It's like how the Chinese used to think that solar eclipses were caused by a dragon trying to eat the sun, so they'd bang on pots and pans to make the dragon go away, and it always worked.
Blowing in NES video games had another,subtle purpose;To introduce human Dna via saliva to the Nintendo Entertainment System...and to a degree, digestive practices and records of pre modern youth and sheltered nerds..So,that someday the NES games will be collected,long after the self- believed ''superior'' NES nerds will have gone extinct
It just worked consistently more than any other method. I didn't know about others blowing onto the cartridge pins helped it to work I just discovered it on my own. Put it in 10 times trying to scrape the pins on the metal grooves, nudging the cartridge while inserted, did nothing but one humid blow of breath moisten the pins and got it to work each time.
I get that, but I’ll settle for lesser quirks that are equally satisfying; like opening and closing the hucard door of my Turbo Duo R just to hear the “tahhh” boing-like sound as the door touches the rear of the chassis. Rather peaceful to my eyes and ears.
I bought a used NDS game. When it arrived it didn't work. I haven't heard of the 'blowing' trick at that point. After trying to get it to work and taking it out and putting it back in my NDS for over 20 times I gave up. I was young so I had to go to bed pretty early, so I had contact with the guy who sold it to me the next day. I couldn't get it to work the enxt morning. In his reply he said that I had to blow on the gamecard and in the slot of my NDS. So I did that, and I put the game back in. It finally worked. That is how I learned the trick. Just because others believe your video does not mean I have to believe it. i can not believe it because the trick works. I even use it for my mouse every once in a while when it won't connect. And somehow it works after I blow on it while I can take it out and put it back in for 8 times otherwise.
***** I believe that it can be a solution. But it doesn't have to be. Like you said, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Maybe it is just luck, but warmth, moisture or airflow could be reasons why it could help. I think sometimes when there is a poor connection that some dust could easily be the problem or that the moisture and/or heat can make for a better connection. But is it worth the effort and money to study it? I don't think so. I think that blowing is always worth a try. Even if it is just a placebo effect. :) Myth or no myth, this topic isn't important enough (at least I can't think of any reason why it would be) to really discuss about. A discussion like this is OK, but not a discussion like the console war or so xD
From an anthropological perspective, blowing on cartridges can even be seen as a form of magic or sorcery, supported by contemporary cultures that still practice sorcery. It is done simply because it works, and because it works, it proves that it is real. If it does not work, it is because you didn't perform the magic correctly, or because something was actively hindering you. Either way, your magic is proven to be real. An extremely interesting phenomenon.
if you're commenting about blowing on game cartridges, you've missed the entire point of this video. this was an example to drive a greater point about fallacies, not a video about blowing into cartridges.
***** He answered that question. We blew into Nintendo games because of lots of reasons he outlined in the video, and which are applicable to all other parts of life and explain why we do some of the silly things we do. I guarantee if the video was called "Why do we knock on wood", there would be plenty of people in the comments discussing the finer points of wood knocking, but that's not what the video is about.
People can comment on whatever aspect of the video they want to (even the bait example given). If they don't want to comment on the main point, it doesn't mean they've "missed it".
It irks me that the game inserted is super mario bros./duck hunt/world track meet, but the game immediately starts as if it were just super mario bros.
I always had to "clip" the cartridge into the system to get them to work. Push the game in but not all the way, push down until the top of the game barely rests on the consol, then apply downward pressure and begin to push the game deeper into into the slot until it suddenly pops in.
That worked too. Remember the Game Genies? They didn't even allow you to do the"press down" so obviously that wasn't completely necessary for the game to work. At one point i played all my games connected to a Game Genie whether i entered codes or not because this seemed more reliable.
Yea, I would blow into the cartridge for good measure, but the popping the cartridge into place technique always seemed to be the thing that actually worked.
Sleeping in a closed room with an electric fan will kill you. Fans are used on hot days. When you use a fan on a hot day in a very hot closed room, you turn the entire room into a convection oven. This makes the room literally cook the human body. Children and elderly have been known to be cooked to death in the comfort of their own homes. In this case, discomfort. Closed cars without fans have been known to kill people that very same way. Specifically infants. The room in the same concept. Also, cartridges have exposed connectors for the serial ports. When a game sits in a dusty closet for a few days, it accumulated dust. Blow on it to remove the dust, the connectors work unobstructed and in highest efficiency. I blow on my USB connectors every once and a while because I see dust in there. I sometimes have to clean them with a q-tip when I pull them out of storage. So much crap in there. I scraped the connectors when i see rust forming, etc. See the problem here? When I have a connector for a hose that won't screw in right, I wipe it with a towel. Usually works. When I have a door that does not shut, I clear the frame of obstructions. Usually works. When my electronics do not work, the first thing I do is check and clear the physical connections. Usually works. Cleaning things works. As a matter of fact, I never had a problem putting cartridges in when I checked the connections first. Sometimes I found cobwebs and the occasional bundled up ant. It isn't a complicated idea. Sure, it won't fix actually software glitches for well-stored and clean cartridges, but that isn't the point I am trying to make. Blowing on the cartridges DOES WORK for dusty cartridges. A good wipe with a q-tip is even better. Ensure that your electronics are well maintained physically, you can rest assured that any problem that exists is outside of your control. Most games back them were glitched. Sure. But that isn't a reason NOT to do standard checks. This is what I hate most about people these days and their "SCIENCE!" They always forget to actually look at the result instead of trusting papers with numbers on them. I don't care how many number you have on paper, if your numbers do not line up with reality, then something is wrong with the numbers. NOT REALITY. Sometimes nothing is wrong with the movie you have on DVD. You just stored it improperly and got dust all over it and now the inside of your DVD player is dirty. CHECK YOUR HARDWARE! Gosh... It's like fastening your seat belt and changing your oil. Everyone needs to do it. That way when your car DOES break down, it won't be because you have bad oil and you won't die from not having buckled your seat belt.
We always used the old trick of placing another game in the NES on top of the one you were trying to play. It forced the first game firmly down into position and solved a ton of problems on multiple consoles.
The great irony of this whole thing is that neither you at It's Okay To Be Smart, nor those cited (unofficial, amateur) references you listed, provided any real verifiable evidence to the matter, but in fact, resorted to a good deal of appealing to authority here.
Over time a thin layer of oxides develops on the game cartridge contacts (and in the console). When you breathe, not necessarily blow on the contacts, they become more conductive due to the increase in humidity. Cleaning the contacts with a cotton swab dipped in rubbing alcohol helps as well.
Blowing do work. Moist and oxidation are the bad guys here. The moist from your breath temporarily improves contact between the cartridge and the console. It also made it worse later on, as the moist accelerated the oxidation on the contact points. I fixed the problem later on by cleaning the cartridge contact points from oxide. I also cleaned up the console as well as tensioning the contact fingers so that they made better contact with the cartridge. My NES unit works perfectly fine even to this day. My next plan is o replace all the batteries inside my battery-powered cartridges, so I can save games without them going corrupt/disappear on me.
This is the problem where STEM people try to compartmentalize everything into some kind of science or thought experiment that completely invalidates real-world experience. This guy is trying to gaslight us for things we know worked not because "we saw our friends do it" --which is a lot of nonsense-- but because it made sense. NES cartridges were notorious for bad cartridge connections, it was partly to do with the construction of the cartridge circuit boards and their connectors and the NES' construction and partly because those carts were dust magnets. I never had to do this with Sega Master System, Sega Genesis and later SNES games because the construction on those systems was superior to the NES. It made sense because dust and lint built up on cartridges (as well as the internal receptacle that connected the cartridge to the NES' system board), because most kids would leave their cartridges sitting around on the floor. Blowing on them helped clear the dust from the connectors (the downside is that our humid breath could lead to tarnish growing on the copper connections, which itself had to be cleaned with alcohol). The fact is that this could easily be falsified -- just take a bunch of NES cartridges, leave them laying around and test them by blowing on them (while having a control study without blowing) -- but this guy doesn't even test his hypothesis while just tacking it up to confirmation bias. That itself is bad science.
lmao you guys didn't watch the part about the common belief fallacy. plus, I think the burden of proof would fall upon those saying that it does work. it is not impossible that blowing on the cartridge helps, but there is no evidence that it would.
Everyone please watch "Testing the effectiveness of blowing into NES cartridges" video. It CLEARLY PROVES that blowing WORKS. It's the moisture in our breath that makes better contacts for the game.
Blowing on the cartridges does work. It must be the moisture of the breath. I just spent a few minutes of re-inserting 3 game cartridges, none of them working. Then one by one worked again as soon as I blew on them. They weren't dusty but the copper is not as fresh after 30 years.
In a way, it does work, but does more harm than good. Let me explain. Someone taught me a neat trick, instead of blowing on a cartridge, what he did was to move the cartridge left and right inside the NES while it was down. This must've dislodged the bit of dust that was in the cartridge, enabling it to be read. Blowing does the same thing, except it exposes the metal cartridge parts to moisture, which causes rust.
+Neon Pegasus No, it just realigned the connectors inside the tray, which are loose to accommodate the clicking mechanism. If dust were the problem, it would have been just as big a problem on all the top loaders. But it wasn't.
ZipplyZane So basically, the problem was most of the time the cartridge didn't align correctly in the system, and by taking it out and putting it back in, it realigned the cartridge?
Neon Pegasus Pretty much. At least, once it got loose. My understanding it that the connector inside loosened every time you moved that tray up and down.
ZipplyZane That would explain why the newer style NES worked much better, since it was straight down like SNES, and not the old style. I always thought maybe the design kept dust from getting in the way more.
Blowing the correct way did work. It is even explained why in the digitpress reference included in the sources... "While most people who do this believe that they're "blowing dust" off of the cartridge contacts, what they're actually doing is increasing conductivity on the cartridge contacts by lining them with a thin (on in some cases a thick) layer of moisture by way of human breath". I knew that even as a kid.
That’s an excellent explanation of the scientific method and understanding biases. But it does nothing to disprove the Theory of Blowing Fixes the Game. There’s no hypothesis or methodology; nor control groups, no large sample randomized blind studies. He failed to show the science behind his theory. So, I’d keep blowing on the cartridge...if there were still cartridges. 😂
Ironic, isn't it? They actually used to sell cleaning sticks for the cartridges and cleaning cartridges to put into the console. The purpose? To - clean - the - dust - out. These guys' first console must have been a Playstation. lol
@@jayd6123 No. It's to clean oxidation, iron oxide, scaling etc. Not "dust". Dust has absolutely no effect on any electrical path because "dust" as it's implied is a loose covering and as soon as it meets metallic friction is a none issue and brushes away. I need to do a video because for a second I thought this video may explain to people what's going on and it still didn't.
