its shortcomings.  Consequently we spend a lot of time tinkering, soldering, applying modifications to wring out better video signals or improved play control.  At times it can truly seem like we're fighting against our beloved machines, although that's not really the case.  We're just trying to make them better.

Hence the adversarial title of my latest post.  Round One of my hardware struggle sees me taking up the most common weapon in the retro collector's arsenal: the soldering iron.  I suspect all serious retro collectors will at some point wield one, or at the very least, pay others to do so.  I confess to occupying this latter camp for a long time.  I've paid other, more experienced tinkerers to mod my Odyssey² and Intellivision for composite video, and to draw S-Video from my ColecoVision and Atari 2600.  In just the past few weeks, I've purchased from gurus at the AtariAge forums a homemade Masterplay-esque Atari 5200 joystick adapter, which allows me to use 2600-compatible controllers on the 5200 instead of the godforsaken stock joysticks, and two NES dogbone controllers modified to work on the ColecoVision and Atari 7800, respectively.

I don't regret any of these purchases.  Composite and S-Video far outshine the standard RF signal these vintage machines output natively, and the NES dogbone is probably my favorite hand controller of all time.  Being able to use it on many of my earlier machines is easily worth the few dollars the mods set me back.  Some of the alterations I paid for are fairly complex.  Modifying the Intellivision for composite video involves a lot of de-soldering and drilling narrow holes in very tight quarters.  But other procedures, such as the O2 composite mod, are much simpler – things I felt that I should have been able to do myself.  I have some knowledge of electronics; I grew up learning about circuits from my mother, who made a living fixing such things for General Telephone, and I've studied some on my own. So I can understand circuits; it's the physical dexterity required to manipulate a soldering iron that I've been skeptical about.

Until recently, the only mod I accomplished on my own was rewiring two Odyssey² joystick connectors to be 2600 compatible, by attaching crimp-type 9-pin male DB9 ports to them.  This mod is easy; opting for crimp-type connectors meant no soldering was required.  It's served me well for a long time.  But a few weeks ago I decided to try a mod where the soldering iron could get some use.  I chose constructing a TurboGrafix-16 composite cable because it was fairly easy, and it doesn't require any direct modification to a console.  That meant if I screwed it up, I wouldn't ruin any of my machines.  But if I succeeded, I'd be able to get improved audio and video out of my TG-16 without shelling out $80+ for a TurboBooster.

If anyone reading this is in a similar situation, looking for an easy project with which to enter the wide world of retro modding, I think this one may just be the best one around.  It'll introduce you to wire stripping, pin crimping and/or soldering, and the application of heat shrink tubing.  And like I said, there's no danger of breaking anything other than a $5 video cable.  I won't reproduce the procedure here, but rather link to the excellent tutorial at Classic Gaming Quarterly.  This article on How To Solder can help you get started.  I recommend starting as I did by soldering together a few random lengths of wire, just to get the hang of things before beginning any real projects.  Soldering is not particularly difficult, although I do think it would be a challenge if you are trying to apply solder to a tiny joint within a confined space (inside a console for example).  Luckily this is not the case with the TG-16 cable.  And best of all, afterward you can enjoy Blazing Lazers or Bonk's Adventure with a much sharper picture and cleaner audio, which I can now do.

My own homemade TG-16 composite cable

I'm happy to have finally built a retro console enhancement with my own hands, even if it is an easier one.  And not having to buy an expensive TurboBooster is a nice bonus.  Next I hope to build a similar cable for my TI/99, and maybe build a 2600 joystick adapter for it.  Eventually I'd like to build a joystick adapter for the Intellivision, but that one is way more complicated.  Someday...

The Lesson Is: Never Try

After buying our own house, moving in, and setting aside one entire bedroom for my game collection, I'm finally on the verge of doing something I've been wanting to do after acquiring all these classic game consoles: hooking them all up so I can play them.

Crazy, I know. But it's a common scenario. You acquire more consoles than space, and are forced to put some into mothballs. Atari 2600, NES, Odyssey²? Connected and ready to go. Channel F, Astrocade, Atari 5200? Hidden away in boxes. Sure, they'd come out occasionally, but digging them out was always a pain, so it didn't happen very often. A few of these haven't been hooked up for years now. Well, no more!

At least, that what's I hoped. After keeping my "second-tier" machines on ice for so long, I was really looking forward to playing some Atari 8-bit games again, or firing up The Incredible Wizard on the Astrocade, or finally trying the Dreamcast Giga Wing disc I picked up a while ago. Unfortunately, this is what I saw after turning on my Astrocade:

And my Atari 130XE:

And my C64:

My Sega CD won't power on at all.

