QUALITY CONTROL
HOW TO MAKE SURE YOUR SHINY NEW CARTRIDGE DOESN’T KILL YOUR TREASURED CONSOLE
One thing you may have heard about newly manufactured cartridges is that they’re not up to the quality standards you’d expect. Sadly, there’s some truth to that. Some very desirable re-releases have been officially licensed, but exhibited poor physical design – and in some cases, refused to even work on official hardware. “There is a very, very, hardcore and passionate community around reproduction game boards and if someone uses a shoddy board in a commercial product – you’re going to hear about it, even if you aren’t directly involved in that community,” says Josh. “If we didn’t care about quality, we could certainly go over to Aliexpress and bulk buy the worst possible boards for $8 a piece or less, but we have to consider the quality of our products first and foremost.”
For a company determined to keep its own nose clean, this can lead to overcompensation, as iam8bit found out. “One important bit of context – when we were planning the first Legacy Cartridge Collection release, the industry had never seen something like it before. As a result, a lot of speculative conversation swirled between lawyers and our licensing partners,” Jon and Amanda explain. This led to the company’s Street Fighter II cartridge coming with an eyebrow-raising warning that your SNES may catch fire. “Long story short – the warning was not about the cartridge at all, but actually pertaining to the use of retro consoles,” they explain. “The concern was, if you had a dusty old SNES in your attic, with cables being chewed on by rats and moths making a nest of the cartridge slot, then you best be careful. Think about it – most people don’t take care of their old technology, so it makes sense.”
Modern cartridge reproductions both bootleg and official, as well as flash cartridges, have been affected by problems over the years. So what should you be looking out for to ensure quality? Some things are more obvious than others. Giveaways for low-quality boards are silver-coloured connector pins produced via a technique known as hot air surface levelling
– these won’t withstand repeat insertion and removal. Similarly, if a cartridge connector edge is flat, showing no signs of bevelled edges or corner chamfers, that’s no good. What’s harder to see without electronics expertise is when PCBS don’t properly translate the voltage required by older consoles for modern chips. To learn more about this, Retrorgb has a great guide that you can find at bit.ly/cartquality.