Resurrecting Cartridges

I spent the morning resurrecting old non-working SNES cartdiges that had been donated to the archive. This involved opening them up, applying polish & fixer to the contacts, then re-sealing. I went six-for-six in getting the old cartridges working again!

Here's the inside of the SNES game Zombies Ate My Neighbors:




Buoyed by my success, I went back this afternoon and resurrected another seven NES cartridges and eight Atari cartridges. That's twenty-one games in all; pretty good for a few hours' work!

Commodore 64

Last week we received a donation of a Commodore 64 (actually a later-model Commodore 64C), including a disk drive, monitor and joysticks. All of which works, and also came with about thirty-five games.

Here are some pictures:

Watching

I'd been pretty stoked about Mirror's Edge since first reading about it many months ago, but when I sat down to try to play it I sadly learned that I don't have the chops to effectively manage the controls (I got stuck on an early part of the training!)

Yesterday I spent some time in the archive watching a student play Edge. I don't normally get too excited watching someone else play, but Edge was definitely exciting to watch. Faith (the character) was trapped in an office building with several gunmen searching for her. She had to find a way out of the building, and then travel over the rooftops to safety, all the while being chased and fired at. I felt myself getting involved in the action, even though I wasn't the one running the controls.

So while I may never be able to play Edge myself, I can still experience it vicariously!