I spent a lot of time last night watching Odd Tinkering's game console restoration videos on YouTube (read as "FreeTube"). First I started out seeing what I would need to do to disassemble my Wii. Well, as it turns out, everything between the user and the heat diffusion plate is held on with Nintendo's trailblazing new tri-wing anti-repair screws (all new for 2006; the Gamecube was held together with their old-style "Nintendo Shock" screws from 1985). Anyway, that was a bit disconcerting, especially considering the used game store and phone repair shop I was going to take my Wii to shut down sometime between the last time I was on Alphabetical Street and last week when I went to Dollar General to get some leggings; to say nothing of the fact a tri-wing screwdriver bit costs slightly more than just having the Wii repaired by someone else.
Apart from just that, I ended up going down a rabbithole 5 years deep having to do with this guy buying broken down old piece of crap game systems and restoring them. Not just making them functional again, but a full-on restoration. Bringing the system back up to like-new condition. I had watched his Wii restoration video before, when I was researching the most common problems endemic to the classic Wii, and I was a little surprised at how much attention he paid to the impractical bits of the system. The fact the casing had yellowed and the top was scratched would not have made a difference in how the system functioned, but he repaired the surface with epoxy, re-whitened the casing with UV radiation and hydrogen peroxide, and even put on new GCN accoutrement covers to replace the ones that had been lost in some long-forgotten move one day in 2009. I'm not joking when I say Odd made it look like it had just come off the production line. Could there have been a little image doctoring (or, should I say, "Ducktoring") along the way? Possibly, but the methodology was sound. This is the accepted procedure for cleaning printed circuit boards and re-whitening plastic.
My rabbithole adventure took me next to something I never expected I'd ever see in 5785— restoring an Atari 2600 and its joysticks. At first, it was fascination: I was the medical student in the Italian Renaissance who was witnessing the human internal anatomy for the very first time. I know plenty about the zeigeist of the '80s, I can quote you sales figures for the 1980-1985 holiday seasons, tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the history of videogames from Table Tennis for Two on up to the Nintendo Switch 2, but I had never seen inside an Atari 2600 before. I knew what all the chips were called, I knew about the MOS 6502 with register modifications, I knew about the TIA video processor, but I had never seen them doing what they needed to do to make games like Adventure, Yars' Revenge, and Pitfall 2 work.
The console was in pretty rough shape; bits of the decorative trim had worn away, the orange paint on the joystick rangefinders had worn away, and even though a cartridge could dock in the cartridge bus, it certainly couldn't display anything on the screen. It looked as though the console had been immersed in water for an extended period and it didn't look any better inside. Things were rusting, flaking away, Odd had to give it some serious welly to get the rusty screws out to disassemble it. One thing stood out, though: the inspection tag with "November 1980" printed on it. As he carried on with the disassembly and cleaning, I could suddenly see this particular console's entire lifetime play out. After assembly and final QA inspection in November 1980, it was packed away in a box and sold in a Black Friday sale. Whereupon it was hidden until someone could have a private moment to wrap it in festive paper that would be torn off on the last night of Hanukkah by a child who had been asking for an Atari non-stop since she got to play one at her friend's house. New games were bought for it every couple of months, it continued to be a treasured part of the family sitting room. It was probably the gateway to an NES in 1986 and a Super NES in 1991. It was left at home when the owner went off to college, ended up on a shelf in the basement where it was accidentally submerged during a flash flood. They kept saying they'd get it fixed, then they said they'd throw it away, then it ended up being sold for a couple quid. Not much more than a glorified doorstop, it just sort of drifted about, thrown away, salvaged, thrown away, salvaged, until it ended up on the online marketplace where it finally ended up in the hands of Odd Tinkering.
That's a sort of romantic, dramatised story. But what isn't a story is that, as more and more parts got cleaned up, including an RF diffuser plate I never thought would ever get clean, I kept thinking about Adventure and River Raid and all these games, both popular and not, that made up the 2600's game library, and how I said on the Atari 15 page that you could fit every single one onto a diskette or 2. I was thinking how this system was going to be made useful again after at least 20 years of uselessness. She might not be anything more than a museum piece, but the repairs were going to make her playable again for the first time in my lifetime and she would continue being playable for at least another 20 years. I'll freely admit, I was getting a bit teary by that time, but the thing that made me start ugly-crying was when Odd put a shotglass of isopropyl alcohol on the desk and restored the original screws. Granted, maybe a couple of them genuinely needed replacement and some social media trickery was employed to make it look like they were original, but it was the thought that counted. Where someone else would have written off this grody old heap of plastic from the '80s and just 3D-printed an Atari 2600-looking case for a Raspberry Pi running Stella, that didn't happen here. Someone looked at it and said "Challenge accepted". It's not an emulator, it's not a multicart, it's not a plug-n-play TV console. In this world of fast fashion, 5-minute crafts, AI-generated art, and technology that's designed to break down after 3 months, someone bought an Atari 2600 for about $5 and put $400 worth of work into it to make it look and feel like you just brought it home from Woolworth's 15 minutes ago.
This isn't an isolated incident, either. Every game console that gets restored on that channel gets the same treatment: full disassembly, cleaning, diagnostic, repair, restoration, and reassembly. He even took a Nintendo 64 thumbstick mechanism apart and repaired it, rather than simply pitching it out and ordering a new one from Amazon. These are 10, 20, 40, 50-year-old game systems, brought back to full functionality! As someone who spent way more of her 20s wishing she had been born in the '70s so she could have been around for the videogame revolution in the '80s than I'd like to admit, and who is so accustomed to people saying "well, this one's ruined, pitch it out and start again," to see this Finnish guy and his rubber duck actually giving a crap for a change was refreshing. Even for all its price, the Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox X/S are all consumable goods. No one expects them to last more than a year. But it just goes to show: it doesn't matter what's wrong with old technology, it can be repaired. And, quite frankly, if the modern electronics weren't made of such shitty-quality parts and controlled by capitalist entities who treat all their customers like potential thieves, all the modern stuff could be repaired, too! That's not to say there aren't people who give Apple the middle finger while taking apart an iPhone to correct something that Apple intentionally broke, it's just... why waste the time? You know you're going to pitch out your iPhone for the newest model next month, so who gives a shit if something breaks? This is the age of consumable goods, where everything from spent napkins to gaming computers will end up in the landfill sooner rather than later. The Atari 2600, NES, Mega Drive, Super NES, all those old systems are leftovers from the age of durable goods. Even the most common problems with the Xbox 360 (ostensibly the harbinger of the consumable goods era) have been diagnosed and fixed by people concerned with preservation and anti-consumerism. It's like I've been saying for years now: except for a couple copypaste games with bugs from here 'til Tuesday, there's nothing so good about the Switch 2 that you can't just jailbreak a Wii U and be better off. Why give megacorps your money when you could just as easily give them the finger instead?
Talking of, I sure am glad Odd Tinkering is member-supported now so he doesn't have to play the role of a performing animal for a couple scraps of paper and a Slim Jim anymore.