2:49 When I heard blowing on the cartridge hurt it, I stopped for a while. I had to start doing it again though, because if I didn't blow on it, it wouldn't load no matter how many times I reseated it and no matter how I put it in. If I blow on it, it works immediately.
I made decent money in Jr high/high-school fixing the red ring of death for people, I'm pretty sure it was a problem with the heatsink arms would warp because of the rivet they used to secure it making the heatsink actually detach. so I would remove the rivets and just screw it down to the motherboard. I'm pretty sure I did the whole shebang of applying new thermal compound and all that but probably didn't have to. I know of multiple units to this day that still work because of my mod!
that wasnt the issue exactly, but it definitely was a big contributor, what it actually came down to was that they crammed too much into too little space with inadequate thermal regulation so things got hot, warped or even burned and then you get the red ring error because some chip has popped itself off the board or worse damaged the board itself, cooked psu's were also fairly common from what ive heard basically the red ring issue was actually a whole trainwreck of individual problems rather then one single issue that could have been easily dealt with by microsoft hence why it took them so long to fix it
*correction:* @ 5:34 - _(mumbles)_ *=* _fan shroud_ (as in the thin metal sheet that is covering something like a circuit board, or in this case the fan)
Should mention that the condensation from your breath helped with the contact in the moment, but actually would cause the contacts to "rot" (the board material underneath the contacts was susceptible to the moisture, and would slowly degrade the more water was on it,) and would end up making it worse over time.
Neither is the ease of playing backups. It was not so simple to get the backups in the first place, in the days of dialup, which lasted until well after the DC was long gone. Unlike a PS or even PS2, which you could rent or borrow a game, then copy it on your PC drive, but they wouldn't run without some sort of mod.
The Dreamcast failures were a combination of Sega burning bridges with the 32X, Sega CD and Saturn being hundred dollars+ devices that were dropped early on in their life. This caused consumers to be hesitant with the Dreamcast, and likewise developers didn't want to make games for a platform like that. Then the PS2 came out, and its better performance, DVD functionality, and goodwill from the PS1 overshadowed Sega's console.
I also heard the ET cartridge urban legend and I didn't believe it either until they found them in the desert! I was shook! Thanks for the video, very enjoyable!
I remember hearing about the ET story when I was in middle school, which was actually how I got into learning about retro games. I just thought “no way a game was THAT bad” and just went down this rabbit hole where I’d do nothing but watch gaming documentaries lol
Dreamcast was and still is my favorite console ever. So many great memories! Especially Sonic Adventure and being able to play the mini game on your memory card!!!
I fixed my first gen xbox red ring with a towel lol, it lasted about a month, then I did it again and got a few weeks, then it was dead forever. I put the CD faceplate (silver from the Xbox 360 PRO) on my arcade, that arcade still runs today.
The Nintendo scarcity myth was true in the 80s and 90s. That was their whole marketing plan. They intentionally underprovided the proper number of consoles to stores
@@oozly9291 To increase demand. When they finally shipped more consoles to stores people went ballistic over them. Ensuring that even more consoles were sold due to FOMO from consumers.
My SNES gaming experience has a sad ending. I had to lick the cartridges good (sometimes use rubbing alcohol) to get my 6? games I had to work. When the problems got worse. For example, my games freezing every time I played. I took apart the console, looked around, and then cleaned it. Tested my games to see if it helped any, before putting it back together. All my games ran really well. When I put the top half shell back on. I was back to lots of licking and freezing. So I left the top half shell off and the problems went away. A couple days later. My mother saw my SNES and flipped out. Said I broke it and put it in the garbage while I was yelling at her saying. It works! It won't work with the top on! It works!😭It works! Bye bye Super Nintendo. 🤦♂😞
The myth here is that the ET game was that horrible. It wasn’t a great game but truth is it erred on the side of being too ambitious for the console it was on. Think about it - you had a game that had a beginning, middle and end, several NPC characters, a larger world than most others at the time, a quest to go on… a few years later when applied to a console with more horsepower it was called legend of Zelda. The fact they even tried that on a console with only 4k to work with that basically ran on pencil erasers… it was a flop but it flopped because they tried to do reach a bit beyond what could be done, not because the idea was so bad.
