A look at my games console collectionSo you just wanted to play games without any of those complicated BASIC commands or that loading from cassette nonsense that would take F O R E V E R? A games console was just perfect for you. Imagine just inserting a cartridge*, switching on, and immediately being in the game ready to play.Absolute heaven *Cartridges sold separately There are 30 games consoles in the museum
Yet another carboot sale find, The seller wants £10, I paid £8 but he wouldn't let me have the super scope but would let me have the related cartridge. Never understood why. This one suffered from intermittent sound before losing it completely, shame as I love Super Mario.However I recently purchased another console, and that one works fine, but has had a bad retrobright experience
Swapped a TV for this, it suffered with the usual bad PSU connections, once soldered it worked perfectly.Clockwork Knight and Sega Rally were my most played games.The Saturn was incapable of using pirated discs for quite a while as the disc protection data was written outside the TOC (Table Of Contents). If you observe the disc loading and checking routine, you can see the laser read the TOC at the inside edge and then move almost to the outside edge of the disc, read 'something' and then return back to load the game. Normal disc copying software only copies what it can see, ie, what's in the TOC.Maybe that's one reason the original Playstation was so popular???
Paid £17 from Game Station when they existed and were a decent retro games retailer. I'd been fancying one of these for a while, just to play Shenmue, and to burn emulator discs as these machines did not need a modchip to play homebrew games. This one needed the lid sensor cleaning out and the common PSU pins problem fixing.Four player ChuChu rocket is insane!I did get quite a few accessories for this console as you can see in the picture. Keyboard, mouse, VMU's and rumble packs. I managed to connect it to the internet after receiving the update disc in the post from Sega themselves.The House of the Dead with two light guns and Virtua Fighter 2 kept me entertained for quite a while.
Another carboot sale find, Goldeneye and Super Mario 64 were epic! The World's first true 64 bit console, The Atari Jaguar claimed to be, but it used 2 x 32Bit (GPU and DSP) and the Motarola 68000 (32bit internal processing with a 16bit external data bus, same chip as used in the Amiga A500) as the controller, with a 64bit data path between them.
Sega Mega Drive (US: Sega Genesis) (X2)
I already have four Mega Drive 2's, (but no power supply), but it's always nice to have the original, which only outputted mono sound from the rear video socket, if you wanted stereo, you had to use headphones, or make a custom video cable.
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
I spotted this for sale on eBay, and had to have it. To delay the inevitable row with the wife, I'll decline to say how much it cost, but it was a lot cheaper than we've previously seen them for sale for. It came with no games, and as the NES doesn't boot with no cartridge inserted, I couldn't test it for an agonizing 24 hours until I "acquired" some games. Happily after some fiddling with the cartridge and 72 pin connector, it does work.
Sega Master System / Power Base
Again, I was left unsupervised and found this, it works perfectly and has the game Hang-On built in
I used to have the silver version of this, but I believe one of my kids has it, so I bought one for myself while everyone else was squabbling over toilet roll. This one is the later SCPH-50003 with the built in IR port. I later acquired two more working PS2s, these are earlier versions without the IR port
Saw a box at a car boot sale with an Xbox on top, I have been looking at buying one for a while, so took a chance for £25 and it turns out to be a modded xbox with several games installed, that's a win in anyone's book, the second one works, but the crystal doesn't work, it has Error 12 on the screen, which means issues with the DVD drive. The fourth one is currently untested
VTech V Smile TV Learning System (Blue)
Bought as a job lot for £2 from a car boot sale much to the other half's annoyance. This one has a microphone included for superstar performances
VTech V Smile TV Learning System (Pink)
Bought as a job lot for £2 from a car boot sale much to the other half's annoyance. It's very pink, stop laughing
VTech V Smile Motion Active Learning System
Bought as a job lot for £2 from a car boot sale much to the other half's annoyance. Wireless controllers but only mono audio
The dark area
I hope you all find this as interesting and as nostalgic as I do.
And if you do, why not check out the next page in my retro museum... Controllers
Or to quicky jump to another room of the museum, click or tap on Rooms at the bottom of this screen
Special thanks to my long-suffering partner Denise for putting up with all this "nonsense".
No cats were unnecessarily annoyed during the creation of this site
Speaking of cats, did you see one here?
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