You know, If I started a thread that inspired this amount of interest and debate, I'd be pretty proud of myself. Hopefully whoever follows up on this experiment won't be so brittle.

Quote Originally Posted by Frankie_Says_Relax View Post
Despite the fact that I've seen the same type of green and black mold/oxidation/corrosion in cartridges from Atari 2600 to Gameboy Advance (pretty much the last cart-based-system to have that style of top-lipped cartridge) including but not limited to NES, Genesis, Super NES, N64, and so on and so forth ...
Right, so why do we have to blow on a cartridge 5 times to make it work in a NES, but not those other consoles? I don't recall ever blowing in the Intellivision I had before my NES, and I sure as hell don't have to blow in my SNES and N64... so what's the difference?

That's just too much to deal with and it's more trouble than it's worth - because we KNOW that a game with CRAP growing on/breaking down the contacts is NOT GOING TO WORK.
How do you know? This is the part I don't get. Do we really need to run an experiment to prove that exposing bare metal to moisture will corrode it over time? Isn't the real question what effect that corrosion has on the reliability of the cartridge? And does blowing on a cartridge actually make it work better, or is it all a placebo effect? Just because everybody does it doesn't mean it works. That can be used to justify any myth.