While it's true it's impossible to prove? It's just based on electrical knowledge that there's nothing you could "blow off" that would interfere with an electrical pathway. However. Why you couldn't test it has everything to do with male / female tolerances of the pin authentication. A VCR relies on a much more sensitive communication and "dust" itself it not enough to stop audio visual information .. although that's magnetism. I still need to do a video on this because funny enough a video with 4.4 million subscribers approaching the subject of psychology on the issue still didn't actually tell what is happening here. I explained it many years ago before others started to ( and probably converts from believing it helped). I'll explain it to you though. So as I said, the reason you can't disprove blowing effectiveness has everything to do with tolerances of something that's a hand operation. By the tolerance this meaning the clearance between the male pins and female pins as well as the plastic pocket that holds the cartridge and the cartridge itself. It has nothing to do with the hinge mechanism at all. Now could you fully seat the cartridge to where it is plumb with the pocket right? And likely it may not work. Personally I can get almost any game to work 90% of the time with a little love. So you know when the cartridge is in? You have lets call an X and Y axis where X is side to side and Y is back and forth... You have felt this right? And there's enough millimeter of contact to still be "connected"? The ultimate way is to LEAVE the power on... sometimes resetting/rebooting... And you want to very gingerly move the cartridge while it's still " in the pocket" with both pins connected. Pull it out of connection back or forward a little bit.. like a mm if even that.. front right more in far left more in etc. You may find a sweet spot where the game has to be canted by a mm or even slightly out from being fully seated by a mm. THAT is what the problem is with the NES. Precision tolerances. What else this is doing? is cleaning any hard scale off the pins with friction but part of the puzzle is the fact that from the factory it has too wide of a tolerance for error of proper seating. Obviously the best way with any electronics is to make sure your connections are clean and do it properly but honestly? I've rarely seen a cartridge so long as its been kept inside in dry storage that has pins that should not work on contact. So what this has to do with blowing? Roulette. Yup. Because of the tolerance there is NO way the cartridge lands exactly in the same position every time ( talking millimeters of precision here ) you insert it again. So blowing is like a superstition. Someone blows on a cartridge... they get lucky because the next seated position is NOT THE SAME as the last. They could blow on it 10 times... ( we were all there at 5 years old ) or 3 times ... or give up. My grandpa was a technician and always said NOT to blow in them because ironically putting moisture from your mouth would THEN cause the pins to corrode... kind of funny. But we had those like "docs cleaning kits"... I feel like we would use it once in a while... STILL BLINKING. I mean this day in age? yeah you'll see dirty contacts.. I really want to test my theory though and find a moderately used game then clean another cartridge as best as possible as see if I'm right. I'm 90% certain I am because... They were blanking in the damn 80s - early 90s.. like brand new games before SNES would do the same. Also the NES top loader works that much more consistently. That's why I think it has little to do with dirty cart pins. But go and try it for yourself with an NES the power on positioning method I guess I'd call it. When you see vertical lines and then startup screens by shifting just like a mm or so or false startup screens you will realize how sensitive it is and how bad the tolerance is. Just experiment. You will also have a new found love of the NES and feel like a wizard being able to get any blanking game to work relatively quickly.
So if there's dust in the cartridge port that's blocking the receptors blowing it out isn't helping? It's just my mind playing tricks on me? It was all just a hoax?! And when my iphone didn't charge because it was full of dust,but it did after I blew the dust out; it was all a lie!? Wow my life is changed.
TheSyncopated Origamist my mike tysons cart has been blown ever since like 1990 so idk about that, blowing it still works, i can keep putting it in my nes all i want but it wont load, i blow on it and it works perfectly, imo the cognitive bias are the people who think it doesn't work, pins get dirty, which makes the pin connector impossible to read the pin, q-tip is better to use but blowing on it is indeed a temp fix
I pushed the cartridge sideways, worked with NES and N64. I don't recall ever having to do it with the SNES. Sometimes I'd put the cartridges in at a slight angle, test the game, if it didn't work, turn it off, push one of the corners of the cartridgeto one side, try again, if that didn't work I'd push the other corner of the cartridge to the other side and that almost always did the trick. If the second push didn't work, I'd take the cartridge out and slide it in from one side or the other, than repeat the corner pushes to the sides. If that didn't work I'd take it out and put it in from the opposite side and repeat the slides. The one cartridge that gave me the most trouble was the grey Tengen Pacman cartridge. It would take 10-15 minutes to get that one to work, but all others would generally work on the third try if they didn't work from the start.
Me too, I have a new 3ds xl, and for the life for me, it won't read the orginal DS cartridges, I even cleaned it and still didn't read it. I then remember having a N64 and my friends telling me about blowing into the cartridges, so I decided to blow into them like a harmonica, and it... worked.
That Mario playthrough going on the TV appears to be a tool-assisted speedrun of some sort; if it is, it would be nice to see its source cited in this video's description, please.
Of course it was a TAS. No human would edge jump the piranha plants and turtles and take the time to hit the mushroom if you had no intention of picking it up. Plus the jumps are rhythmically timed to a computers precision. That video would be impossible to be recreated by a human player.
One thing that Hank Green (VlogBrothers, SciShow) said about the scientific methods in one of his SciShow episodes that I really liked (and I'm paraphrasing it): Scientific methods is scientists using a machine gun to try to shoot a theory full of holes, and afterwards declare it indestructible when they fail to do that.
You're totally on the ball with this. Thank you and we'll done. At the end of the day, the more people playing games (both indie and big company), buying consoles, and supporting gaming, the better for us as gamers. We're the ones that benefit from a competitive and diverse market, we get better games that push limits, diverse ranges of topics and styles, and larger support and recognition. The playing of the games is the important part, not the method you use to play it. We've got so many fantastic headline games for every platform, and that can only be a good thing for gaming.
That fan in a closed room will RAISE the temperature of the room. Moving air doesn't cool it, and the motor of the fan is a heat source. They won't die, but they will achieve the opposite effect than intended.
***** That's not the case and it's easy to understand if you consider your car a small room. If it's 100 degrees outside and you have all the windows closed, the fan will just move the heat around until it is evenly distributed, but as you know, it will not make it any cooler in the car. your body and the motor of the fan will increase the temperature of the inside of the car, if parked in the shade. obviously, in the sun...
They tell me that the problem is that the moving air makes you feel cooler but makes you dehydrate faster; if you are already dehydrated (say from being drunk in the miserable sweaty summer here in SK) you have a higher risk of death from heat exhaustion.
***** no, but it would stay exactly the same temperature. If you shield the car from sunlight radiating heat and light into it, you would also prevent the car from _losing_ heat due to radiation. The car is already sealed off from outside air so it's not going to lose much heat from convection, the only remaining means of thermal energy transfer is conduction from the cabin air to the medium of the car's body and either into the ground through the tires or into the air immediately around the car, and that is a very slow process. Additionally, that process runs both ways, so if the cabin air is cooler than the exterior air, the interior will still slowly heat up. All of this said, if your car air is already significantly colder than the exterior air, sealing up your car and reflecting as much sunlight as possible will help you keep that car cooler for longer. If your car's cabin air is already about the same temperature as the outside air, it will not become cooler whether you have the windows open or not, and if you are unable to reflect or avoid much of the incoming sunlight, you should definitely have the windows open so that the cabin air doesn't become much hotter than the outside air. And, in the spirit of the original question: If you run an electric fan on the inside of a sealed car, you would move the air around which would make humans feel cooler (because our sweat would evaporate more easily), but moving all of that air, metal, and plastic releases heat through friction which would steadily heat up the car.
Just found this channel, so far this is my favorite video. I guess it comes with the job to see so many negative or nonsensical comments. Either way, I'm sure most people do appreciate the videos for various reasons. I for one like learning a few quick things, or even seeing things I know explained differently, so for that, I thank you.
My understanding is/was that screwed up graphics was sometimes due to one or more of the metal contacts of the cartridge having dust on it, preventing current from flowing through that contact, and that the point of blowing was to remove dust. This video didn't seem to offer an alternative explanation for why Nintendo games go temporarily bananas. It seemed more interested in bombarding you with propoganda for scientism as a replacement for philosophy, which BTW should not be done with public funds.
The primary reason that cartridges lose/corrupt data has to do with oxidation or corrosion of the contacts or the retention springs losing tension and no longer providing a solid connection. The oxidation usually resulted in a very light but hard coating which could often be broken simply from inserting and removing the game a few times. Unless you had dirt caked onto your contacts, the process of inserting the cartridge would remove particulate, or at least push it along the contacts and the male and female contact would still make a decent connection. It is actually very hard to blow dust off of something when you are blowing at it end on. You can see this with dust collecting on fan blades, even metal ones where static electricity doesn't build up. So blowing into your cartridge has very little effect, if any, on the dust particles at rest on the contacts. It can however increase the relative humidity and cause the contacts to corrode more quickly. If you used a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol, you could wipe away the dust safely, but that is an entirely different story. Most of the time just taking the cartridge out and replacing it would have an equal success rate to blowing into it. Even Nintendo said not to blow into your cartridges because it could damage them. That aside, the rest of your comment is absurd on it's face. The degree to which it fails to reflect reality, in any meaningful form, is almost impressive. Or would be if it weren't so depressing.
itsmaxinthebox Thank you for the information about the Nintendo carts. That's what this video should have told us instead of going on a rant about half-baked psychology for four minutes.
You just proved the video so hard. I'll admit, they didn't do a good job with an alternate explanation, but it still goes to show that even when presented with an alternative, people still hold on to their beliefs.
Jeremy Williams Yelling "cognitive bias!" or "cognitive dissonance!" is not (or shouldn't be) a free ticket to getting your arguments accepted without criticism.
Benjamin McLean While that may be true, you still hold on to the notion. There are many examples in history in which people accepted explanations because they seemed to make sense. The ancient Greeks made up gods because they didn't understand natural disasters. So, Zeus threw thunderbolds. In the 50s, the world was convinced that drinking coffee caused lung cancer - except it didn't...it was the cigarette that people smoked while drinking coffee. If people are so closed minded that they can't even begin to think that they could be wrong, we will never move forward. THAT is what science is about, just like the video said - trying to prove our hypotheses wrong. :)
It's totally obvious that less than some few hundred microscopic dust particles would be capable of disabling the catridge's electrical current. Only blowing them away would make them go away. Ending my sarcasm there, you just had to move the catridge a little to make it work; the connector inside the NES was the actual problem. It's silly, that many people still think that the dust particles you can't even see could spoil the electrical currents in devices.
