Any way to troubleshoot a cart with vertical lines?

Any way to troubleshoot a cart with vertical lines?
by Dastari on 2009-10-18 (#51516)

Hi

To further my NES collection, I picked up Cabal recently. Unfortunately, when I put it in my NES it displays pretty wide vertical lines are regular intervals across the entire game. This does not effect any of other NES games, so I doubt that it has anything to do with the NES and I have cleaned the Cabal cart thoroughly. There is no obvious damage to the board. Does anyone know if there's some way to figure out what is causing this? Is it something that I can fix? If not, is it something where if someone turned this board into a repro with new ROM chips would it work?

Any help is appreciated.

by MottZilla on 2009-10-18 (#51517)

It's probably dirty. Clean the connector on the cartridge.

by Dastari on 2009-10-18 (#51519)

MottZilla wrote:
It's probably dirty. Clean the connector on the cartridge.

As I said in my post "I have cleaned the Cabal cart thoroughly." Is there anything else that can produce this behavior? The lines are at completely equally spaced intervals and don't jump or move at all.

by Bregalad on 2009-10-18 (#51520)

It makes bad contact, and once more, on the NES bad contacts have nothing to do with dirt. Dirt can be one cause of a bad contact, but 90% of the time it's just because of the crappy connector's mechanics and we can do nothing but cry and suffer the number of resets, random freezes, graphical glitches and erased saves this causes. (not counting you have to re-instert a game 4-6 times average before getting it to work).

by MottZilla on 2009-10-18 (#51521)

Sorry I missed that you cleaned it. Did you try it on another NES console? Maybe your console could use a replacement connector.

by Dastari on 2009-10-18 (#51530)

MottZilla wrote:
Sorry I missed that you cleaned it. Did you try it on another NES console? Maybe your console could use a replacement connector.

Not exactly since I don't have another one. I have tried several other games on the NES though and they all play fine so I assumed that my NES was fine and that this is a problem with the cart. I'm going to try cleaning it a second time and hopefully that will fix it.