Cleaning\repairing a SNES cartridge

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MonsieurX

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#1 MonsieurX
Member since 2008 • 39858 Posts

Bought Secret Of Evermore few years ago over on eBay and never got it to work completely. Tried to clean the connectors with some rubbing alcohol and it didn't help. What's next?

The game starts "normally", gets to the "Press Start" screen then the screen turns black and I only get sound

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N64DD

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#2 N64DD
Member since 2015 • 13167 Posts

says your video is set to private.

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achilles614

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#3  Edited By achilles614
Member since 2005 • 5310 Posts

Open the cartridge and clean the circuit board. If there are no visual signs of circuit damage then that's likely all it needs. I used rubbing alcohol and compressed air to clean out the chips leads from dust. I had a GBA gameshark that refused to work, when I opened it up there was some weird gunk on on the chip's leads after cleaning the board it works great. My GBA yoshi's island would freeze while playing and cleaning the board fixed that too.

If the circuit components are damaged they aren't too hard to replace. I would bet you could harvest most of the parts (except for ROM/RAM) in this pic http://www.cs.umb.edu/~bazz/snes/cartridges/cartpcb_illustrated.png from an old crappy sports game cart. If you're willing to open the cart and take hi-res pictures of it maybe someone here could spot a broken component or help you find it through use of a voltage meter.

Then again, if the game isn't expensive and truly FUBAR then just buy a working copy :P

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MonsieurX

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#4  Edited By MonsieurX
Member since 2008 • 39858 Posts

@achilles614: Thanks for the suggestions,I'll look into it.

And it's Secret Of Evermore,copies are around 45$ now

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deactivated-5f56fcab5da82

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#5 deactivated-5f56fcab5da82
Member since 2019 • 118 Posts

20 years later come to find out, blowing inside of the SNES cart wears out the chip...whoops