That's a lot of talk about "science" when all you did was make a claim and not bother to back it up in any way. You want me to believe that blowing on the cartridges didn't work? Then provide a better explanation and back it up with repeatable experiments. Otherwise, I'm going to have to go with the hundreds of examples of blowing on cartridges totally working.
I don't blow on the cartridges to get them to work. Instead, what I do, is wiggle the cartridge from side to side gently, then hit either power or reset. That's a much better option. In fact, the spit from your breath might make the game glitch even more badly than before you blew on the cartridge!
Wait, blowing on the cartridge did _not_ remove dust? I ... but .... are you _sure_ you're not lying or something? I knew that the coin rubbing thing was a myth but this is the first time I hear about the cartridge blowing technique. Oh and I'm from Germany BTW so this myth actually crossed borders.
Blowing on cartridges removed dust, but the vast majority of the time, dust is not why NES cartridges failed to work. Usually, it's because the spring-loaded pin-connectors would wear out inside the unit, and no amount of blowing could make that work, only removing and re-inserting the game would! I know many commenters are claiming otherwise, but even moisture from your breath would provide limited, if any, electrical conduction. Your brain is playing tricks on you to this day
It's Okay To Be Smart Yeah, I believe you. It's just one of those few childhood beliefs nobody had destroyed yet. You know. _sniff_ No, I'm fine, I'm fine ...
Jackson Kerr Mind reading isn't my strong suit but I'd say you are thinking of either one of these en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_in_film or _Almost Famous_.
Come on now, if you're gonna use footage and sound effects from the most popular video game ever (Super mario) use the right sound effects with the right footage! None of those matched ;)
Most people watching this probably don't remember banging on the TV set to get the picture back when it messed up.(Banging fixed radios too.) Finding out the right place to bang was a skill everyone had to learn, as the TV aged, and changing the tubes didn't help. Banging worked phenomenally well for most TV's that got flakey. Should we have just sat there and watched the messed up picture endlessly, because we couldn't scientifically prove banging would work, when just the right bang made it spring back into action? (The practice of banging on the TV died out as TVs got more reliable.) Blowing dust off a cartridge may not have been why it started to work, but it is easy to do, and there is something sensible about doing the very easy things first. How many people have tried flicking the switch several times when the light bulb burns out? So how many people have ever actually encountered a light switch that failed? But flicking the switch is easier than changing the light bulb.
I don't know why this is so associated with Nintendo. It was a common trick with the Atari 2600 cartridges as well. Btw, it worked much more often than just reinserting the cartridge.
Re Yeh, I have empirical evidence that I was playing an Atari and not a Nintendo as it didn't exist yet. If you mean my scientific research as a ten year old - let me check my lab notes.
sirlordford So... You wrote an opinion that is the complete opposite of what is argued for in the video... Basing your opinion on empirical evidence of yourself at 10 years of age... Evidence which you yourself proceed to discredit as not scientific? I don't get it
sirlordford I was kind of hoping you'd elaborate so that we might reach an understanding and increase the sum of knowledge... But if you prefer leaving it at that I suppose it's your choice.
We neuroscientists call it a variable interval schedule of reinforcement. That's the neural basis of the "post-hoc fallacy". I fall prey to it myself. For instance, when I get a case of nostalgia, I'll play Pokemon games and I will press B rapidly when trying to catch a Pokemon. When I was a kid, rumor had it this made the pokemon more likely to get caught. I do this still without even thinking about it, despite knowing it has no effect on the game. Yet, sometimes the pokemon is inevitably caught when doing this, and the brain registers a success. The behavior is reinforced. The fact that this happens on a variable interval makes the behavior more powerfully reinforced.
I've seen a handful of these videos now saying that this didn't work. If you read the sources for this idea that is spreading about blowing on the cartridge not working, it's ridiculous. Their source is essentially a quote from someone who made a documentary about Tetris players, an interview with the host of a webcast (who doesn't really claim blowing on the cartridge doesn't work), and the results of a self-declared "non-scientific study", where someone blew on one cartridge for a few months, and had a seperate cartridge he didnt blow on and he showed the effect on the contacts. None of this has to do with whether blowing on the cartridge fixed it. The sources are actually about long-term damage due to corrosion. I don't think most people really cared whether their game cartridge was going to survive for years. Boo this man!
I was thinking about this video for a few days and the kids that did this grew up with VHS. We learned that our vhs tapes collected dust causing them not to play, so we figured it was the same for the games.
Am I the only one who thinks the inkblot around 1:58 looks like two lizard-mantis hybrids playing arcade machines while each getting a backrub from a frog?
The real problem was the pins not making contact. By takeing the game in and out repeatedly, or even adding the heat from your breath, it caused the metal to expand slightly, and make contact, or built up enough of a static charge that the electrons could jump the very small gap. As someone who has refurbished N.E.S.'s I can attest to the fact that a clean pin set on the cartridge, PLUS having the connector inside the console deck make good contact will get the game to load EVERY SINGLE TIME. :D
Disagree. I was 8, I blew on it because it was dusty. Electric objects attract dust. You're making it more complicated than it is, man. lol Kinda too much.
neutral dust particles tend to move toward a charged object. ***** and i'm not sure why you're responding to me in bold? lol i disagree with the video but what's your point?
That would be because Google formats anything with asterisks around it as bolded, even when you actually mean asterisks. Beyond that, you're assuming that there's free particle movement inside of the Nintendo bay and that there's strong enough electric fields created beyond the contacts that the particles become negatively charged on the side of the contacts and move toward the contacts? And that these dust particles are actually getting between the contacts that are, you know, in contact with other contacts? That doesn't make physical sense. The things stopped working because the pins didn't sit well against each other. Blowing on the things could potentially cause a (very) short-term positive reaction due to the higher conductivity in saliva, but over time, you're going to get rusted pins which causes even more of a problem. Which is exactly the original video's point. You do things because they seemed to work even though they actually don't, or in times like this, actively make the problem worse.
I've never said that as an adult I do this, but that the thought occurred to me as a child without social prompting. There was dust on the unit, the game did not work and I blew on the cartridge. Thank you for, once again, proving my initial idea that it's not that complicated.. man.
I don't think that there was nothing but superstition to it. Every time my brother blew on a cartridge it worked. I tried proving that it was just the second insertion which always worked by not blowing it and plugging/unplugging it several times, like 5 or so. Then after it hadn't worked even once, my brother blew into it, I inserted it and it worked immediately. I tried it more than once, with the nintendo being on for various lengths of time to prove it wasn't just warmth or some-such. I inserted a random cartridge a random number of times, nothing. I blew it and inserted it, and it worked. There's far more reason to think the little moisture actually caused it to work with this sensitive piece of electronics, than it's just superstitious BS.
This video did not explain why blowing in the carts did not actually do anything. There was no science in the video, just explaining how science COULD be applied in this situation.
Yet it provided links to an actual scientific study literally 3 inches below the video you were just watching. Which makes you lazy and useless. Another happy product of cell phones and social media. "Me me me, right now!"
i used to do it because my sister said if the game doesnt run blow the dust out the cartridge at that time i never knew that the dampness of the breath could harm the electronics
@ 2:00 Looks like a either an anchor or a sci-fi ship of some kind in the middle, and the objects on the sides is just Europe rotated sideways. GIVE ME COOKIES.
To my understanding, the reason the "Lockness Monster" (as my friend from 20 years ago called it) struck was due to some manner of timing glitch in the NES's 10-pin authentication system. Ya see, way back a long time ago, this company called Activision began making some really great games for the 2600 Atari. Atari did not like that because they were not directly making any money off that. They even wanted to slap Activision with a C&D. Flash forward to the NES. Nintendo got the bright idea to make a 10-pin authentication system in their console and patent it. This ensured that only Nintendo could make games for their system. Then, instead of flat-out preventing third-party companies from making NES games, they sold licenses to these companies. The third-party companies would then have to submit their game code to Nintendo, who could then do any last-minute adjustments to, say, the content, and control the supply. Thus a third-party company could still make money off the NES, but Nintendo got the lion's share. I don't rightly recall what went wrong to cause the lock-ups, but I think it was some sort of request the console sent to the cartridge, and the cartridge was supposed to respond properly within a certain amount of time. If it didn't, the game would not run properly. The ACTUAL pattern that was going on was that removing the cartridge and reinserting it was what corrected the issue; blowing on the cartridge connectors did not solve the problem, and to my understanding actually acted as a catalyst for some long-term deterioration.
You really should have actually explained the problem--the side loader and pushing the cartridge down. It meant that the connector had to be loose inside, meaning it was easy to not get the pins aligned properly from the cartridge. I actually kinda figured out it didn't work as a kid--just because of the large number of tomes it didn't work. Though I still did it anyways, just in case. But I moved on to other attempts, like holding the power button down or holding the cartridge in weird or using the Game Genie. (That last one actually had a reason to work, I found out.) I still marvel that none of us figured it out by the fact that we could actually see the contacts, which never got any cleaner, and no dust ever came out.
The 10NES lockout chip is the reason! The 10NES Lockout Chip was formed of two parts: the lock, which goes into the system, and the corresponding key, which goes on the cartridge. The 10NES’ function was simple: keep restarting the system indefinitely until a cartridge with its corresponding 10NES key was inserted into the system. The 10NES chip was used by Nintendo to prevent the release and distribution of unlicensed third party games, pirated games and imported games. Yes, the restriction also applied to games from other regions. The 10NES came with a problem though: even if the game is legit, if there is not a strong connection between the system and the cartridge, it will not detect it, and will block the game. This is normally what we expect from cartridges: if it doesn’t connect well, it doesn’t work. The problem here was that the NES itself was a greatly flawed machine when it comes to the design choices. The first thing we notice when we compare the NES to pretty much every other cartridge-based console, including the ones that came before it, is that it was not a top loading device, but it was rather created to simulate the zero-insertion method of VCR’s, one of Nintendo’s design choices to make the NES look more like a generic entertainment device rather than a console. The difference is that, while with VCR’s the tape was safely inserted into place by machinery, on the NES you had to do the actual insertion yourself, having to press down on the cartridge to have it lock into place. This was a problem because it lead to the pins inside the system to bend over time, causing the games to have a hard time connecting to the system, and thus having the 10NES lockout chip refuse to boot your copy of the game. This also lead to the theory that blowing your cartridges was good as it removed dust and debris, ensuring a solid connection, the truth is that the air you blow into the cartridge is heavily moist, and moisture is a good conductor of electricity, so you basically allowed the cartridge to connect better to the system, but that came at a price, as this moisture also leads to corrosion, which ultimately damages your cartridges beyond repair.
