September 05, 2008

Why Super Nintendos Lose Their Color: Plastic Discoloration in Classic Machines - an investigation into why old computers turn yellow.
posted by Hank Mabuse 15 years ago
  • Interesting.
  • Man, American Super Nintendos were ridiculously ugly
  • I have a SCSI CD player that did this. A guy that that was building a boat that he planned to sail to Belize wanted a CD player that he could connect to his computer and wanted to swap it for another piece of equipment that he had spare. I sent him the CD player but got an abusive letter back about 'obvious heat-sink problems' and 'being taken advantage of' and 'do I take him for an idiot' with the returned piece of equipment. That CD player is still going strong. Eat that, Belize boat guy that never made it anyway (ended up in Melbourne).
  • Huh. I always thought it was the cigarette smoke.
  • Man, American Super Nintendos were ridiculously ugly They were different outside of the US market? You got pic?
  • I always thought they were strangely beautiful
  • I was a pretty unpopular child, all things considered
  • Uh yes, I had a MacClassic that became somewhat beige/orange with 'age'. And remember the sad look of a MacPlus(!) at work when it was finally discarded after years of use, it looked as if it had been stashed in a cigarette smoke-filled room. No, it wasn't.
  • Amazing. It seems the US version was a different shape; and they went to considerable lengths to make the cartridges incompatible. Was the US software different too?
  • Almost certainly on some games, Pleggers.
  • Also US games (and Japanese games) ran at 60Hz, and European (and Australian) games ran at 50Hz, due to the differences in our TVs (PAL and NTSC). This usually meant that European games ran slower, and looked a bit squidged, because the games companies were too lazy to properly convert them.
  • Monkeyfilter: ran slower and looked a bit squidged
  • Aah, brings back fond memories of days in college. My roomie (from Japan) and I splurged on an American second-hand Super NES. We only had a couple games to play, so we were SUPER excited when his brother came to the States for a visit and left his collection of NES games for us. Our excitement soon faded upon realizing that the cartridges were a different shape than the US counterparts. If you shoved really hard, you could manage to get the cartridge into the slot good enough to play the game - - but they tended to pop out mid-game. Undaunted, I eventually cracked all the cases open, and was left with a pile of ROM chips... we spent countless nights afterwards staying up all-night long playing our booty of games.
  • I've often wondered about this effect. Thanks for the great article! I think it's interesting that most modern computing equipment I come across in my daily activities is black or dark. I wonder if that represents a lesson learned, but it seems that especially today, tech is not meant to be used for long years without becoming obsolete, so who knows.
  • I'm told you can also date collectible Barbie dolls by the type of plastic discoloration. Like yellow facaes vs. green ankles and shit.
  • Monkeyfilter: Like yellow facaes vs. green ankles and shit.
  • They get green on their ears from some cheapo fake earrings they had at one point. There are whole websites devoted to peoples' favorite methods for removing the green. Barbies, I mean.