YELLOW PLASTIC NO MORE The “Retr0briteâ€￾ Project

'How to deal with the "not-so-mellow yellow" of old computers and consoles.'

Thought this might be of interest to someone here.

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/

And yes, the URL and the title of the page are spelled differently, who knows why.

 

Oh wow, that is impressive. I may be trialling this at some point, methinks. Thanks!

 

Until now I thought those C64's were always that colour.

 

Interesting project. However, I would dispute their claim that this was discovered last year. I've known of people experimenting with Hydrogen Peroxide for countering the yellowing for years.

The early style C64 was indeed that smoky colour. The later model was white.

 

Damn, you beat me to posting this Very cool though, I'd really like to try it out on my old Apple hardware.

 

I just might pick up a yellow PC Engine to try this out on. And I think retro's right. I remember reading about this sort of thing years ago. These guys had a good idea to gelatinize it though.

 

Word. I know that it's been talked about on this website before. Discussed and decided that yeah, you can do it, but you have to mess with some pretty nasty chemicals. I believe you can find a quote from ASSEMbler himself saying that.

 

White SNESSES? My God... h: :dance:

Just read the ingredients... they are more basic then I imagined. Planning to try this out within the coming weeks! =]

 

i...always thought c64 was....

my reality is shattered

 

Wonder how long it is till someone sets up a company doing it...

 

This is awesome, and I have 3 systems (all of same kind) in dire need for hydrogen peroxide

 

Pretty cool, I'll use this one some colored yellow consoles I got.

 

just do it like i did



left -> before the bleach. right -> after!

and as easliy writen on that page

http://www.superpcenginegrafx.com/cleaning_a_pcengine.html

 

Impressive!
I will do this to my "yellow" dreamcast.

 

That's pretty neat to reverse the nasty yellowing. I dunno about the retrobright mixture but the bleaching of the PC-Engine you did sounds awfully easy. I didn't know it wouldn't damage the paint to bath it in bleach.

 

I did spot a page warning about the use of peroxide & bleach at percentages higher than 10%, as well as a few other warnings:

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/Problems+and+Pitfalls

 

Wow, it seems you can get impressive results if you do it well, I'll have to try it with a couple of yellow SNES's I got last week ^_^

 

One thing I have read (but dont know how true it is) is that bleach causes the casing to become very brittle as it damages the structure of the plastic.

Also bleach apprently only works on discoloured consoles (eg. dirty, smoke damaged, etc) the ones which have actually had the plastic physically/chemically change colour due to the flame retardants used usually cant be fixed - as bleach does not actually reverse the chemical process.

To quote from here:-
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/189
"Bleach - I’ve had very limited success with letting bleach sit on Macintosh cases. When it does work, it’s difficult to get a uniform effect unless you can soak the whole piece in bleach equally. This probably damages the structure of the plastic and might cause another type of yellowing — so beware! "

I have never understood why third parties have not yet cottoned on to the idea of making 'replica cases' for retro consoles - they certainly make enough clone systems!

...I would love to have a replica Super Famicom case with a nicely widened cartridge slot to accept US SNES games...

 

Bleachy Engine!

 

Yup, I always worried about it getting brittle.

How did this topic get duplicated and then split?!