Clean up your devices

26.6.2020

I got this game console called Champ by Hexaglot as a gift maybe 25 years ago.

It has four different games in it, which of three are tetris like games and one is a pong game.

I was never too interested about it, but my mum got into liking it. After years of gaming it stopped working. It suddenly went off and on and some of the buttons were slightly jammed in. When you played tetris, some of the buttons could get jammed down and you can't really play like that. So I opened the device and investigated if there would be anything to do about it. I found there was some gunk, probably a mix of grease, dust and dead skin, in the holes where the buttons are.

It had been accumulating there since day one. I cleaned the holes and after the operation the buttons worked! The moral of the story is to clean up your mechanical input devices, maybe once in 25 years.