You can use this to wipe the contacts when you're done if you want, or just to keep on-hand in case of spills. Stay away from anything 50 percent or lower. The higher the concentration of alcohol the better-you need this liquid to clean up the contacts after you scrub them, but you don't want a lot of water in it because it can rust and corrode the pins.

I've had good luck so far with Weiman Brass Polish, which I bought after reading negative reviews of the competing Brasso polish. This is a must to remove stubborn tarnish from a cartridge's pins, which is otherwise hard to dislodge. These are high-quality tools that will open up all of the above carts and more. NES, SNES, Genesis, and other cartridges all use special screws that you can't turn with a Phillips or Torx screwdriver. Here's what you need.Ī comprehensive video guide to cleaning your old games. Luckily, with the right tools and an assortment of chemicals, getting these games back into near-new condition is no trouble at all. Putting dirty games in your console is bad for it, and a dirty console can go on to infect the clean games in your collection. I've bought 'cleaned and tested' games with connectors caked in dust, coated in tarnish, and (once) partially obscured by a dried up old spider carcass. What I quickly found is that different vintage game vendors have pretty drastically different ideas of what 'cleaned and tested' means. I wanted to play the original games with the original controllers, so I hopped on eBay and snapped up a few used cartridges to expand my childhood game collection. I didn't want to dive into the legal grey area that is emulation-my fever can only be cured by the real thing. Writing about the Nintendo Entertainment System's birthday a couple of weeks ago put me in the mood for some retro gaming. Andrew Cunningham reader comments 59 with

Video game cartridge cleaner