I'm MORE impressed that some store broke street date, because you're playing a cartridge that wasn't sold in stores until late-1988 (Power Set cartridge), and yet here it is 1987 at Joe's House!
WI tried out some of my old game boy games, and there was dust/dirt in it. I put it in the slot not knowing of the temporary ware, and behold it didn't work! Tried again, it didn't work. Pulled it out, blew on it to clear the debree, and bam. If there's debree it's trying to read, it's not gonna get anything, but if you clean it by blowing into it, then there you go.
The neocortex, which is the outer layer of the cerebral cortex, and the part of the brain responsible for all higher-level thought and perception, really only learns patterns, recognizes patterns, makes predictions about future patterns, and synthesizes patterns. Making predictions is important for decision making in the brain, as well as attention, and synthesis of patterns is used as output, such as in the motor cortex. It's so good at this that companies like Numenta are developing learning algorithms based on how it works, and are able to do things that other learning algorithms have incredible difficulty with. I'm working on something similar, but I'm focusing on using it for artificial intelligence rather than statistical analysis and big data.
Important distinction: taking the cartridge out and putting it back in doesn't just give another attempt for the game to start. The action of removing and reinserting the cartridge can actually clear debris from the contacts, resulting in a proper electrical connection.
I love digital info that can be applied to real life. I used to do that to my USB drive... yesterday I followed your example (not blow the damn thing) and yes, it did work the 3rd time. Lifesaver! thanks, and subscribed!
I think blowing on the cartridge is a double-edged sword: + It does in fact remove the dust from the contacts, thus helping the game work better. I didn't play my NES for like 5 years, went and played about 5 games over the course of a weak, none of the games worked until I blew on them (and visually saw dust particles leave). To clarify, I tried each of the 5 games like 20 times without blowing and they did not work. Let me also add this was in the last 5-10 years I did this, although I cannot remember the exact day. - I can't say this for a fact, but I assume to oxidation from blowing on the cartridge is a real thing. The game I played the most I had to thus blow on more frequently, and it is no the hardest game to get to work. I do not want to discredit the creator of the video, as he does have good science behind his ideas. However, I don't think blowing the NES cartridge is totally useless either. Granted, there are other ways I learned later which are better for getting games to work rather than blowing, like using a special cloth to clean the contacts of the cartridge, or slowly adjusting the cartridge while placing it in the NES also seemed to help.
The thing is it did work when I did it, the insides of my games would get dusty as hell because I didn't always have the little dust sleeve things to cover all my cartridges. I had the official NES cleaning kit also, that told you from Nintendo themselves that if your game glitches you need to clean your cartridge. vagary.tv/wp-contentnew/2012/03/NES-Cleaning-Kit.jpg If you don't have a cleaning kit, you blew in your cartridge. Nintendo said to clean your carts, we all just did it wrong. This psychobabble is stupid.
I don't get it. Are you saying it doesn't work because you yourself tested it? Or was this tested in a lab? From my understand the act of blowing removed the dust. Just like when you have to blow on a wireless mouse to remove the dust off the bottom. It is the same concept. Removing dust did the trick. At least for me.
The one thing he missed in the video is that there were actually many times the cartridges had dirt and dust inside them. I remember having to take tweezers to my cousin's games where it looked like a rat had made it's nest in the end of the games. So while I can agree that at times and maybe even the majority of times it was the reinsertion of the cartridge doing the trick, there were times that there was a build up of dust, we would see that cloud blown out which may have led to us believing that was the fix. Also the contact points of the cartridge were prone to corrosion. Whether that was due to our mouthfuls of moisture or in spite of it, cleaning kits were made of basically cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol and a lot of dirt and corrosion was removed from the cartridges and from within the Nintendo itself. This video and research was performed by some young millennials who did not grow up playing these systems and they are starting conclusions based on hindsight and a handful of stories. Had they the real experience of the era they would know that this is not a valid topic for cognitive bias.
It’s a “shoot for the recognizable” paradigm more than anything else; and that’s without even really considering the clickbait nature of UA-cam videos/online content. You have to use the ideal example for each distinct audience/group to get the point across, and making use of this particular one broaches a lot of subsets of interest. Probably why we have so many examples to choose from when it comes to specific fallacies. That, and the fact that people use them so often with only the slightest of variation…
Yeah, but no. Many years ago when I heard this wasn't true, I tried it myself. I took out a DS cartridge out and put it back in about ten times. Never worked. Then I blew on it and it worked right after. This kept happening with GBA cartridges too. Sometimes it would work after putting them in a couple times if lucky, but the only thing that always worked right away was blowing on them. Also strange: This problem doesn't exist with SD cards. Not once have I inserted one and not have it work right away. I don't know what it is, but if I'm not the most astronomically unlucky person, then this video isn't being entirely accurate.
Questionnnnn (I may send a personal message just in case), but what camera are you using to film 0:05 ?? I'm wanting to do videos where I game on a TV rather than do screen capture... I've got a few things lined up and I want my videos to be THAT nice looking :) Tips?
Just replied to your message, but just so everyone knows: That shot is not a recoding of a TV. I won't give away all of our secrets, but suffice to say, it's much more complicated than that :)
N64 owner here, and I did it all the time. And the worst part was, I had one time when the problem actually was dust (you could see the dust blocking the connection), and from then on I always thought that was the problem. Also, you missed a very important one that every Pokemon trainer should know: mashing "A" after throwing a pokeball.
What about those of us that pulled the carts out, never blew on them, and continued to insert them again and again, without them working, until we pulled them out and blew on them, and they worked the first time. Perhaps the idea is mostly correctly, but at the same time, there I believe there were instances where blowing on them, actually did remove particles from the cart contacts.
well then the science begs the question: if it was not in fact dust on the connectors that was preventing the games from working, what was? It was so universal across all NES games and ONLY NES games that I can't help but wonder. An inherent flaw in NES coding? but then why was it the games would still work eventually? Was it an error in the system design? Was it simply how we input the cartridge and why repeat tries resulted in success, because of a subtle, unnoticable change?
Great question. The NES game contacts were angled slightly with respect to the slot that they slid into. Over time, the slot inside the NES would wear out and the game pins wouldn't seat correctly every time. But removing and re-inserting the game was just as, and likely more, effective than blowing on the game. Unless you stored your games in a sack of flour, dust was almost certainly not the issue, and there's not enough moisture in your breath for people to make the claims of "increased conductivity"... unless you were licking the pins. Corrosion could be a problem (especially if you blew saliva all over your games), but no amount of blowing could get that off. It required special cleaning chemicals or alcohol.
Gameboy games had it too and I also thought that I was blowing dust off. I still don't really believe it did nothing. Do you have scientific evidence that proves that blowing has no effect?
I always thought it was a really bad idea to blow into the cartridges, because of the potential to blow particles of spit into them, which could really screw them up. All I did was repeatedly push and pull the cartridge into the slot (assuming that the contact surfaces would scratch themselves clean) and it worked every time.
According to my phone call with Nintendo, you are wrong. It did help, the moisture of your breath allowed a temporary boost to let the cartridge be read easier, and according to the same phone call the moisture also caused/lead to a breakdown of the game. So it gave a little help and caused a little damage.
It's like how the Chinese used to think that solar eclipses were caused by a dragon trying to eat the sun, so they'd bang on pots and pans to make the dragon go away, and it always worked.
Favorite comment ever. The more you know...
Blowing in NES video games had another,subtle purpose;To introduce human Dna via saliva to the Nintendo Entertainment System...and to a degree, digestive practices and records of pre modern youth and sheltered nerds..So,that someday the NES games will be collected,long after the self- believed ''superior'' NES nerds will have gone extinct
LMFAO 😂😂
This is why we should look down on people who use religion to explain sceintific reasoning.
@@Ballowax there's scientific proof God exist go watch some videos on UA-cam about it
Was expecting video about Nintendo cartridges, got a video about cognitive bias. Well played
I'm sneaky like that.
Reminds me of Vsauce.
I still do this on my steam games that i download.
I really wan to like this, but it's on 69 likes, and how?
How? Exactly do you do that there digital
@@PixelaGames2000 /r/wooosh
It just worked consistently more than any other method.
I didn't know about others blowing onto the cartridge pins helped it to work I just discovered it on my own. Put it in 10 times trying to scrape the pins on the metal grooves, nudging the cartridge while inserted, did nothing but one humid blow of breath moisten the pins and got it to work each time.
Nintendo games gave us so much joy the least you could do was blow them every once in awhile.
I was going to like your comment but then I looked at the number of likes and thought I should let it stay that way!
😂
I get that, but I’ll settle for lesser quirks that are equally satisfying; like opening and closing the hucard door of my Turbo Duo R just to hear the “tahhh” boing-like sound as the door touches the rear of the chassis.
Rather peaceful to my eyes and ears.
I bought a used NDS game. When it arrived it didn't work. I haven't heard of the 'blowing' trick at that point. After trying to get it to work and taking it out and putting it back in my NDS for over 20 times I gave up. I was young so I had to go to bed pretty early, so I had contact with the guy who sold it to me the next day. I couldn't get it to work the enxt morning. In his reply he said that I had to blow on the gamecard and in the slot of my NDS. So I did that, and I put the game back in. It finally worked. That is how I learned the trick. Just because others believe your video does not mean I have to believe it. i can not believe it because the trick works. I even use it for my mouse every once in a while when it won't connect. And somehow it works after I blow on it while I can take it out and put it back in for 8 times otherwise.
I agree with you
*****
I believe that it can be a solution. But it doesn't have to be. Like you said, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Maybe it is just luck, but warmth, moisture or airflow could be reasons why it could help. I think sometimes when there is a poor connection that some dust could easily be the problem or that the moisture and/or heat can make for a better connection.
But is it worth the effort and money to study it? I don't think so. I think that blowing is always worth a try. Even if it is just a placebo effect. :)
Myth or no myth, this topic isn't important enough (at least I can't think of any reason why it would be) to really discuss about. A discussion like this is OK, but not a discussion like the console war or so xD
I did this with both Gameboy and NDS games, but I cannot recall, that I ever saw somebody showing me that it works this way.
MY grandma still thinks mice are spawned from dirty clothes
WarzValzMinez
I remember my grandma insisting that cats can suck the air out of your lungs in your sleep and kill you...
And my mom still thinks that vaccine cause autism.
