I'm not sure what pushed me over the edge from being generally interested in retro gaming to actively picking up consoles and games (I suspect binging videos from The Retro Future, TysyTube, and Restoration EG), but over the last month or two I've gotten into both collecting and restoring the game consoles and games of my youth. It started with a friend asking if I was interested in buying an original Gameboy (DMG-01) that wouldn't always power on, and it was incredibly fun to take apart, diagnose (dust and gunk in the power switch, corrosion on the battery contacts), fix the issues, clean up, and yes even play. The only replacement part it needed was a new glass screen lens I picked up for all of $5, and now it looks as good as it did in 1989.
Last month I picked up a Super Nintendo console at a local game shop, everything was working, but the shell itself was pretty grimy and yellowed. I decided to give it a thorough cleaning and inspection, as well as take a stab at retrobriting the case. The cleaning wasn't too difficult, there are plenty of guides on disassembling the console, and only one specialty bit is needed for the case screws (a Nintendo gamebit). Hot soapy water, a soft bristle brush, and a micro abrasive magic sponge did an amazing job de-griming everything, even removing the name written on the bottom in sharpie (which really takes me back to the 90s.)
Because I can't resist making a project out of everything, I decided to build a dedicated box lined with UV LEDs for the purpose. It doesn't hurt that it could double as a UV resin hardening chamber, or perhaps for UV bleaching other things. I'd seen several iterations of the idea on YouTube, and borrowed a few elements that I liked from each. I ended up grabbing two storage bins from Target, one an opaque 31 gallon bin to use as the outer shell and a transparent 32 quart bin for the interior. For the UV light I picked up 40 meters of UV LED strip, which included an AC adapter and splitter, I just needed some paired wire to jump between the segments. I wanted to use as much of the LED strip as I could while also getting even illumination; I ended up cutting the strip into 6 segment strips for the sides, placing 6 of those strips across the short ends and 9 across the long end. The lid was slightly longer, so it got 6 strips of 8 segments. Before placing the LEDs I lined the interior of the larger bin with strips of aluminum tape I had left over from the kegerator build in order to keep the UV light contained and limiting the absorption into the walls. In order to prevent shorts under the LED strip, and because the adhesive it's backed with isn't amazing, I put stripes of double-sided tape under each strip. A small drilled hole near the base served as the entry point for the cable.
The last question before putting it into use was what recipe to use. A lot of the early discussions of retrobrite focused on the role of laundry soap (TEAD) as a necessary component, but after my previous session digging into the details, it seemed entirely unnecessary. A lot of people seemed to be using 12% hydrogen peroxide on YouTube, but some were using 6% or even 3% with reasonable results, the big difference being how long they allowed the process to run. I'd be remiss to not mention the excellent experimental video from The 8-Bit Guy where he compares multiple very different protocols on keys from the same yellowed Amiga keyboard; while there are some tweak I would've made to the experiment (namely controlling the UV dose more carefully), it made a convincing case for a liquid hydrogen peroxide bath catalyzed with UV or heat.
I decided for my initial run to split the difference; I mixed a 50/50 mixture of 12% hydrogen peroxide and tap water, yielding a 6% solution. I needed one gallon to fully submerge the the top half of the SNES shell, so half gallon of each was added to the smaller tub. In order to prevent the parts from floating to the top as bubbles accumulate, I filled small glasses with tap water and rested them on top, since both should be relatively transparent at this wavelength.
Based on the other protocols I've seen, I decided to aim for 24 hours, taking a peek every 6-8 hours to check progress, knock off bubbles, and make sure the parts remained submerged. The improvement looked modest when I looked down into the box, but when I'd rinsed off the solution and compared the top of the shell to the untreated bottom half, it was incredibly apparent.
Seeing the results on the top, I decided to go ahead and run the bottom half and controller shell as well. The question I had was; how much had the first 24 hours diluted the solution? I know hydrogen peroxide breaks down into water and oxygen under bright light, hence the reason it's always sold in opaque containers, but would it still be effective? I don't have a spectrometer at home (yet!), which would've made it easy to measure the residual concentration, so I decided to simply drop the remaining bits into the same bath and observe the process after 6, 12, and 24 hours. After 24 hours the bottom half visually matched the top half; the efficacy of the bath seemed essentially unchanged between the two cycles. I suspect rate of breakdown is far lower than I imagined; when I dumped the solution into the yard it fizzed a great deal, still plenty of active H2O2 left over.
Reassembly took a couple minutes, but no major snags were hit. I did notice a bit of corrosion at the bottom of the cartridge slot, so took a moment to scrub it down with isopropyl alcohol to clean it up.
All done it took just two days and a half gallon of 12% H2O2. With that done, it's back on the shelf ready to be fired up! The whole process of getting video output from an SNES to a modern flatscreen television isn't as straightforward as I'd hoped, and while I've got a reasonable image now, I'm thinking to do a comparison once a couple of cables arrive later. Until then I can enjoy reliving some of my early gaming memories any old evening.
