My Sega Master System sits on the shelf unrepaired, but the controller? We can fix that! Button 2 was behaving very badly, so we whipped out some metho and gave it a good scrub down.

Opening the controller revealed a fair bit of black gunk around the contacts. No idea what the previous owner had been doing with it. Perhaps somebody spilt an entire Canon Bubble Jet ink cartridge inside? Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t helping Button 2 respond properly.

These old controllers are wonderfully simple inside. There isn’t even a controller chip like you’d find in a Mega Drive pad, just the contacts, wiring and conductive pads. I gave the board a clean with methylated spirits and some cotton tips, then had a look at the rubber button pads.

You do have to be a bit more careful with those conductive pads. Cleaning them too aggressively can damage the material that makes the electrical connection in the first place. I even wondered about using a pencil eraser, as people sometimes do with cartridge contacts. Looking back, that’s not something I’d recommend for the rubber pads!

Once the contacts were looking considerably better, I cleaned the remaining dirt from the case and put everything back together. While I’ve got the console sitting around unrepaired, I can still use the controller with my Mega Drive and Master System Converter. Convenient!

For the test I fired up Wonder Boy on the Mega Drive 2, complete with my 50/60 Hz and English/Japanese switches. Thanks go out to patrikw25 for pointing out the ENG/JPN behaviour in Wonder Boy a few weeks, or even months, back now!

The controller was behaving beautifully again. I also got thoroughly distracted changing the region and refresh-rate settings, discovering wasps in the Japanese version and generally being terrible at Wonder Boy. Apparently having a working controller doesn’t automatically make me any better at the game!

A nice simple repair for a change, and Button 2 is back in action. Now I just need to find the time to give the Master System itself some attention.

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