My Dreamcast works, but won't read any discs.

My ColecoVision, which has beautiful composite and S-Video mods, has stopped outputting color:

The CV was especially surprising, since I used it not a few weeks ago and it was working fine then.

I also discovered that the S-Video cables I had purchased for my SNES and Gamecube outputted heavy interference patterns. This, at least, I know I can remedy by buying better cables. I proved it by trying a GameStop PS2/Xbox/Gamecube cable instead, and the interference disappeared. I already ordered two new cables.

My Master System power supply and Atari 5200 RF switch are both dead. Luckily I had spares of each.

Just for heck of it, I also tried my Channel F. It has never worked since I bought it at a flea market over ten years ago – something that would bother me if I had any desire to play Channel F games at all... which I don't. I thought it would have been just too ironic if it had somehow come back to life while all these other machines were dying.  However, it's still broken:

OK, I still don't care about the Channel F. But wow... six nonworking consoles, and a seventh with a severe color problem. For the last several months, I've been looking forward to finally getting these out in the open, all the time blissfully unaware of the massive technical problems lurking just out of my sight. I am disappointed, to say the least. These past couple days have felt like an endless stream of failure.

Luckily, my 2600, 5200, 7800, NES, Genesis, TG-16, Vectrex, Intellivision, Master System, and Odyssey² work fine, so I probably shouldn't complain. But I hate to see machines die. Hopefully they can all be repaired. I suspect the Sega CD may simply require a replacement fuse. Perhaps the C64 does as well. RAM chip failure is very common on Atari computers, but I have a friend who may be able to help fix it. Dreamcasts have problems reading discs all the time, and they are often fixable by re-seating or cleaning the laser assembly. The ColecoVision color problem is probably caused (I pray) by a loose internal connection that can be repaired easily. The one that scares me the most is the Astrocade, since it is a rare machine. But even there I have some optimism, because it did output a real picture for a second before going snowy. Maybe this will be a simple fix as well. I can only hope. I plan to document our repair attempts and publish the results here.

One positive outcome to all this. For years I have slowly accumulated a TI-99/4a setup, first acquiring a handful of loose games, then a bare console, then finally an RF switchbox and power supply. As each part entered my collection at different times, they ended up being stored apart from each other, so I never knew if any of them worked. Finally I dug everything out today, plugged them in, and saw this:

Finally, some success!  Perhaps my RCA Studio II, which I have never tried due to never having the proprietary switchbox, will work as well.  I did finally pick up a switchbox (for free) not that long ago, and I have one game for it.  The question is: do I care enough about this godforsaken machine to even bother hooking it up?  It would be an unjust world indeed if the Studio II lives while the Astrocade dies...


Update: With some help from a good friend who has experience replacing chips and the like, my 130XE and ColecoVision have come back to life.  The XE had two bad RAM chips, which were replaced by components purchased from Best Electronics. Apparently, even though my ColecoVision had been modded for composite and S-Video, color information was still supplied via some component on the RF board.  We fixed it by swapping in an RF board from a working console.  We suspect the Astrocade has a bad voltage regulator – apparently a common problem – but have not yet attempted to replace it.  We're not sure what the Sega CD's problem is, nor the C64's.  The fuses on both machines seem OK, and we couldn't find any other obvious sources for the malfunctions.  I haven't tried to fix the Dreamcast yet.

I recently pulled my VIC-20 out of mothballs only to discover that it too, is on the fritz.  Such is the life of the retro hardware collector...

Minicollections

Finally I have come around the main point I wanted to make when I started writing about collecting goals, lo those many weeks ago. It's something that is at once blindingly obvious and very exciting (well, I find it exciting, anyway). The idea is simple: define a small subset of stuff that shares some kind of common theme, and collect the best quality examples of it you can find. This technique has the advantage of being manageable, while giving you that sexy goal of "completion" that collectors love to strive for. I'm calling these subsets minicollections.

Examples of minicollections:
1. CIB examples of all the Atari 2600 games released by Imagic.
2. Complete copies of all the NES Mega Man games.
3. Mint copies of all the games you had as a kid.
4. Every licensed Pac-Man game for every system you collect.

The list goes on. The best part of minicollections is that they're endlessly flexible. Any theme that interests you can be a minicollection, and you can make them as small or as large as you please.

I've completed at least one minicollection, although it was big enough that the "mini" epithet may not be totally appropriate. I've managed to amass complete-in-box copies of all the original American Odyssey² releases. (If you're curious, the last piece I acquired was a Power Lords manual.) My next "mini" goal for it is to improve its cosmetic condition. Most of the games are in good shape, but a few labels are bubbled, a couple boxes are crushed, and so on. However, I expect this goal to remain incomplete for a long time, as mint O2 games are hard to come by.