From an anthropological perspective, blowing on cartridges can even be seen as a form of magic or sorcery, supported by contemporary cultures that still practice sorcery. It is done simply because it works, and because it works, it proves that it is real. If it does not work, it is because you didn't perform the magic correctly, or because something was actively hindering you. Either way, your magic is proven to be real. An extremely interesting phenomenon.
if you're commenting about blowing on game cartridges, you've missed the entire point of this video.
this was an example to drive a greater point about fallacies, not a video about blowing into cartridges.
***** He answered that question. We blew into Nintendo games because of lots of reasons he outlined in the video, and which are applicable to all other parts of life and explain why we do some of the silly things we do. I guarantee if the video was called "Why do we knock on wood", there would be plenty of people in the comments discussing the finer points of wood knocking, but that's not what the video is about.
reads title yeah idc I eexpect the title to be focus of video
Had to check if I somehow drifted to Friday Nights after seeing your username.
People can comment on whatever aspect of the video they want to (even the bait example given). If they don't want to comment on the main point, it doesn't mean they've "missed it".
Four of the seven worlds in the title are “Blow on Nintendo Games”. One can be forgiven for thinking this video might have something to do with it.
It irks me that the game inserted is super mario bros./duck hunt/world track meet, but the game immediately starts as if it were just super mario bros.
I commend your eye for detail :)
It's Okay To Be Smart Also, the music on the title screen should be in the actual GAME..
I always thought it was dust and lint that was making the games un playable.
ua-cam.com/video/dkaeR11EBeg/v-deo.html
To get the dust out. duh....
this is why there is a reply button what are you talking about?
I bought a NES game and it didn’t work so all I just needed was isopropyl alcohol and a Q-tip and it worked perfectly
I always had to "clip" the cartridge into the system to get them to work. Push the game in but not all the way, push down until the top of the game barely rests on the consol, then apply downward pressure and begin to push the game deeper into into the slot until it suddenly pops in.
That worked too. Remember the Game Genies? They didn't even allow you to do the"press down" so obviously that wasn't completely necessary for the game to work.
At one point i played all my games connected to a Game Genie whether i entered codes or not because this seemed more reliable.
Same
Yea, I would blow into the cartridge for good measure, but the popping the cartridge into place technique always seemed to be the thing that actually worked.
Sleeping in a closed room with an electric fan will kill you. Fans are used on hot days. When you use a fan on a hot day in a very hot closed room, you turn the entire room into a convection oven. This makes the room literally cook the human body. Children and elderly have been known to be cooked to death in the comfort of their own homes. In this case, discomfort. Closed cars without fans have been known to kill people that very same way. Specifically infants. The room in the same concept.
Also, cartridges have exposed connectors for the serial ports. When a game sits in a dusty closet for a few days, it accumulated dust. Blow on it to remove the dust, the connectors work unobstructed and in highest efficiency.
I blow on my USB connectors every once and a while because I see dust in there. I sometimes have to clean them with a q-tip when I pull them out of storage. So much crap in there. I scraped the connectors when i see rust forming, etc.
See the problem here?
When I have a connector for a hose that won't screw in right, I wipe it with a towel. Usually works.
When I have a door that does not shut, I clear the frame of obstructions. Usually works.
When my electronics do not work, the first thing I do is check and clear the physical connections. Usually works.
Cleaning things works.
As a matter of fact, I never had a problem putting cartridges in when I checked the connections first. Sometimes I found cobwebs and the occasional bundled up ant. It isn't a complicated idea.
Sure, it won't fix actually software glitches for well-stored and clean cartridges, but that isn't the point I am trying to make. Blowing on the cartridges DOES WORK for dusty cartridges. A good wipe with a q-tip is even better.
Ensure that your electronics are well maintained physically, you can rest assured that any problem that exists is outside of your control.
Most games back them were glitched. Sure. But that isn't a reason NOT to do standard checks. This is what I hate most about people these days and their "SCIENCE!" They always forget to actually look at the result instead of trusting papers with numbers on them. I don't care how many number you have on paper, if your numbers do not line up with reality, then something is wrong with the numbers. NOT REALITY.
Sometimes nothing is wrong with the movie you have on DVD. You just stored it improperly and got dust all over it and now the inside of your DVD player is dirty. CHECK YOUR HARDWARE!
Gosh... It's like fastening your seat belt and changing your oil. Everyone needs to do it. That way when your car DOES break down, it won't be because you have bad oil and you won't die from not having buckled your seat belt.
We always used the old trick of placing another game in the NES on top of the one you were trying to play. It forced the first game firmly down into position and solved a ton of problems on multiple consoles.
The great irony of this whole thing is that neither you at It's Okay To Be Smart, nor those cited (unofficial, amateur) references you listed, provided any real verifiable evidence to the matter, but in fact, resorted to a good deal of appealing to authority here.
It's amazing how much we will often play a game of calling fallacies while committing one ourselves. A "Fallacy-Calling Fallacy," perhaps? Hahaha!
Over time a thin layer of oxides develops on the game cartridge contacts (and in the console). When you breathe, not necessarily blow on the contacts, they become more conductive due to the increase in humidity. Cleaning the contacts with a cotton swab dipped in rubbing alcohol helps as well.
Blowing do work. Moist and oxidation are the bad guys here. The moist from your breath temporarily improves contact between the cartridge and the console. It also made it worse later on, as the moist accelerated the oxidation on the contact points.
I fixed the problem later on by cleaning the cartridge contact points from oxide. I also cleaned up the console as well as tensioning the contact fingers so that they made better contact with the cartridge. My NES unit works perfectly fine even to this day.
My next plan is o replace all the batteries inside my battery-powered cartridges, so I can save games without them going corrupt/disappear on me.
Exactly right on all points!
Yep
I always thought that the moisture from your breath would cause the electric current to run stronger in the carriage.
he actually didn't debunk anything ! that technic was universal across the globe!
This is the problem where STEM people try to compartmentalize everything into some kind of science or thought experiment that completely invalidates real-world experience.
This guy is trying to gaslight us for things we know worked not because "we saw our friends do it" --which is a lot of nonsense-- but because it made sense. NES cartridges were notorious for bad cartridge connections, it was partly to do with the construction of the cartridge circuit boards and their connectors and the NES' construction and partly because those carts were dust magnets. I never had to do this with Sega Master System, Sega Genesis and later SNES games because the construction on those systems was superior to the NES.
It made sense because dust and lint built up on cartridges (as well as the internal receptacle that connected the cartridge to the NES' system board), because most kids would leave their cartridges sitting around on the floor. Blowing on them helped clear the dust from the connectors (the downside is that our humid breath could lead to tarnish growing on the copper connections, which itself had to be cleaned with alcohol).
The fact is that this could easily be falsified -- just take a bunch of NES cartridges, leave them laying around and test them by blowing on them (while having a control study without blowing) -- but this guy doesn't even test his hypothesis while just tacking it up to confirmation bias. That itself is bad science.
lmao you guys didn't watch the part about the common belief fallacy. plus, I think the burden of proof would fall upon those saying that it does work. it is not impossible that blowing on the cartridge helps, but there is no evidence that it would.
Everyone please watch "Testing the effectiveness of blowing into NES cartridges" video. It CLEARLY PROVES that blowing WORKS. It's the moisture in our breath that makes better contacts for the game.
Moisture in non-conductor. Again you recognized the pattern that never existed.
*I call bullsh_t.* Moisture just speeds up oxidation of the copper contacts.
The animation and effects on this video are amazing.
Blowing on the cartridges does work. It must be the moisture of the breath. I just spent a few minutes of re-inserting 3 game cartridges, none of them working. Then one by one worked again as soon as I blew on them. They weren't dusty but the copper is not as fresh after 30 years.
In a way, it does work, but does more harm than good. Let me explain. Someone taught me a neat trick, instead of blowing on a cartridge, what he did was to move the cartridge left and right inside the NES while it was down. This must've dislodged the bit of dust that was in the cartridge, enabling it to be read. Blowing does the same thing, except it exposes the metal cartridge parts to moisture, which causes rust.
+Neon Pegasus No, it just realigned the connectors inside the tray, which are loose to accommodate the clicking mechanism.
If dust were the problem, it would have been just as big a problem on all the top loaders. But it wasn't.
ZipplyZane So basically, the problem was most of the time the cartridge didn't align correctly in the system, and by taking it out and putting it back in, it realigned the cartridge?
Neon Pegasus Pretty much. At least, once it got loose. My understanding it that the connector inside loosened every time you moved that tray up and down.
ZipplyZane
That would explain why the newer style NES worked much better, since it was straight down like SNES, and not the old style. I always thought maybe the design kept dust from getting in the way more.
Blowing the correct way did work. It is even explained why in the digitpress reference included in the sources... "While most people who do this believe that they're "blowing dust" off of the cartridge contacts, what they're actually doing is increasing conductivity on the cartridge contacts by lining them with a thin (on in some cases a thick) layer of moisture by way of human breath". I knew that even as a kid.
That’s an excellent explanation of the scientific method and understanding biases. But it does nothing to disprove the Theory of Blowing Fixes the Game. There’s no hypothesis or methodology; nor control groups, no large sample randomized blind studies. He failed to show the science behind his theory.
So, I’d keep blowing on the cartridge...if there were still cartridges. 😂
Ironic, isn't it? They actually used to sell cleaning sticks for the cartridges and cleaning cartridges to put into the console. The purpose? To - clean - the - dust - out. These guys' first console must have been a Playstation. lol
@@jayd6123 No. It's to clean oxidation, iron oxide, scaling etc. Not "dust". Dust has absolutely no effect on any electrical path because "dust" as it's implied is a loose covering and as soon as it meets metallic friction is a none issue and brushes away. I need to do a video because for a second I thought this video may explain to people what's going on and it still didn't.
