Why do cartridges die? Micro Machines 96 stopped working all of the sudden.

​

Something strange happened to me with MM'96. I bought the game online, and I played a couple of times. The other day though, the cartridge stopped working: When I turn on the console it shows nothing, just a black screen.

I also have a ToeJam & Earl cartridge that I bought online and never worked.

That made me wonder, how is that cartridges die all of a sudden? Is there a way to fix them?

 

I assume you cleaned the cart contacts?

 

I did, with alcohol, but didn't work. They didn't seem specially dirty anyway, both cartridge and console are in good shape...

This guy suggests to get a cleaning kit...

http://reviews.ebay.ca/Don-apos-t-T...esis-or-Megadrive-Game?ugid=10000000000887695

...but all my other cartridges work well, expect for this two.

 

BITROT. Happens on ROMs too, but for different reasons than that of EPROMs.

 

this is the reason why dumping carts is so important.

 

As strange as it sounds have you tried to reflow the solder? I have fixed a few games like this in the past, mostly snes. It doesn't always work, but worth a try?

 

unfortunately I don't have the skills or tools to play around with the internals...

 

Hmm... any guides on this resoldering process? May be interested...

BITROT seems the likely cause though. Maybe a chip inside fried?

 

with re-flowing the solder all you are doing is reheating the solder point and adding a very small amount of solder. You could even get away with "wetting" the soldering iron, go over a few pins, re-wet the iron and repeat. This also works for surface mounted stuff, allthough it is more delicate. Recently repaired a game boy game this way as it wouldn't go past the game boy intro screen.

 

It is about as basic as you can get with soldering. If you absolutely need a guide it is not something you should be tackling.

 

Like all engineered system, aging and degradation are part of life. There is a real and somewhat measurable phenomenon that cause electronic components to age and eventually fail.

Like a mechanical system is subject to friction forces that introduce heat and decay, electronic components can be subject to the same effect. Electricity is the phenomenon in which electrons travel in a conductive material. In that sense, an electronic circuit is a mechanical system, only on an atomic scale. Electrons are pumped into a pipe and there is friction(heating due to parasitic resistance ) and decay of the component.

Every components are affected over time. Resistors might change values over time, semi-conductor materials lose their properties, electrolyte capacitors leak their dielectric and so on...For years, device can work with components with values that drastically changed but some time the amount of shift is too important so that all of a sudden they simply stop working...

There is an interesting article that explains the effect of transistor decay : http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/transistor-aging/0

There is still a possibility that it is not the case of your cart. I would suggest to not give up and try a few tricks mentionnés above. Just keep in mind that the quality of the components plays a big role in it's longevity. If the game was originally put on the market as a cheap and quick game, there is a good chance the components inside aren't as good as, for example, a first party game.

TL;DR. Transistor decay and general component aging is a normal phenomenon that can render a device useless all of a sudden.

 

Maskroms dont suffer "bitrot".

Eproms lose charge overtime and can lose data. But reprogramming will fix that. Maskroms dont work that way and do not suffer the same.

 

You... can't write to EPROM's though... right? I assume you mean to copy the EPROM and write it to an EEPROM?

 

Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory

Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory

Sure you can.

Eproms are erasable and programmable. You need to erase with UV though. EEPROMs are just electrically eraseable - hence the extra E in the name.

 

Though I understand soldering and can do this, what I mean is what components would normally require soldering as examples/guides as I have never dealt with needing to perform this on games. IE. what areas on the microchip? how can you tell which lines have degraded? etc.

 

MASKROMS DO BITROT. And on my post I said "different reasons". They're not programmable but they do suffer of things such as internal oxidization, die impurities/debris, manufacturation errors, blown output buffers, blown address inputs...

And some of these failures (the impurity/ unintended oxidization one in particular) can have the same effect on the output data as the EPROM bit rot.

And again, tell that bitrot doesn't exist on mask roms for the few bit rot maskroms and proms I've been keeping here from all those repairs I've done in the last few years.


The most interesting one is a HITACHI mask rom I took out from a Parodius DA famicom cart.

 

die impurities isn't bit rot, its a manufacturing issue or a faulty part. Its not the same thing, even if it has similar results.

If you had said, "Maskroms have other (much less common issues) that give similar results". Then that would have been fine, but its not bitrot.


Edit:
Just to point out, this is always how I have understood it and some brief googling turns up the same view point.

 

Whatever. Doesn't matter what you call the problem, it does not change the fact that it does exist.

Basically you can't count on MASKROMS as indestructible devices because that, they're not. That was the point of my post.

By the way, SEGA MEGA DRIVE MASKROMs are rigged to "blow" (actually it changes the electrical characteristics of the pin making
it unable to receive the address signal from the 68k on the console) a address line if you play too much with cart swap with the console on.

An cleverly placed 1K pull up resistor will make the MASK ROM readable again. And since region unlock devices such as MEGA KEY and some cheat devices do have the said
resistor on them they happen to have a "resurrection effect" on the cartridges.

I actually salvaged some Mega Drive games by doing that. Oh and it only applies to original SEGA cartridges.

 

Calling a problem by a different name just leads to confusion - hence saying its not bit rot. Things need to be accurate, the internet is forever and what you say will just be repeated by others as fact.

 

Could you elaborate? IE. where you would place it and the like? I haven't ever repaired this sort of stuff but seeing you have, knowing how you do it would be fantastic so if I came across an issue in my collection I could fix it.