Ah, the trusty old Mega Drive 2! This is one I’ve already modified with a couple of switches around the back, but today I’m going to give its cartridge connector a good clean. After twenty-odd years, you can imagine how much rubbish might have collected inside that slot.

In the previous video I showed how I’d been cleaning the contacts on game cartridges themselves. Of course, there’s not much point making the cartridge spotless if you’re just going to shove it straight back into a filthy connector. Let’s see what we can get out of this one!

I’ve got a bottle of 99.8% isopropyl alcohol, which is the nice high-purity stuff. You can also get 70% alcohol, but that leaves rather more water involved, and I don’t particularly want that sitting inside the Mega Drive.

The other equipment is wonderfully sophisticated: a plastic card and some cleaning cloth or suitable paper folded around its edge. Add a little alcohol, insert the covered card into the cartridge slot and pull it back out. The trick is to go in and out rather than jiggle it from side to side and risk bending the contacts.

And would you look at that! There’s already dirt coming off onto the cloth. Move to a clean section, give it another go, and yet more grime appears. Lovely! It’s amazing what can hide inside something that looks perfectly respectable from the outside.

I wouldn’t force an oversized card into a tight connector or leave bits of cleaning material behind. The idea is to clean those spring contacts, not rearrange them. With the console disconnected from power and everything allowed to dry properly afterwards, it’s a fairly straightforward little cleaning job.

I’d actually been having another play with my Sega Genesis Nomad earlier, which was giving me some cartridge trouble of its own. Naturally, that turned into a demonstration of the machine rather than more cartridge-slot cleaning. I do have a habit of wandering off into something more interesting!

The Nomad is a brilliant little piece of hardware. It’s almost a perfectly reasonable handheld Mega Drive, provided you ignore that enormous battery pack hanging off the back. I was even thinking about taking it on the train. A portable Sega console for the trip sounds like a fine idea to me!

Once I’d managed to get a game running, I was rather more interested in playing it than talking about dirty connectors. The screen wasn’t the easiest thing to film, and the game was giving me a bit of trouble, but it’s still a lovely machine to have around.

Anyway, back to the cleaning. This general approach is useful for quite a few ordinary cartridge slots, provided the card and cleaning material actually suit the connector. The Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and Famicom all give you plenty of opportunities to discover just how dirty old hardware can become.

And no, I wouldn’t promise miracles with the Sega Saturn expansion cartridge slot. That thing can be troublesome at the best of times, and I suspect a piece of cloth and a card won’t solve every problem it’s capable of producing!

While you’re working on an old console, it’s also worth opening it occasionally for a look at the motherboard. Leaking capacitors, corrosion and liquid damage are all things I’d rather find before they cause more trouble. I repair computers for a living, and believe me, people can do some remarkable things to electronics.

So there we go, another cartridge connector cleaned and a little Nomad gaming thrown in for good measure. Hopefully your cartridge slots will shine like new, and your games might even behave themselves for a change!

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