Did this happen to anyone else’s SNES? It happened to mine, but I thought maybe it was because my SNES was jealous of the time I was spending with my shiny new PSOne.
ars technica did some digging earlier this week on plastic oxidation and found a cool article on why this happens to some SNES consoles, and not others.
Since two different batches of plastics had two different aging results (as illustrated in the top and bottom halves of my SNES, or the old and new SNES units), then there must have been a difference of additives between them. Perhaps in one of the production runs of plastic, they didn’t get the catalyst or flame retardant mixture quite right and more residues were left over in the top half’s plastic batch, thus causing it to degrade more rapidly over time. And by the time Nintendo produced the later runs of Super Nintendos, they had perfected the manufacturing process of their plastic, meaning that those later models aren’t as susceptible to oxidation as the earlier models are.
[Original article from Vintage Computing and Gaming]
I just blamed myself for being such a heavy smoker back in the SNES days.
Yup, happened to mine, too!
I'm still sorry for all of you, my american friends, for getting that ugly blocky-purple version of the snes. Thank God we in Europe got the super-famicom, blue-red-green-yellow style instead!
My SNES is suffering the same fate….at least it still plays the games flawlessly, unlike my "still as gray as the day I took it out of the box" NES.BLINK. BLINK. BLINK.
Mine didn't do that, but I think it probably was a later edition. My NES is still gray as ever, and both consoles still work. I've a few buggy carts, but the majority come on the first time every time. One thing I do know is that the carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke accelerated the color change in super nintendo casings (learned about that when I worked at GameStop).
Mine is that yellow but is darknening to a darker gray color. i was like noooo lol.j-man
carbon monoxide?are you sure it isn't the tar in cigarette smoke that causes SNESes, computers, and teeth to turn yellow?
Yep. My SNES is yellow too. Looks horrible.