Stop buying videogame consoles. The companies making the consoles think you are all 12 and treat you like you were born yesterday.
Most recent console I have used (and still use frequently) is a Gameboy Color from 1998. Original hardware (I did replace the screen).
Last game I finished was Pokemon yellow on an original cartridge. Worked fine, after 25+ years (with a new cartridge battery).
For anyone who expects their retro console to boot up and be playable, check to see if your console has known capacitor issues before powering it up. Even caps not part of the plague can leak if they’re old enough. If they’re powered on with leaking caps, it can be much harder to fix than if the caps were replaced before being powered on
The original Xbox has a capacitor thats prone to fail.
Who wouldn’t? It’s such a weird thing to assume it shouldn’t just work (assuming no hardware failure at least).
If I turn on a PC from 10 years ago it’ll boot up and run the applications installed on it.
Gen Z grew up in this broken world. They don’t know any better. They don’t understand what it means to own something.
That’s the plan, actually.
Gen Z is a wide spectrum.
I started on the PS1 and I am Gen Z
Many Gen Z grew up with Wii’s and Xbox’s which used physical media. I was never allowed to own an Xbox, but I did have a Wii. I think a lot of us have memories of putting in game CDs. The cutoff for that might be Gen Alpha.
Could be.
Specific age boundaries aside, the younger people are, the less experience they have of owning physical things, and the stranger the world as it used to be sounds to them. They live in a curated world of continually obsoleted technology they don’t own fed a diet of propaganda pushing technology and its proponents as saviors and not oppressors.
Yeah, there’s definitely a range. I’m gen z and we never really had game consoles, so I grew up mostly gaming on a Mac (do not recommend, although I think the translation layer situation has improved since then). I also have memories of putting in tapes, cartridges, and floppy disks to my parents’ old Atari and Commodore computers (both of which actually worked great after having not been used for like >30 years)
Because we’ve been conditioned to think that putting in a disc means a quick 5GB update to install…come back in 20 min
It’s been incremental but the landscape of gaming is now a casino with games, not games with betting.
My PS2 has game saves from 2002 on it that still function.
Just plugged it in and gave it a try… My NES still works… The “just plugged it in” part was a bit tedious,… finding the right adapters,😅🤣
You have to find a RGB to HDMI converter/ scaler?
Look at Mr Fancy Pants with the RCA cords, real men game on coax
SNES/GBA game saves erasing due to batteries 😭
If I drop an RPG for a month I have difficulty picking back up my ongoing savegame. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to continue a 30 year old savegame.
I’m mostly referring to completed saves of Kirby and DKC-franchise. The first is a collection of games you have to unlock, so if you just wanted to play in the arena mode, then you’d have to play through a whole lot more just to unlock it.
But it’s still playable
You’re telling me I’m going to have to replace the batteries and replay chrono trigger and Pokémon emerald again? Oh the horror
Just play on an emulator. Save states anywhere you want.
If you have VR, I highly recommend EmuVR for all console emulator needs.
Plopping yourself on the ground in front of an actual CRT is such a different and incomparably better experience than playing them on flat LcD screens, it really pleasantly suprised me.
I’m guessing the VR applies some type of CRT like filter to the virtual CRT? Or is it just a nostalgia thing?
Kind of both. It’s basically a frontend for emulators, where you are in a most archetypal 80s room, with a large CRT TV that runs the emulator, and you get all your roms as physical discs/cartriges on your shelf, with emu cores being actual consoles you connect to the TV, put a disk/cartridge in, and then you can sit in front of the TV and play.
It’s extremely immersive, the games feel so much better on an “actual” CRT TV.
https://youtu.be/73XVOeRuu9A?t=237 It’s not as apparent in 2D without VR, but you can get an idea at this timestamp.
And with how small most save files are, you can even store them in a folder on a cloud service without taking much space. So if something happens to your computer for drive with your legally backed up personal cartridge and disc images… You still have those save files.
It sucks when you borrow a friend’s SNES and didn’t realize that was a problem and their saves suddenly disappear (along with your current playthrough on a different save file) and you worried you somehow did something to cause it.
Pokemon Emerald’s battery is only there for real time clock functions. Saves remain intact even after the battery runs dry.
Gen I and II games used the battery for save data, however.
Yeah you’re right. Bad example.
Looking at the list on Console Mods I’m actually surprised how many GBA games do use a save battery when a lot of games clearly didn’t need it for saves. Did the battery allow for faster saving, or maybe just cheaper cartridges?
It was a cost/availability thing. SRAM was used all over the place prior to the GBA (and for some early GBA games) because FRAM and flash memory was expensive at the capacities needed.
Funnily enough, most games that use SRAM can have the chip swapped out for an FRAM chip, and they will no longer need a battery. (Actually you move the ROM chip from the SRAM board to the FRAM board) The two types of RAM present identically to the game’s software, so it just works.
The Pokemon games use Flash RAM with 2x-4x the capacity of the SRAM and FRAM chips most other games used. There was also EEPROM for games with small save files.
GBA? The kids these days. I have an original Zelda cart for the NES that still holds save data.
My Atari VCS (this was before they were calling it the “2600”) was manufactured in 1978. It’s 48 years old, and if I slap E.T. into that son of a bitch, it plays.
the og atari and nes were video game consoles.
a ‘modern’ console is just a required hardware device to access a subscription service and game rentals falsely advertised as purchases.
I have a Rev B gold Zelda cart for NES and I am curious its battery state. But my NES was lost in time.
if I slap E.T. into that son of a bitch, it plays.
But why would you do that?
To be contrarian.
My only dead battery so far is Final Fantasy NES!
Weren’t the batteries in GBA cartdriges only for the clock?
Oh, saves are saved on the cartridge, not the console? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Nearly every cartridge-based system up until the 3DS n the cartridge. But many older cartridge games from that era (SNES, GBC, sometimes GBA) used volatike SRAM that needs to be constantly powered with an internal battery. When the battery dies, the save is wiped and it can no longer hold a save, though you can always open the cart up and replace the battery.
the bootlickery
The dickhead replying is so fucking dumb. If the console was physically broken in any way, then the discussion could be about planned obsolescence or regular wear and tear or how it was stored. But the console DID survive. It did “resume back to normal”, but it is artificially rendered worthless by the company.
We could talk about how long a console should physically last, with issues like the red ring of death being an example of them not lasting long enough, but the idea that Sony says you didn’t play frequently enough so you no longer own the things you paid for is absurd.
N64 was made when they still cared about pushing the creative limits of what they could do with the tech, rather than just seeing how to use it to squeeze every last penny out of the consumer
I could start up sonic on my sega genesis right now.
I have pirated copies of Sierra online games from the 80s and some of them have saves made by the first person who uploaded them. Who were those people? No idea. But I would LOVE to know where they are now.
If it have a blue-checkmark - just ignore it’s opinion.
It’s amazing anything legible comes out when he’s so busy presenting himself for corporate dong
was it one of Nintendo’s own love hotels?
I find my DS every few years and it still just turns on with the same charge for the last decade and a half. No idea what they made those batteries out of.
