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...
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