@@HearMeLearn yeah and that makes the game even more remarkable. It’d have been easy to make a space invaders rip off where ET fired reeces pieces at advancing whatever’s. That guy had a game to code in six weeks and tried to craft basically legend of Zelda in a 2600. I mean… you can’t fault him for his ambition.
The Dreamcast does actually have quite a bit of copy protection in its discs, which are not regular CD's but actually GD-ROMS which hold way more. The reason the CD trick works is that Sega left in half-baked support for another cd format and the Dreamcast could be tricked into loading games from that, since they didn't put time into working the copy protection to also take into account that other format. It was actually patched in later versions of the BIOS so the CD trick doesn't work on the last chunk of consoles that came out at all without a modchip
I had the red ring of death and somehow it fixed itself after I beat the shit out of it, but unfortunately I had to hit it from then on to get it to run
I think it's fascinating when a major gaming company like Sega drops out of the hardware business and then Microsoft tags in with the Xbox. Maybe one day Sega will return to compete again.
The real way to fix ROD on Xbox 360 was to open it up and change out the stock cooling paste to a high quality one. And then it worked a long time again.
The issue with blowing into the cartridges though is that moisture from your breath will cause the pins to corrode faster. So sure increasing the speed limit helps speeding, but you're really making the issue worse.
It was actually the extra MARKETING for Shenmue that makes that myth relevant. They spend like 70 million in promotion in a last ditch effort, but it was too late. So in a way, I'd say it did. That's ALOT of capital to lose.
The towel trick saved my Xbox 360 for years. It did eventually die, but it was only several years later. So while it wasn't a permanent fix, I would definitely say it was a fix.
The Sony Killswitch rumor existed before the PS3 and PS4. I knew some guys who worked in game repair, talking about a repair for the PS2 cd-drives that involved rotating a gear that seemed to only exist to turn over time, leading to the console to stop reading disks. Once you turned the gear back, it would work again. Apocryphal as hell, but definitely a rumor that existed before the PS3 was a tinkle in Sony's eye.
The reason Atari buried a bunch of E.T. cartridges in a landfill in New Mexico was because they had a service center/warehouse near there that they were shutting down or moving somewhere else. So instead of paying an assload to ship all the inventory to the new location, it was actually just more cost efficient to dump it. So it had very little to do with the quality of the game but they did have a lot of copies of the game to bury because of it. They manufactured way too many copies and had a lot of returns.
My dad used to work from home fixing consoles, before he learned how to solder, he would place the Xbox mobo in the oven for like 7 minutes while it was heating up to resolder the connections
Imagine the et game dig being a hoax to sell the games, and the myth I've seen videos on here of the buried games, and there's no way they were buried fo that long.....
I don't know, I guess I'm in the minority of people who actually enjoyed the Wii-U when it came out. My favorite feature of the WII-U is hands down the feature that allowed players to #1. Link the console to your TV which would then allow players to control the TV's channels, volume, video inputs and power the TV on/off all as if it were an actual tv remote control. And #2. The best part at least for me and my use cases at the time was the ability to go from playing in handheld mode from the built-in screen to playing on our big screen TV in the living room, all with a touch of a button seamlessly. Now I'm a simple person so it may not seem like that much of a big deal to most people out there but for me at the time it was a big deal to have that sort of feature and I really enjoyed the console while I had it, and yeah sure the games were limited being Nintendo but I got great enjoyment out of playing splinter cell and call of duty Black ops 2 where I fell in love with the zombies mode, it truly was a great time to be a gamer for me at the time and sometimes I wish I could go back to that time in my life and those days and those games. That being said all the time I see people hating on the Wii-U and I don't know I guess I feel like it just gets more hate than I feel it deserves sometimes but like I said I guess I'm just in the minority. Great video guys keep up the good work.
The DC did have anti piracy measures in place, but like any hardware as soon as a loophole was found it was exploited (and it was found fairly quickly with the DC).
2:17 I did that with *SEGA* console/games a lot in the old days. 3:20 Remember that too, then I *GENIUSLY* realized what was causing the problem (it actually was the *plastic ventilation cover* "covering" the Heat Sync). Never *Finished the Fight* (Halo 3 meme)🤥😑
Nintendo does not intentionally keep consoles low in stock. HOWEVER they damn sure made the super nes mini and nes mini EXTREMELY low stock. That was deliberate.
