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...