Denial

Hello,

I recently purchased a second Voodoo Castle cartridge off of eBay. I am going to use the case as a case for my VIC-20 Multicast that I purchased a while back. Anyway, my question is this:

When I opened up the cartridge to switch out the PCBs, I noticed that a) The chips were quite a bit shinier than the chips on my first Voodoo Castle cartridge, b) the green on the PCB was brighter, and c) my new one has a sticker that says "Assembled by Bremen", as you can see in the pictures. The only other notable difference is that my first one dies not have the note on what SYS command to use to start the game, while the second one does.

Hopefully someone can answer my question, thanks!

As for the green color, that is simply the solder mask. Its a colored lacquer which protect the copper traces and make it easier to solder to small, closely spaced pads. Different manufacturers had different chemical composition of their lacquer, which would give you a slightly different color as a result of aging (or at the time of manufacture). It can also give cracks in the solder mask (over time) and in certain instances oxidation of the copper beneath. Storage conditions also have an effect as air in cities/close to industrial facilities can be more acidic. Smoking also gives its own special patina. The same applies for exposed tin and other metals. Gold is the best protection, so any gilded metal surface will survive much longer without degradation.

Kakemoms wrote:As for the green color, that is simply the solder mask. Its a colored lacquer which protect the copper traces and make it easier to solder to small, closely spaced pads. Different manufacturers had different chemical composition of their lacquer, which would give you a slightly different color as a result of aging (or at the time of manufacture). It can also give cracks in the solder mask (over time) and in certain instances oxidation of the copper beneath. Storage conditions also have an effect as air in cities/close to industrial facilities can be more acidic. Smoking also gives its own special patina. The same applies for exposed tin and other metals. Gold is the best protection, so any gilded metal surface will survive much longer without degradation.

Ok, thank you for the information, I never knew about that.

It's the first time I see a Voodoo Castle (or any Commodore game cart) with a single 16kBytes ROM with address decoder instead of 2 of 8kBytes.

Guessing it was manufactured in Europe by Commodore Germany...

eslapion wrote:It's the first time I see a Voodoo Castle (or any Commodore game cart) with a single 16kBytes ROM with address decoder instead of 2 of 8kBytes.

I think both of my Voodoo Castle cartridges are like that...

merman wrote:Guessing it was manufactured in Europe by Commodore Germany...

Ok, interesting, thank you for the responses.