Like many people who started playing video games in the 1980s, when titles were still put on cartridges, I often had to deal with faulty connections when playing with my Nintendo Entertainment System. And while every video game shop would sell you a fancy cleaning kit with solvents and swabs for 15 bucks and Nintendo would advise against doing so, any kid knew the best way to clean out dusty connection ports was to simply blow into the cartridge.
Recently, I heard the sobering theory that blowing into the cartridge didn’t really accomplish anything, and that simply reinserting it into the system is what dislodged the connection-blocking dirt. But with so many hours of my youth spent forcing air into 8-bit game packs, I can’t bring myself to accept that it was all meaningless. Surely, there must be something that can be accomplished by caressing Nintendo classics with a puff of breath?
It turns out there is, as with a little bit of engineering you can turn a classic game cartridge into a harmonica, complete with old school video game sounds.
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