Why Your SNES Turned Yellow

If, back in the day, you ever wondered why your old Super Nintendo tended to discolor, your curiosity will now be sated. Via Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog, an article on the Vintage Computing and Gaming site which explains the mysteries of plastic discoloration. From the article: "Since ... different batches of plastics had ... different aging results ... 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."

Comments

well

[mastershake_phd]

Well my SNES is still gray. You would think this would be more prevalent. Ive got a lot of old plastic stuff, some faded, but none change colors.

Re:Same thing happened to old Mac's

[LoadWB]

And my Amigas, and my Commodore 64Cs/128s and peripherals, and (which I wouldn't think since it's been in storage) my Atari 800XL, and...