OK, so now here's how I can turn a sad story into something good.

First, I managed to acquire some very nice 2600 games late last year. Among them is a near mint condition Fishing Derby and a near mint CIB Fire Fighter.

So I'm looking for Missile Command in my stack of carts yesterday. I don't remember if there was a text release of this or not, and my Atari picture labels are stacked under three layers of games. Time to go digging... first thing I did was spill about half a dozen carts. I picked them up immediately. See, Intellivison carts don't stack straight. I don't have an Inty, so why on Earth I have 20 or 30 games for it is beyond me. I don't even know if any of them work!

I thought I'd just stack a handful of 2600 carts atop those, but no, the 2600 carts took a spill, and the dang Inty carts stayed put! Long story short, the 2005 and 2007 AA Holiday carts were fine, (dunno if Stella's Stocking boots, but it should), Parker's Frogger was fine (if it had been Starpath's, I would have saw red), but Fishing Derby had some kind of rattle in it. I looked down in there and two large chunks of plastic were missing by the edge connector. The board was loose, too, and this cart was almost mint! #!?@

Looks like I had work to do, and I'd been meaning to strip the Activision glue from that cart for a while.

A bit of history on it, though:

I got this cart in a Craigslist lot. It's the only respectable copy of Fishing Derby I'd found in the wild in the last four years. I had to wait a week to pick the lot up because its owner was on vacation. It was worth it, though, for the number of games that were in excellent shape. I gave my "old" copy of Fishing Derby to my brother along with 50 other games, a ton of controllers, and my light sixer.

Anyway, I heated the label but it just refused to peel off. I finally dug up a corner of it to get it started, then heated it and it came right off. The label was fine, but the damage to the shell is extensive. The supports that hold the ROM board in place were shattered, the flat piece that is behind the edge connector was broken, and the bottom half was cracked lengthwise all the way to the Activision logo. I used cyanoacrylate super glue to put everything back together meticulously. The left screw post was also shattered, and I put that back together with the glue. I stripped the Activision glue from the shell and replaced it with Elmer's school glue stick.

In the end, I got the whole thing back together and the only way to tell it's been damaged is to look down beside the edge connector. The glue spots on the bottom of the case are barely visible, as is the damage to the label were I had to start it peeling off on one corner.

So next was the Fire Fighter cart, whose minty label was peeling off. Turns out that all I had to do was heat it up and the original glue stuck it down again.

Looks like I've got what it takes to fix dead games. I've worked my magic on a 7800 Ms PAc Man cart that was shattered during shipping, and I've also repaired PSP games with destroyed shells. The new shells even still have the UMD sticker in the middle! (this reminds me that I need to transfer the sticker from my sratched beyond repair ATV OffRoad FUry game to my GTA:LCS game...) I've also brought dead CD games back to life. I can't do a thing about CD rot...yet, but give me time and I'll have that one licked, too.

My previous hardware projects were fixing the Power and Reset switches in my 7800. I have to do the Puase and Select switches now. The fix I used does not require replacement parts--I work directly with the switches that are there. Also, I did some work on my Heavy Sixer. Other than that, I also worked on a truck.