While it's true it's impossible to prove? It's just based on electrical knowledge that there's nothing you could "blow off" that would interfere with an electrical pathway. However. Why you couldn't test it has everything to do with male / female tolerances of the pin authentication. A VCR relies on a much more sensitive communication and "dust" itself it not enough to stop audio visual information .. although that's magnetism. I still need to do a video on this because funny enough a video with 4.4 million subscribers approaching the subject of psychology on the issue still didn't actually tell what is happening here. I explained it many years ago before others started to ( and probably converts from believing it helped). I'll explain it to you though. So as I said, the reason you can't disprove blowing effectiveness has everything to do with tolerances of something that's a hand operation. By the tolerance this meaning the clearance between the male pins and female pins as well as the plastic pocket that holds the cartridge and the cartridge itself. It has nothing to do with the hinge mechanism at all. Now could you fully seat the cartridge to where it is plumb with the pocket right? And likely it may not work. Personally I can get almost any game to work 90% of the time with a little love. So you know when the cartridge is in? You have lets call an X and Y axis where X is side to side and Y is back and forth... You have felt this right? And there's enough millimeter of contact to still be "connected"? The ultimate way is to LEAVE the power on... sometimes resetting/rebooting... And you want to very gingerly move the cartridge while it's still " in the pocket" with both pins connected. Pull it out of connection back or forward a little bit.. like a mm if even that.. front right more in far left more in etc. You may find a sweet spot where the game has to be canted by a mm or even slightly out from being fully seated by a mm. THAT is what the problem is with the NES. Precision tolerances. What else this is doing? is cleaning any hard scale off the pins with friction but part of the puzzle is the fact that from the factory it has too wide of a tolerance for error of proper seating. Obviously the best way with any electronics is to make sure your connections are clean and do it properly but honestly? I've rarely seen a cartridge so long as its been kept inside in dry storage that has pins that should not work on contact. So what this has to do with blowing? Roulette. Yup. Because of the tolerance there is NO way the cartridge lands exactly in the same position every time ( talking millimeters of precision here ) you insert it again. So blowing is like a superstition. Someone blows on a cartridge... they get lucky because the next seated position is NOT THE SAME as the last. They could blow on it 10 times... ( we were all there at 5 years old ) or 3 times ... or give up. My grandpa was a technician and always said NOT to blow in them because ironically putting moisture from your mouth would THEN cause the pins to corrode... kind of funny. But we had those like "docs cleaning kits"... I feel like we would use it once in a while... STILL BLINKING. I mean this day in age? yeah you'll see dirty contacts.. I really want to test my theory though and find a moderately used game then clean another cartridge as best as possible as see if I'm right. I'm 90% certain I am because... They were blanking in the damn 80s - early 90s.. like brand new games before SNES would do the same. Also the NES top loader works that much more consistently. That's why I think it has little to do with dirty cart pins. But go and try it for yourself with an NES the power on positioning method I guess I'd call it. When you see vertical lines and then startup screens by shifting just like a mm or so or false startup screens you will realize how sensitive it is and how bad the tolerance is. Just experiment. You will also have a new found love of the NES and feel like a wizard being able to get any blanking game to work relatively quickly.
I always thought it had to do with the repeated insertion. like the contacts cleaned off when rubbed against the NES connectors. just a hypothesis.
So if there's dust in the cartridge port that's blocking the receptors blowing it out isn't helping? It's just my mind playing tricks on me? It was all just a hoax?! And when my iphone didn't charge because it was full of dust,but it did after I blew the dust out; it was all a lie!? Wow my life is changed.
It does work. It's just not the solution to the problem in a lot of cases.
Great visual on this episode. Keep up that creativity; it really gives your channel more appeal.
The funny thing is, is that the moisture from your mouth actually causes the cartridge to "die" earlier.
TheSyncopated Origamist my mike tysons cart has been blown ever since like 1990 so idk about that, blowing it still works, i can keep putting it in my nes all i want but it wont load, i blow on it and it works perfectly, imo the cognitive bias are the people who think it doesn't work, pins get dirty, which makes the pin connector impossible to read the pin, q-tip is better to use but blowing on it is indeed a temp fix
Yes to this!
This video reminds me of whenever I talk to my dad. Whenever I ask him a simple question, he ends up giving me a whole lecture
I totally forgot about that Michael Jackson ET album! I remember buying that for 1 dollar at goodwill. I wonder if it's worth anything now...
I will pay you at least $10 for that, so it's worth something
Well, if I can find it when I go home for the 4th, it's yours man!
+It's Okay To Be Smart You mean that i did that for nothing
I pushed the cartridge sideways, worked with NES and N64. I don't recall ever having to do it with the SNES. Sometimes I'd put the cartridges in at a slight angle, test the game, if it didn't work, turn it off, push one of the corners of the cartridgeto one side, try again, if that didn't work I'd push the other corner of the cartridge to the other side and that almost always did the trick. If the second push didn't work, I'd take the cartridge out and slide it in from one side or the other, than repeat the corner pushes to the sides. If that didn't work I'd take it out and put it in from the opposite side and repeat the slides. The one cartridge that gave me the most trouble was the grey Tengen Pacman cartridge. It would take 10-15 minutes to get that one to work, but all others would generally work on the third try if they didn't work from the start.
I still do this on my 3DS...
wat :)))))
Yeah... I did it on my Fire Emblem Awakening game after not playing it in 9 months.
+Samuriwarrior3 me too. i know it barely works, but it's a cartridge.
Me too, I have a new 3ds xl, and for the life for me, it won't read the orginal DS cartridges, I even cleaned it and still didn't read it. I then remember having a N64 and my friends telling me about blowing into the cartridges, so I decided to blow into them like a harmonica, and it... worked.
I still have my DS Lite and Wii... :D
It actually does help. I bought my son a super Nintendo and when it don't work, I'll take it out, blow it, pop it back in and works every time! 👌
That Mario playthrough going on the TV appears to be a tool-assisted speedrun of some sort; if it is, it would be nice to see its source cited in this video's description, please.
I only play Pokemon on the 3DS,
That is it..
Of course it was a TAS. No human would edge jump the piranha plants and turtles and take the time to hit the mushroom if you had no intention of picking it up. Plus the jumps are rhythmically timed to a computers precision. That video would be impossible to be recreated by a human player.
One thing that Hank Green (VlogBrothers, SciShow) said about the scientific methods in one of his SciShow episodes that I really liked (and I'm paraphrasing it):
Scientific methods is scientists using a machine gun to try to shoot a theory full of holes, and afterwards declare it indestructible when they fail to do that.
blow ON the nes games?? you mean the whole time i was blowing FOR nes games was wrong?
uhhhhhhhh
You were suppose to blow *AIR* on plastic with metal
*NOT* *ON* *SOMEONES* *MEAT*
MakM Edits LEL
I'll never say you were wrong! Best trade for Contra i ever got!
You're totally on the ball with this. Thank you and we'll done. At the end of the day, the more people playing games (both indie and big company), buying consoles, and supporting gaming, the better for us as gamers. We're the ones that benefit from a competitive and diverse market, we get better games that push limits, diverse ranges of topics and styles, and larger support and recognition. The playing of the games is the important part, not the method you use to play it. We've got so many fantastic headline games for every platform, and that can only be a good thing for gaming.
I thought it was because it had dust in it.
My first watch over your work.
Great approach. i like your style. I suscribed, obviously :).
Great content, mate.
That fan in a closed room will RAISE the temperature of the room. Moving air doesn't cool it, and the motor of the fan is a heat source. They won't die, but they will achieve the opposite effect than intended.
:/ 저는 주의예요.
theuglyzone
good. better safe than sorry. the fan might fall over on you...
*****
That's not the case and it's easy to understand if you consider your car a small room. If it's 100 degrees outside and you have all the windows closed, the fan will just move the heat around until it is evenly distributed, but as you know, it will not make it any cooler in the car. your body and the motor of the fan will increase the temperature of the inside of the car, if parked in the shade. obviously, in the sun...
They tell me that the problem is that the moving air makes you feel cooler but makes you dehydrate faster; if you are already dehydrated (say from being drunk in the miserable sweaty summer here in SK) you have a higher risk of death from heat exhaustion.
***** no, but it would stay exactly the same temperature. If you shield the car from sunlight radiating heat and light into it, you would also prevent the car from _losing_ heat due to radiation. The car is already sealed off from outside air so it's not going to lose much heat from convection, the only remaining means of thermal energy transfer is conduction from the cabin air to the medium of the car's body and either into the ground through the tires or into the air immediately around the car, and that is a very slow process. Additionally, that process runs both ways, so if the cabin air is cooler than the exterior air, the interior will still slowly heat up.
All of this said, if your car air is already significantly colder than the exterior air, sealing up your car and reflecting as much sunlight as possible will help you keep that car cooler for longer. If your car's cabin air is already about the same temperature as the outside air, it will not become cooler whether you have the windows open or not, and if you are unable to reflect or avoid much of the incoming sunlight, you should definitely have the windows open so that the cabin air doesn't become much hotter than the outside air.
And, in the spirit of the original question:
If you run an electric fan on the inside of a sealed car, you would move the air around which would make humans feel cooler (because our sweat would evaporate more easily), but moving all of that air, metal, and plastic releases heat through friction which would steadily heat up the car.
Just found this channel, so far this is my favorite video. I guess it comes with the job to see so many negative or nonsensical comments. Either way, I'm sure most people do appreciate the videos for various reasons. I for one like learning a few quick things, or even seeing things I know explained differently, so for that, I thank you.
My understanding is/was that screwed up graphics was sometimes due to one or more of the metal contacts of the cartridge having dust on it, preventing current from flowing through that contact, and that the point of blowing was to remove dust. This video didn't seem to offer an alternative explanation for why Nintendo games go temporarily bananas. It seemed more interested in bombarding you with propoganda for scientism as a replacement for philosophy, which BTW should not be done with public funds.
The primary reason that cartridges lose/corrupt data has to do with oxidation or corrosion of the contacts or the retention springs losing tension and no longer providing a solid connection. The oxidation usually resulted in a very light but hard coating which could often be broken simply from inserting and removing the game a few times. Unless you had dirt caked onto your contacts, the process of inserting the cartridge would remove particulate, or at least push it along the contacts and the male and female contact would still make a decent connection. It is actually very hard to blow dust off of something when you are blowing at it end on. You can see this with dust collecting on fan blades, even metal ones where static electricity doesn't build up. So blowing into your cartridge has very little effect, if any, on the dust particles at rest on the contacts. It can however increase the relative humidity and cause the contacts to corrode more quickly. If you used a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol, you could wipe away the dust safely, but that is an entirely different story. Most of the time just taking the cartridge out and replacing it would have an equal success rate to blowing into it. Even Nintendo said not to blow into your cartridges because it could damage them.
That aside, the rest of your comment is absurd on it's face. The degree to which it fails to reflect reality, in any meaningful form, is almost impressive. Or would be if it weren't so depressing.
itsmaxinthebox Thank you for the information about the Nintendo carts. That's what this video should have told us instead of going on a rant about half-baked psychology for four minutes.
You just proved the video so hard. I'll admit, they didn't do a good job with an alternate explanation, but it still goes to show that even when presented with an alternative, people still hold on to their beliefs.
Jeremy Williams Yelling "cognitive bias!" or "cognitive dissonance!" is not (or shouldn't be) a free ticket to getting your arguments accepted without criticism.
