4 ms·

I remember using rubbing alcohol on a q-tip against both sides of the connector. That seemed to work well when blowing on it and rubbing it with your shirt didn

• CamperBob2 14y ago
  Isopropyl alcohol as sold in US drugstores/grocery stores is about 30% water, though, and the alcohol evaporates a lot faster. So for the most part, those who were cleaning their cartridge edge connectors with rubbing alcohol might as well have been breathing on them or using water by itself. One thing I couldn't tell from the article was whether those fingers actually were bare copper, or gold plated. If they were bare copper, I'm amazed that they lasted a week. If they were gold-plated, then the connection problems would have been strictly in the harmonica connector inside the console itself, at least until people started using pencil erasers. Blowing on the cartridge itself would certainly have had no effect. Another possibility is that Nintendo made the mistake of flashing gold directly over copper when they should have used an intermediate layer of nickel for passivation. This would probably result in connections that were better than bare copper would have provided but not as reliable as a proper surface treatment would have been.