I got a 32x in a box of junk at the flea market.
The 32x turns on and boots games, but the games didn’t play so well. Sometimes they wouldn’t boot easily, and when they did boot, they would freeze during intro screens.
In Doom, it was actually crash with a Bus parity error printed on the screen during the level select.
So that got me thinking, maybe there was a problem with the data busses.
So I cracked ‘er open, and I took out the two ribbon cables. I cleaned the contacts with an eraser, and then sprayed contact cleaner inside the connectors and plunged them a bit using the ribbon contacts.
Then I put it all back together, and viola, it works! No more crashes.
So, if anyone else has a crashing or non-working 32X, try cleaning the ribbon cable contacts.