Benjamin McLean While that may be true, you still hold on to the notion. There are many examples in history in which people accepted explanations because they seemed to make sense. The ancient Greeks made up gods because they didn't understand natural disasters. So, Zeus threw thunderbolds. In the 50s, the world was convinced that drinking coffee caused lung cancer - except it didn't...it was the cigarette that people smoked while drinking coffee.
If people are so closed minded that they can't even begin to think that they could be wrong, we will never move forward. THAT is what science is about, just like the video said - trying to prove our hypotheses wrong. :)
It's totally obvious that less than some few hundred microscopic dust particles would be capable of disabling the catridge's electrical current. Only blowing them away would make them go away.
Ending my sarcasm there, you just had to move the catridge a little to make it work; the connector inside the NES was the actual problem. It's silly, that many people still think that the dust particles you can't even see could spoil the electrical currents in devices.
That's a lot of talk about "science" when all you did was make a claim and not bother to back it up in any way. You want me to believe that blowing on the cartridges didn't work? Then provide a better explanation and back it up with repeatable experiments. Otherwise, I'm going to have to go with the hundreds of examples of blowing on cartridges totally working.
It ABSOLUTELY worked. Every kid did the science. We tried 10 times and it didn't work. We blew on the cartridge and then it worked.
I don't blow on the cartridges to get them to work.
Instead, what I do, is wiggle the cartridge from side to side gently, then hit either power or reset.
That's a much better option.
In fact, the spit from your breath might make the game glitch even more badly than before you blew on the cartridge!
Wait, blowing on the cartridge did _not_ remove dust? I ... but .... are you _sure_ you're not lying or something?
I knew that the coin rubbing thing was a myth but this is the first time I hear about the cartridge blowing technique. Oh and I'm from Germany BTW so this myth actually crossed borders.
Blowing on cartridges removed dust, but the vast majority of the time, dust is not why NES cartridges failed to work. Usually, it's because the spring-loaded pin-connectors would wear out inside the unit, and no amount of blowing could make that work, only removing and re-inserting the game would!
I know many commenters are claiming otherwise, but even moisture from your breath would provide limited, if any, electrical conduction. Your brain is playing tricks on you to this day
It's Okay To Be Smart Yeah, I believe you. It's just one of those few childhood beliefs nobody had destroyed yet. You know. _sniff_ No, I'm fine, I'm fine ...
Penny lane... What's the name of that movie again?
Jackson Kerr Mind reading isn't my strong suit but I'd say you are thinking of either one of these en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_in_film or _Almost Famous_.
Yes almost famous, thanks. I need to watch that again :)
That was extremely awesome :)
Got here through You Are Not So Smart blog/podcast.
Come on now, if you're gonna use footage and sound effects from the most popular video game ever (Super mario) use the right sound effects with the right footage! None of those matched ;)
^^^^^^^Butthurt! ^^^^^^^
Josiah Venable
But he's technically correct. THE BEST KIND OF CORRECT
Need some lube?
Most people watching this probably don't remember banging on the TV set to get the picture back when it messed up.(Banging fixed radios too.) Finding out the right place to bang was a skill everyone had to learn, as the TV aged, and changing the tubes didn't help. Banging worked phenomenally well for most TV's that got flakey. Should we have just sat there and watched the messed up picture endlessly, because we couldn't scientifically prove banging would work, when just the right bang made it spring back into action? (The practice of banging on the TV died out as TVs got more reliable.)
Blowing dust off a cartridge may not have been why it started to work, but it is easy to do, and there is something sensible about doing the very easy things first. How many people have tried flicking the switch several times when the light bulb burns out? So how many people have ever actually encountered a light switch that failed? But flicking the switch is easier than changing the light bulb.
I don't know why this is so associated with Nintendo. It was a common trick with the Atari 2600 cartridges as well. Btw, it worked much more often than just reinserting the cartridge.
Is there any scientific research behind this? Or are you also going by confirmation bias
Re Yeh, I have empirical evidence that I was playing an Atari and not a Nintendo as it didn't exist yet. If you mean my scientific research as a ten year old - let me check my lab notes.
sirlordford So... You wrote an opinion that is the complete opposite of what is argued for in the video... Basing your opinion on empirical evidence of yourself at 10 years of age... Evidence which you yourself proceed to discredit as not scientific? I don't get it
Linvael No, you really don't.
sirlordford I was kind of hoping you'd elaborate so that we might reach an understanding and increase the sum of knowledge... But if you prefer leaving it at that I suppose it's your choice.
We neuroscientists call it a variable interval schedule of reinforcement. That's the neural basis of the "post-hoc fallacy". I fall prey to it myself. For instance, when I get a case of nostalgia, I'll play Pokemon games and I will press B rapidly when trying to catch a Pokemon. When I was a kid, rumor had it this made the pokemon more likely to get caught. I do this still without even thinking about it, despite knowing it has no effect on the game. Yet, sometimes the pokemon is inevitably caught when doing this, and the brain registers a success. The behavior is reinforced. The fact that this happens on a variable interval makes the behavior more powerfully reinforced.
I've seen a handful of these videos now saying that this didn't work.
If you read the sources for this idea that is spreading about blowing on the cartridge not working, it's ridiculous. Their source is essentially a quote from someone who made a documentary about Tetris players, an interview with the host of a webcast (who doesn't really claim blowing on the cartridge doesn't work), and the results of a self-declared "non-scientific study", where someone blew on one cartridge for a few months, and had a seperate cartridge he didnt blow on and he showed the effect on the contacts.
None of this has to do with whether blowing on the cartridge fixed it. The sources are actually about long-term damage due to corrosion. I don't think most people really cared whether their game cartridge was going to survive for years.
Boo this man!
I was thinking about this video for a few days and the kids that did this grew up with VHS. We learned that our vhs tapes collected dust causing them not to play, so we figured it was the same for the games.
funny how you made a claim without scientifically testing it out....
You guys are reading the title wrong,
It's not "Why Did We Blow On Nintendo Games?"
It's "WHY Did We Blow On Nintendo Games?"
Wiggling the cartridge is better c:
Am I the only one who thinks the inkblot around 1:58 looks like two lizard-mantis hybrids playing arcade machines while each getting a backrub from a frog?
You used the science-is-always-right fallacy.
The real problem was the pins not making contact. By takeing the game in and out repeatedly, or even adding the heat from your breath, it caused the metal to expand slightly, and make contact, or built up enough of a static charge that the electrons could jump the very small gap.
As someone who has refurbished N.E.S.'s I can attest to the fact that a clean pin set on the cartridge, PLUS having the connector inside the console deck make good contact will get the game to load EVERY SINGLE TIME. :D
Disagree. I was 8, I blew on it because it was dusty. Electric objects attract dust. You're making it more complicated than it is, man. lol Kinda too much.
He raises alot of good points by using this as an example. Even if that one example is wrong you can't ignore all the other ones
Electric objects don't attract dust.
And blowing on the cartridge has *repeatedly* been shown to cause more problems.
neutral dust particles tend to move toward a charged object. ***** and i'm not sure why you're responding to me in bold? lol i disagree with the video but what's your point?
That would be because Google formats anything with asterisks around it as bolded, even when you actually mean asterisks.
Beyond that, you're assuming that there's free particle movement inside of the Nintendo bay and that there's strong enough electric fields created beyond the contacts that the particles become negatively charged on the side of the contacts and move toward the contacts? And that these dust particles are actually getting between the contacts that are, you know, in contact with other contacts?
That doesn't make physical sense. The things stopped working because the pins didn't sit well against each other. Blowing on the things could potentially cause a (very) short-term positive reaction due to the higher conductivity in saliva, but over time, you're going to get rusted pins which causes even more of a problem. Which is exactly the original video's point. You do things because they seemed to work even though they actually don't, or in times like this, actively make the problem worse.
I've never said that as an adult I do this, but that the thought occurred to me as a child without social prompting. There was dust on the unit, the game did not work and I blew on the cartridge. Thank you for, once again, proving my initial idea that it's not that complicated.. man.
02:00 I see two immensely hungry hippos eating a futuristic spaceship. What do you see?
blowing on cartridges DID work if they were dusty
And the moon landing was a hoax and the earth is flat. Now go and blow a cartridge.
I don't think that there was nothing but superstition to it. Every time my brother blew on a cartridge it worked. I tried proving that it was just the second insertion which always worked by not blowing it and plugging/unplugging it several times, like 5 or so. Then after it hadn't worked even once, my brother blew into it, I inserted it and it worked immediately. I tried it more than once, with the nintendo being on for various lengths of time to prove it wasn't just warmth or some-such. I inserted a random cartridge a random number of times, nothing. I blew it and inserted it, and it worked.
There's far more reason to think the little moisture actually caused it to work with this sensitive piece of electronics, than it's just superstitious BS.
This video did not explain why blowing in the carts did not actually do anything. There was no science in the video, just explaining how science COULD be applied in this situation.
Yet it provided links to an actual scientific study literally 3 inches below the video you were just watching. Which makes you lazy and useless. Another happy product of cell phones and social media. "Me me me, right now!"
hondac55 This VIDEO did not explain why blowing in the carts did not actually do anything.
I never said it did. But the description of the video did. gr8 m8, I r8 your stupidity 8/8.
hondac55 You're an angry and easily offended person. Good luck filtering, have a painful week :D
ryanapple1111 Easily offended? Angry? Wow. The last time I saw someone pull so much stuff out of their ass was in a horse vs woman porno.
Liked for one of the best simplistic explanations of science I've seen on youtube so far. Good job :D
This show is all about propaganda, not science. Look elsewhere for unbiased education
i used to do it because my sister said if the game doesnt run blow the dust out the cartridge
at that time i never knew that the dampness of the breath could harm the electronics
This guys videos are always killing it.
Oh you destroyer of childhood quick fixes!
(Great video)
The glasses gently falling onto the brain made me laugh.
@ 2:00 Looks like a either an anchor or a sci-fi ship of some kind in the middle, and the objects on the sides is just Europe rotated sideways. GIVE ME COOKIES.
I love the poster of Michael Jackson and ET in the background 🤣🤣
To my understanding, the reason the "Lockness Monster" (as my friend from 20 years ago called it) struck was due to some manner of timing glitch in the NES's 10-pin authentication system.
Ya see, way back a long time ago, this company called Activision began making some really great games for the 2600 Atari. Atari did not like that because they were not directly making any money off that. They even wanted to slap Activision with a C&D.
