NostalgiaFAG Wednesday Vol. 3: Blowing, Banging, and Insertion

It would be wrong if the actions of my post title were memories of the past/childhood...if they were actually sexually related that is. But it isn't though. What it really has to do with is the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). So what do blowing, banging, and insertion have to do with the SNES you ask? This is why....

You all either owned one of these bad boys or either went to a relative's place or a friend's house to sit in front of the TV and play this shit all day long. Classic games like Super Mario World or Street Fighter II, any fucking game because the SNES was the shit...totally kicked the Sega Genesis's ass. But here is where the main point of my posts kicks in...

When games didn't work, how the fuck did you get them to?

By this I mean, surely you have encountered a game that did not work. Say for like the original Nintendo, the NES, you put in a game and turn it on, but instead of it working, you get a blinking blue TV screen and a blinking red light near the power button. Say for the SNES and even the Gameboy, you insert the cartridge and that startup screen where the Nintendo Logo comes down to the center of the screen and makes the jingle sound is actually scrambled and freezes. You know what I'm talking about right?

So to fix these problems, people had their own ways of fixing em...

One of these ways required seeing the bottom of the game cartridge like this. What I would do is blow into this shit, given the myth that the game isn't working because the cartridge is dirty. After blowing and inserting it back into the system, it usually worked...but not all the time.

Here is another method I and a bunch of people probably did to get games to work. Take an ordinary Q-tip and either soak the tips in water and alcohol and actually swipe and clean the bottom of the cartridge where the contacts were at. This worked too usually, but it was not the preferred way, cuz some people claimed that the alcohol or the water caused damage to the cartridge contacts, thus making your problem worse.

Yeah these 2 methods were the most typical to get games past that buggy startup screen and working again. But there are other little tweaks people did to get them to work if these didn't, and some even incorporated all the methods mentioned to get them to work. Here are a few more techniques.

1. Some people (after blowing/cleaning) insert the cartridge...BUT not all the way. Either slightly jammed in more to the left or more to the right, and the game ended up working.

2. There was the solution of just JAMMING the cartridge with as much force as you can into the system. I remember doing this a lot.

3. People also pretty much just abused the cartridge. Slamming it and banging it thinking it will get it to work.

4. If the cartridge still didn't work after any of that, it was the actual console to blame. So people would actually blow/clean the slot where you insert the cartridge on the console, blowing age-old dust into their faces and mouths (God I remember the taste of that SNES dust).

Then, people had their own rituals...

I remember with me and my cousins, we had this technique to get the games to work. We would blow into the cartridge 3 times, each time blowing harder, until the final BIG 3rd BLOW. After the blowing, we would bang/slap the cartridge with our palms 3 times, then finally, before JAMMING it into the console, we would cough into the cartridge twice. AND VOILA! That shit worked, ALL THE TIME!

I'm sure you guys did this back in the day, and if you remember, you are truly old school. So as usual, hope you had a NOSTALGIC TIME.