mogul345

Yep, bought all the stuff needed to rebuild a bunch of joysticks and paddles from him. Wasn't cheap, but very high quality. Way better than the original guts of the controllers. You just gotta talk to the guy on the phone to make the order, which is a bit unexpected these days.

Small update. I pulled out my childhood Atari (Sears Video Arcade 2) and got it hooked up via RF to the same TV to rule out composite mod issues w/ the 4 switcher. I tested my entire library again, and sure enough, the same 3 carts failed to work. I guess I just have bum luck - when I was randomly testing carts after I completed the mod I picked the 2 out of the 5 that didn't work from the flea market batch, and when I dug out my childhood carts, of the 3 I randomly picked out of the box I had another dud, causing me to think I had larger problems to solve. So I guess I'm going to crack open the dead carts and see if I notice anything peculiar with them, like broken solder joints or something. But I think I'm about to rule them dead. Crazy since everyone says they're super reliable.

Is there any way to test if the carts are dead?

I recently acquired a Sunnyvale 4 Switcher from a flea market, and it came with 5 or so games. But when I tried to play some them, they didn't seem to work. So I just spent today troubleshooting. I cleaned every single one of my cartridges and the cartridge slot with alcohol, and tested my entire library in the console (which I've since AV modded). Here are the results. Sure enough even after cleaning, 2 of the 5 games that came with the 4 switcher still didn't work (these are the entries in the spreadsheet with an asterisk after the name). But what was even crazier is that Chopper Command, a game I've had since I was a child, also doesn't work. It's been cared for pretty much my entire life - my game collection has been sitting in a cardboard box in my closet or on a bookshelf on display for the last decade or so. I've heard of bit rot. Can this happen to Atari cartridges? I guess I can understand games from a flea market being broken. But that Chopper Command has been taken care of its entire life (well, at least since I got old enough to care for them).