If you plan on doing this a lot you should just buy a set of security bit screwdrivers on Amazon. These methods will do the trick but they are unreliable and finicky. Some people make screwdrivers do this by melting acrylic pens and pressing the liquid acrylic over one of the screws or by cutting a slot into a flat head screwdriver.

This will make taking out the star-shaped security screws designed to keep you out much easier. To do this you will need a security bit screw driver, for almost all Nintendo cartridges. The first thing to do is to open up the cartridge so you can get at the printed circuit board (PCB). It will save you loads of time down the road. If you are a collector and partake in retro gaming often, you should consider doing this to all of your games as soon as you get them. In this guide I will walk you through how to clean a NES cartridge, but this basic method will work on any video game cartridge. I have been asked countless times what's the best way to do this, and after years of trying different cleaning methods I believe I have figured out the best method. Not to mention, the go to fix of blowing in the game or console just leads to spit and breath moisture build up that oxidizes and corrodes the brass pins.ĭoing a deep clean of all your games and consoles can fix this issue for good and take you to a world where all your cartridges fire up first try. Years of use and storage mean years of dirt build up on the pins that transfer the game data from the cartridge to the console. What these people don't realize is that their games and consoles are just dirty.

They plug the cartridge in and get a jumbled mess of graphics or a blank screen and think something is broken, especially when blowing in the cartridge doesn't fix the issue. With the growing popularity of retro gaming a lot of gamers have decided to pull out their old systems again only to find that they don't work.

Everybody who grew up on cartridge based video games remembers having trouble getting them to work, especially those who had a Nintendo Entertainment System.

Nintendo nes cleaner