I have other minicollection ideas in mind as well, but I think I'll save them for later posts.

Collecting Goals, Yet Again

Yikes, has a month really gone by since my last post? I swear time is speeding up as I continue to age. At this rate, by next week I'll be collecting Social Security. A month from now I'll be dead!

So I guess I should stop beating around the bush and get to the point of my recent posts. How do you continue collecting once your want lists are exhausted, without devolving into Pokémon-style, gotta-collect-it-all acquisition mania? I believe the answer comes down to just one strategy:

Focus on improving the quality (not quantity) of your collection.

Ta-da!!! I admit, it's not much of a revelation. So why did I spend so much time leading up to it? Well, I actually did have a reason for laying all that groundwork (and it's not just that I'm long-winded). In my experience, it's hard to appreciate this strategy until after you've been collecting for a while. When you start collecting, by definition you haven't acquired anything yet, so the world is your proverbial oyster. Anything new improves your collection. So you pick up everything you can, in any condition you can. In the video game collecting world, this usually equates to a bunch of loose carts with tattered labels, manuals with missing covers, and barely-working hardware.

Then, eventually, you hit a point where you've collected practically every loose cart you ever wanted, and then some. In other words, you've exhausted the collecting avenues I described in my last two posts. It's at this point when looking for quality stuff should take center stage in your collecting pursuits.

By "quality" I don't necessarily mean everything should be in shrinkwrapped, mint condition. But torn labels, chipped cartridges, ripped manuals and the like should be replaced with better specimens. Loose carts can be replaced with boxed copies. Again, no earth-shaking realizations here, but the hunt for quality can reinvigorate your collecting passion, much as the hunt for quantity did when you originally started your pursuit.

Of course, quality can be expensive, and if your collection is broad enough, trying to improve it across the board might be too daunting of a task. I definitely felt that way about my own collection. However, I believe I have a strategy to cope with that too, which I'll discuss in my next post. And then maybe I can finally be done with this topic and write about something else for a change!

Collecting Goals, Again

Warning: I am being more long-winded about this topic than is probably called for, but I can't seem to help myself. I will come around to my main point eventually.

In my previous post, I rambled on about the need for focus in a retro game collection. It may be hard to accept, but you can't collect everything. But so what? You figure out what you most desire, compile a "want list," then go about acquiring the items on it, right? Sure... but what happens when you get everything on your list?

I'm surprised at how often I've seen collectors complete a want list, then lose interest and sell off the collection. Sometimes they drop out of the hobby entirely. Of course, tastes do change. Maybe they used to really enjoy playing that Microvision but then discovered the Game.com and never looked back – I don't know. But if they were just after the thrill of the hunt, and didn't really want the things they were hunting, they probably shouldn't have been collecting them in the first place. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the "search and acquisition" phase of the hobby either. It may happen that you complete a want list, and enjoy having it completed, but still miss the thrill of the hunt.

This has been on my mind a bit lately as I've pretty much completed my original want lists. When I began actively collecting retro games in the mid 1990s, I started with the goal of reacquiring all the pre-NES games I used to have in the early '80s, which my parents gave away shortly after I picked up Nintendo's system in 1988 or so. Beyond that, I wanted to get all the games my childhood friends owned, then any games I may have borrowed from relatives or other acquaintances back then, then that one game I rented from that one place that one time... you get the idea. And of course I quickly discovered other games that made their way to the top of my original want lists. For example, during the '80s, I had not known that there was a sequel to Pitfall!, even though I loved the original game. Obviously Pitfall II became one of my most desired titles once I became aware of its existence.

The Lost Caverns were really "lost" to me – I didn't know this game existed until 1994!
Photo: AtariAge

After 17 years though, I find that I already own most of what I originally wanted. Make no mistake: there are plenty of games that aren't in my collection that I wouldn't object to having, but very few are on my "specifically looking for" list. And it's kind of a bummer. Nevertheless, I have no temptation to stop collecting as others in this situation sometimes do. I trimmed some of my excess stuff a while ago – mainly junk NES games I had no interest in – but I really enjoy owning my collection. I'd just like to continue enjoying collecting it.

As I've been trying but failing to state for two posts now, I've finally figured out how I want to have my cake and collect it too. It's not a huge revelation or anything – it's pretty obvious actually – but I'm excited about it anyway because it's re-energized my collecting interest. I'll describe it in my next post.