When they compare the complexity of producing dated cellphone APUs for Switches to modern PCIe Gen 4 Navi 2 based APUs for the PS5 and XSX. XD Even pre COVID, the only explanation for Switch shortages was either that it was either on purpose, or because of incompetence. Neither reason is particularly good.
I fixed my OG Xbox 360 with the towel trick several times, the problem was that it only worked for a couple hours then you got the red ring of dead again when the console cooled down.
the 360 is a complicated mess, the xenon launch model came with a trainwreck of problems that have killed the vast majority of them by now but some do still survive despite the odds, the various tricks that were claimed to revive them did in fact work, but only as a bandaid solution and only if it applied to your specific point of failure, the various models each had so many points of failure that there really wasnt any single consistent trick that would work and a lot of them were already beyond help before the red ring even showed up for the first time
I bought a fat Xbox 360 model in 2010. It red ringed once in 2011 due to a power outage and it red ringed again in 2012 due to overheating. It still works to this day
It’s so funny that people think blowing on cartridges started with Nintendo. We were blowing on Atari 2600 cartridges from the start my friends. Man I’m old.
I’d guess the seazures came from the Polybius, the games refresh rate and visuals, giving epileptics seazures, i am an epileptic myself and have had seazures from gaming cabinets… the stories probably spread and it was thought to be ”mind control”
so basically about the killswitch one, it happened to my uncle once. We were just having fun playing destiny on his ps3 when it suddenly hanged and went black. The fans were noisy as hell and it wouldn't turn on so basically, myth confirmed
The fact that the game is one of the worst of all time is the real myth. It's slightly buggy, and strange, but once you understand what is happening it's not even close to anything that should be considered worst of all time.
My Xbox had the overheat red ring of death. It was the middle of winter so I shut the Xbox in the window with the air intake out in the cold and stuffed the window with towels lol. Worked great until I could afford a new one.
Y'all are factually incorrect when saying the Dreamcast had no cope protection. It just got defeated pretty early by exploiting the Windows CE part of the console. That's why most pirated games required that you burnt a copy of a boot disk and loaded that first prior to the game ISO, later they found out how to patch the games and make them self bootable.
They have a literal kill switch like the iPhone. If you look up stole batches of ps5's. People are stealing shipments and buying stores ones swapping the consoles and returning them. I guessing because the stolen consoles have been disabled
People: Playstation success is mostly bcuz piracy Also people: Dreamcast failed bcus it doesn't have security against piracy I'm not saying Austin or Matt told that, but I've heard that argument from the same people countless times
Nintendo with their artificial scarcity still remains true. The shutting down of the 3DS and Wii U eshop proves a fucking point and with switch online being garbage it is and taking rom/emulation website then yeah its far from a fucking myth.
Didn't mention the infamous YLOD on the PS3? That's pretty nefarious. The RROD on the 360, also nefarious. Not myths but still pretty shitty of Sony to not cover it. At least MS covered some of the 360s. Oh, there's also the adjusting of the laser on the PS1 or turning it upside down to get it to work? TLDR.... Sony consoles' quality sucks. MS had one screw up and at least tried to help their customers out.
I have blown on cartridges literally thousands of times in my life, and when I started hearing people saying it doesn't do anything, I decided to do a little experiment. I took a cartridge that I knew worked, put it in the console. It didn't load. I removed and reinserted the cartridge to see if it would load. Nothing. Repeat this a dozen or so times, still nothing. Then I remove the cartridge, blow on it like I always do, reinsert it, and it loads perfectly. I did this with about 20 different NES cartridges, and 8 or 9 SNES cartridges. Blowing worked almost every time, and ALWAYS worked more consistently than simply reseating the cartridge. Power cycling also had no effect. I don't give a damn what manufacturers or keyboard scientists say, blowing WORKS. I've spent nearly 30 years proving it works.
Concerning the red ring of death. I was hired as a game tester for Microsoft and I did not stay because on the first day they asked about what issues we had with game or the system. I had told them I had a problem with going through 6 Xbox 360s because of red ring of death and was told outright they did that o. purpose with the light application of thermal paste and ot was planned obsolescence. this was the first time I heard of the phrase and I was immediately upset and quit.
