Pocket Pikachu buttons don't work

Hello! I know this isn't Tama related exactly, but I thought this community would be able to help me best. 

I recently found my old Pokemon Pikachu pocket pet device that I remember playing with as a kid. Amazingly, the battery still works and it boots up great! The problem is the buttons. The A and B buttons work okay, but they need to be pressed really hard to register. The directional buttons as well as the Start & Select buttons don't seem to work at all. 

Does anyone have any insight on what could be going wrong and how it could be fixed? Any possible help is appreciated, thanks! 

This just sounds like the contacts on the circuit-board and the carbon-pads on the backs of the buttons need cleaning!

You'll need to take the device apart to do this, and you'll need to take extra care not to break the speaker wires (on most virtual pets and similar devices, these can get pulled on when you split the two halves of the casing). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a guide for taking apart a Pocket Pikachu and I've never owned one myself, but I would imagine that similar principles to taking apart a Tamagotchi or Tamagotchi Connexion would apply.

The type of buttons used on old virtual pets are most similar to those of typical television remote controls, so the advice in this video may apply to the actual cleaning step;



That said, I've found that I haven't had to go that far when I've had to do this, and simply wiping the contacts and the carbon-pads on the backs of the buttons with a clean cloth has been enough. You'll have to figure that part out when you get there, though!

I hope that your cleanup attempt goes well.

Thank you so much! Giving it a good cleaning is probably exactly what it needs, the poor thing has been collecting dust for 20 years. I'll watch the video and give it a try. Thanks again! 

Moved to Virtual Pets - General

minigrind said:

Thank you so much! Giving it a good cleaning is probably exactly what it needs, the poor thing has been collecting dust for 20 years. I'll watch the video and give it a try. Thanks again! 

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Good luck - please let us know how it goes!