I bought a JVC X'Eye a few years ago on Ebay, listing was roughly $70 said it was refurbished. It's never given me trouble until a bit more recently. The cartridge slot seems faulty, it can't read carts most of the time. I took a microfiber cloth, dampened it with rubbing alcohol* and wrapped it around an old plastic library card I don't use anymore and tried to clean it out that way. It seemed more responsive but still frequently failed, now it's back to working about 8% of the time. I figured I should do a general internal cleaning for the hell of it. I opened it up and disposed of the flimsy RF shielding** cleaned out a lot of dust and cat hair. To get at everything, I physically took both the MD and MCD boards out as carefully as I could, trying not to disfigure the (rather shitty looking) connecting ribbon cable between the two. Debris-free, I reassembled it. Cartridge slot still working like shit, have to blow to get games to work. I know this causes corrosion, but I figure it's fucked anyway and I wanna play some games on it regardless. Here's the weird part. The MCD part of the system was working fine for a week or so after that cleaning, but now it either won't start, or will start and run in the background of an MD cart game! The connector piece doesn't look jolted out of place. Given the "refurbished" line in the listing, was it likely that this already had issues merely temporarily fixed? I only got it for $70, and they appear to usually go for much, much more. While certainly a possibility, I hope that my attempted maintenance didn't make anything worse. Am I likely fucked? *Isopropyl 70%, did I use the wrong kind? **perhaps a bad idea, but it was annoying, got in the way, and works just fine without it. Wasn't it just because the FCC is really uptight about that kind of stuff, no matter how unrealistic that it could interfere with other equipment?
70% Rubbing Alcohol isn't strong enough, and it's too watered down anyway. It won't kill your electronics if it has time to dry, but it won't do much good either. 91% is usually recommended for electronics, and that's what I always use to clean consoles. (You wouldn't believe all the grime it can remove from cartridges. Windex missed lots of stuff for me.) Are you also cleaning the cartridges? They can get extremely dirty as well, even if they look fine. Whenever I clean an NES's 72-pin connector, I clean the games too, otherwise I'd be back at square one with a dirty cart reader.
