Help me fix my Maracas!

[Piers]

I hope someone can help me or provide me with some information. I had a bit of an impulse purchase of the Samba de Amigo Maracas on Mercari. Usually I check to see the state of the item in the listing and if the owner wrote that it was functional or if they tested it before purchase. But long story short, these maracas arrived damaged. I cannot return/replace them. They now sit in my closet as a sad reminder to always check to make sure the cable and ports are not damaged or broken on these things before buying and waiting months for shipping to get it to you.

They use what I think is called 6 pin terminal ( DIN s?) to connect to the controller base.

*UPDATE: Now I'm thinking it uses PS/2 ports*

One of my maracas is missing a pin from its connector.

See Attached Image #1

My fear is the the missing pin from the maraca is still stuck in one of the sockets. Ive tried using powerful flashlights to get better vision but still cant tell if a piece of the old pin is stuck in either one of those controller ports. I'm worried about plugging this in to test and further damaging it with the pins being like that. Does anyone have any experience with these 6 pin terminal(?) PS/2 connectors being so brittle? Or have any experience with them at all lol.

I noticed it looked like someone had already done work on one of the cables?! These are 1st party maracas so I have no idea why they have different connectors at the ends of the cable!

See Attached Image #2

Could this be something you could fix by buying a new 6 pin connector and or socket and replacing them? Or is this how many of them are and I'm overthinking this being a problem and just plug it in and pretend its fine?



UPDATE 1: I'm buying spare parts to try to fix this myself, if anyone can confirm that its using PS/2 ports that would save me wasted money on parts. I will update here with my progress for anyone else that has to do something like this. Also if anyone else has a set of maracas could tell me if they have a missing pin, that would also be greatly appreciated.

[Gocha]

I can't confirm or deny that those are ps/2 plugs, but no mater what the connector is if you wire it properly and replace the plugs and connectors then there should be no problem for it running, I'll check my maracas, since those are kind of woking but at least the plugs are allright.

To check if there is anything inside the plug you could try plugging a needle inside each hole and check if that hole has any resistence to it.

What I think that could be useful to the community is to have a hombrew software to test controllers, maracas, fishing rods, etc. that way we could check if the console is recognizing the controller and each imput on it's own. Maybe there is something like this, I'll talk to a few people about it to heck if there is something like that and if they know if the connector is actually a PS/2 or not.

[Piers]

That would be greatly appreciated! Can you also check the ends of the plugs? I'm curious if yours have different plugs like mine in the second picture.

Great idea about the needle! I will try that, it does seem like the socket doesn't have anything stuck in it, that I can see. Always good to double check.

[Gocha]

Here is a picture of the plugs, the cat picture is on the house, use it wiselly. Also they both have all the pins, so definitely one of yours is mising one.

[Piers]

It's interesting that mine have 2 different plugs and the one I am going to fix is the weird one with the arrow on it(non stock one). I think I remember hearing that these controllers, while being "1st party" had a strange production.