Flash forward to the NES. Nintendo got the bright idea to make a 10-pin authentication system in their console and patent it. This ensured that only Nintendo could make games for their system. Then, instead of flat-out preventing third-party companies from making NES games, they sold licenses to these companies. The third-party companies would then have to submit their game code to Nintendo, who could then do any last-minute adjustments to, say, the content, and control the supply. Thus a third-party company could still make money off the NES, but Nintendo got the lion's share.
I don't rightly recall what went wrong to cause the lock-ups, but I think it was some sort of request the console sent to the cartridge, and the cartridge was supposed to respond properly within a certain amount of time. If it didn't, the game would not run properly.
The ACTUAL pattern that was going on was that removing the cartridge and reinserting it was what corrected the issue; blowing on the cartridge connectors did not solve the problem, and to my understanding actually acted as a catalyst for some long-term deterioration.
Enough about blowing on cartridges - why didn't Mario even get to blow Princess Peach?!
Because she doesn't have a donger?
You really should have actually explained the problem--the side loader and pushing the cartridge down. It meant that the connector had to be loose inside, meaning it was easy to not get the pins aligned properly from the cartridge.
I actually kinda figured out it didn't work as a kid--just because of the large number of tomes it didn't work. Though I still did it anyways, just in case. But I moved on to other attempts, like holding the power button down or holding the cartridge in weird or using the Game Genie. (That last one actually had a reason to work, I found out.)
I still marvel that none of us figured it out by the fact that we could actually see the contacts, which never got any cleaner, and no dust ever came out.
The 10NES lockout chip is the reason! The 10NES Lockout Chip was formed of two parts: the lock, which goes into the system, and the corresponding key, which goes on the cartridge. The 10NES’ function was simple: keep restarting the system indefinitely until a cartridge with its corresponding 10NES key was inserted into the system. The 10NES chip was used by Nintendo to prevent the release and distribution of unlicensed third party games, pirated games and imported games. Yes, the restriction also applied to games from other regions.
The 10NES came with a problem though: even if the game is legit, if there is not a strong connection between the system and the cartridge, it will not detect it, and will block the game. This is normally what we expect from cartridges: if it doesn’t connect well, it doesn’t work.
The problem here was that the NES itself was a greatly flawed machine when it comes to the design choices. The first thing we notice when we compare the NES to pretty much every other cartridge-based console, including the ones that came before it, is that it was not a top loading device, but it was rather created to simulate the zero-insertion method of VCR’s, one of Nintendo’s design choices to make the NES look more like a generic entertainment device rather than a console.
The difference is that, while with VCR’s the tape was safely inserted into place by machinery, on the NES you had to do the actual insertion yourself, having to press down on the cartridge to have it lock into place.
This was a problem because it lead to the pins inside the system to bend over time, causing the games to have a hard time connecting to the system, and thus having the 10NES lockout chip refuse to boot your copy of the game.
This also lead to the theory that blowing your cartridges was good as it removed dust and debris, ensuring a solid connection, the truth is that the air you blow into the cartridge is heavily moist, and moisture is a good conductor of electricity, so you basically allowed the cartridge to connect better to the system, but that came at a price, as this moisture also leads to corrosion, which ultimately damages your cartridges beyond repair.
I still catch myself blowing on things when they aren't working. That habit from when I was a kid stayed with me, surprisingly
I'm MORE impressed that some store broke street date, because you're playing a cartridge that wasn't sold in stores until late-1988 (Power Set cartridge), and yet here it is 1987 at Joe's House!
Love the MJ/ET poster. Classic.
WI tried out some of my old game boy games, and there was dust/dirt in it. I put it in the slot not knowing of the temporary ware, and behold it didn't work! Tried again, it didn't work. Pulled it out, blew on it to clear the debree, and bam. If there's debree it's trying to read, it's not gonna get anything, but if you clean it by blowing into it, then there you go.
who else rewinded the video more than once trying to get to the next one
The neocortex, which is the outer layer of the cerebral cortex, and the part of the brain responsible for all higher-level thought and perception, really only learns patterns, recognizes patterns, makes predictions about future patterns, and synthesizes patterns. Making predictions is important for decision making in the brain, as well as attention, and synthesis of patterns is used as output, such as in the motor cortex.
It's so good at this that companies like Numenta are developing learning algorithms based on how it works, and are able to do things that other learning algorithms have incredible difficulty with.
I'm working on something similar, but I'm focusing on using it for artificial intelligence rather than statistical analysis and big data.
Important distinction: taking the cartridge out and putting it back in doesn't just give another attempt for the game to start. The action of removing and reinserting the cartridge can actually clear debris from the contacts, resulting in a proper electrical connection.
I love digital info that can be applied to real life. I used to do that to my USB drive... yesterday I followed your example (not blow the damn thing) and yes, it did work the 3rd time. Lifesaver! thanks, and subscribed!
I think blowing on the cartridge is a double-edged sword:
+ It does in fact remove the dust from the contacts, thus helping the game work better. I didn't play my NES for like 5 years, went and played about 5 games over the course of a weak, none of the games worked until I blew on them (and visually saw dust particles leave). To clarify, I tried each of the 5 games like 20 times without blowing and they did not work. Let me also add this was in the last 5-10 years I did this, although I cannot remember the exact day.
- I can't say this for a fact, but I assume to oxidation from blowing on the cartridge is a real thing. The game I played the most I had to thus blow on more frequently, and it is no the hardest game to get to work.
I do not want to discredit the creator of the video, as he does have good science behind his ideas. However, I don't think blowing the NES cartridge is totally useless either. Granted, there are other ways I learned later which are better for getting games to work rather than blowing, like using a special cloth to clean the contacts of the cartridge, or slowly adjusting the cartridge while placing it in the NES also seemed to help.
The thing is it did work when I did it, the insides of my games would get dusty as hell because I didn't always have the little dust sleeve things to cover all my cartridges. I had the official NES cleaning kit also, that told you from Nintendo themselves that if your game glitches you need to clean your cartridge.
vagary.tv/wp-contentnew/2012/03/NES-Cleaning-Kit.jpg
If you don't have a cleaning kit, you blew in your cartridge. Nintendo said to clean your carts, we all just did it wrong. This psychobabble is stupid.
I don't get it. Are you saying it doesn't work because you yourself tested it? Or was this tested in a lab? From my understand the act of blowing removed the dust. Just like when you have to blow on a wireless mouse to remove the dust off the bottom. It is the same concept. Removing dust did the trick. At least for me.
I liked seeing McRaney at the end- had to read You are not so Smart as part of summer homework for my AP Psych class.
The one thing he missed in the video is that there were actually many times the cartridges had dirt and dust inside them. I remember having to take tweezers to my cousin's games where it looked like a rat had made it's nest in the end of the games. So while I can agree that at times and maybe even the majority of times it was the reinsertion of the cartridge doing the trick, there were times that there was a build up of dust, we would see that cloud blown out which may have led to us believing that was the fix.
Also the contact points of the cartridge were prone to corrosion. Whether that was due to our mouthfuls of moisture or in spite of it, cleaning kits were made of basically cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol and a lot of dirt and corrosion was removed from the cartridges and from within the Nintendo itself.
This video and research was performed by some young millennials who did not grow up playing these systems and they are starting conclusions based on hindsight and a handful of stories. Had they the real experience of the era they would know that this is not a valid topic for cognitive bias.
It’s a “shoot for the recognizable” paradigm more than anything else; and that’s without even really considering the clickbait nature of UA-cam videos/online content.
You have to use the ideal example for each distinct audience/group to get the point across, and making use of this particular one broaches a lot of subsets of interest. Probably why we have so many examples to choose from when it comes to specific fallacies.
That, and the fact that people use them so often with only the slightest of variation…
Thank you this was very helpful and informative 👍👍
Yeah, but no. Many years ago when I heard this wasn't true, I tried it myself. I took out a DS cartridge out and put it back in about ten times. Never worked. Then I blew on it and it worked right after. This kept happening with GBA cartridges too. Sometimes it would work after putting them in a couple times if lucky, but the only thing that always worked right away was blowing on them. Also strange: This problem doesn't exist with SD cards. Not once have I inserted one and not have it work right away.
I don't know what it is, but if I'm not the most astronomically unlucky person, then this video isn't being entirely accurate.
Questionnnnn (I may send a personal message just in case), but what camera are you using to film 0:05 ?? I'm wanting to do videos where I game on a TV rather than do screen capture... I've got a few things lined up and I want my videos to be THAT nice looking :) Tips?
Just replied to your message, but just so everyone knows: That shot is not a recoding of a TV. I won't give away all of our secrets, but suffice to say, it's much more complicated than that :)
N64 owner here, and I did it all the time. And the worst part was, I had one time when the problem actually was dust (you could see the dust blocking the connection), and from then on I always thought that was the problem.
Also, you missed a very important one that every Pokemon trainer should know: mashing "A" after throwing a pokeball.
What about those of us that pulled the carts out, never blew on them, and continued to insert them again and again, without them working, until we pulled them out and blew on them, and they worked the first time.
Perhaps the idea is mostly correctly, but at the same time, there I believe there were instances where blowing on them, actually did remove particles from the cart contacts.
well then the science begs the question: if it was not in fact dust on the connectors that was preventing the games from working, what was? It was so universal across all NES games and ONLY NES games that I can't help but wonder. An inherent flaw in NES coding? but then why was it the games would still work eventually? Was it an error in the system design? Was it simply how we input the cartridge and why repeat tries resulted in success, because of a subtle, unnoticable change?
Great question. The NES game contacts were angled slightly with respect to the slot that they slid into. Over time, the slot inside the NES would wear out and the game pins wouldn't seat correctly every time. But removing and re-inserting the game was just as, and likely more, effective than blowing on the game.
Unless you stored your games in a sack of flour, dust was almost certainly not the issue, and there's not enough moisture in your breath for people to make the claims of "increased conductivity"... unless you were licking the pins. Corrosion could be a problem (especially if you blew saliva all over your games), but no amount of blowing could get that off. It required special cleaning chemicals or alcohol.
Gameboy games had it too and I also thought that I was blowing dust off. I still don't really believe it did nothing. Do you have scientific evidence that proves that blowing has no effect?
I always thought it was a really bad idea to blow into the cartridges, because of the potential to blow particles of spit into them, which could really screw them up.
All I did was repeatedly push and pull the cartridge into the slot (assuming that the contact surfaces would scratch themselves clean) and it worked every time.
According to my phone call with Nintendo, you are wrong. It did help, the moisture of your breath allowed a temporary boost to let the cartridge be read easier, and according to the same phone call the moisture also caused/lead to a breakdown of the game. So it gave a little help and caused a little damage.