5200 freeze up

[MegaManFan]

Good friend and fellow AtariAge member Bivotar came over to our apartment earlier today for a while on his lunch break to show off some nifty homemade 2600 labels (thanks for the Bowl-a-Rama!), loan me a stack of Classic Gamer and AA magazines (damn good reading material, thanks AGAIN) and play some head to head 5200 (the best part of all). Unfortunately we hit a bit of a snag - several times while using my 4-port with a copy of Sean Kelly's multi-cart, the console would inexplicably freeze even though neither one of us had hit pause, and no tapping of pause or reset on either controller would unfreeze it - I'd have to manually cycle the power and select the game again from scratch. This was most noticable during Wizard of Wor, but I'm sure it happened several different times. It wasn't a predictable thing - we played long games of Mario Bros. and Joust where it never happened at all, for example. What should I track as my source of the problem? Is it my 4-port, my multi-cart from Sean, or one of my two controllers? I have no idea where to start. Thanks again for coming over Dan, it's always a hoot when classic gaming fans get together for vintage console fun. Here's hoping someone has an answer so I can solve this problem before next time! It's no fun to get a good game going and lose it to some flaky bug.