A YouTuber lost his entire retro game collection in a terrible house fire, but he’s trying to rebuild by fixing as many fire-damaged bits of hardware as he can, including this retro game cartridge.
A house fire is a traumatic and disastrous event for anyone who goes through it. This was the trauma that affected YouTuber and retro game collector MarkFixesStuff, who lost almost everything in his extensive collection when his house burned down two years ago.
Despite this awful setback, Mark was determined to rebuild his life and his retro collection and began what he dubbed the ‘Phoenix Project’ to restore as many items that were damaged by fire and smoke as he possibly could.
The Coleco Vision cartridge was the latest item from Mark’s damaged collection to go through the restoration process. At first glance, it didn’t look very promising, as the outer shell was very burned and warped. However, Mark stated that the cartridge was a ‘symbol of hope’ since he believed that the circuit board inside could still be usable.
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After freeing the board from the damaged outer cartridge shell, Mark examined the circuit board and attached chips and discovered that they were contaminated with dust and soot. A clean with a cotton swab and some isopropyl alcohol removed the first layer of greasy soot and corrosion.
Mark then turned to his Creality K1 3D printer, which he used to create a replacement shell that the circuit board could sit in to make it back into a proper cartridge again, using a 3D print file acquired from another retro fan on Thingiverse. Not satisfied with regular PLA, Mark opted instead to use glow-in-the-dark plastic for the shell as a visual metaphor for the game rising from the ashes.
A new replica label was added to complete the restoration and it was ready for testing. Joyfully, it worked perfectly and can be added back into Mark’s growing collection of rescued games and consoles.