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TIL there was a TV tuner attachment for the Game Gear! (media.piefed.world)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
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[–] 16 points 11 months ago (19 children)

The GG could only go about five, if you were lucky, on six AA

Which, while of course requiring exponentially more power, the Switch 2 only goes for about 6 hours on less demanding games, funny how battery life hasn't really changed much for advanced handhelds.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago* (8 children)

    Sure but the switch 2 has a rechargeable battery unlike the game gear which had to be supplied with new batteries every time which cost money.

    I’m not sure if rechargeable AA were common in those days.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Rechargeable batteries were common, but in my experience they tended to not hold up as long as normal batteries and took 6-8 hours to recharge. At that time they also degraded quickly, were expensive, and overall just a massive hassle to try and manage.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    The IBM thinkpad that runs on windows 95 that I have still has a vaguely functional battery. The battery can last a whole 5 minutes still, damned battery was probably more expensive to produce than the entire rest of the laptop.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Ha, I still have my IBM ThinkPad but it has never had a working battery in its life with me. The hinge on one side is also still cracked and I could never properly close it.

    Was my first laptop in the mid-2000’s running Windows 95. I got a USB 1.0 Ethernet adapter so I could surf the web on the DSL line we had at home before we finally upgraded to a wireless router.

    Good times. On MySpace, ripping music to the 4GB IDE HDD I had into MusicMatch (before I learned about iTunes), checking news for Halo 3, trying to play games…

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    The biggest problem with rechargeable dry cells is that each one supports 1.2 volts, while alkaline are 1.5. Some devices wouldn't even run, most run more poorly and run out of battery even faster.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Fwiw, should you need it, there are AA lithium batteries with a usbc slot for charging and they deliver 1.5v. I bought a pack out of curiosity and was very pleasantly surprised.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Make sure to get some that mimic battery power loss at the end. Some models just shut off when they are empty and others slowly reduce the voltage so that battery indicators on devices are able to pick that and display a warning to change batteries soon.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    This is also why I have never considered the Switch a portable system. It was a hybrid that was never quite a "real" console or a handheld, and thus made compromises on both ends. I personally never used the Switch undocked, I'd have rather they sold a fixed model with no screen or joycons that just plugged in.

    The real reason that Game Gear was so power hungry is that it was just a Sega Master System crammed into a handheld. This is why it felt wildly better and more advanced then the Game Boy. Sega did the same thing years later with the Sega Nomad aka a Genesis crammed into a handheld.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    the real reason it was such a bitch for power is that it had a compact flourescent tube for the backlight.

    when you remove that and replace it with a LED backlight suddenly the battery life explodes.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    I figured the backlight was a big part of it. crazy that people actually modded a game gear

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    You would not believe the amount of mods the GameGear has, my dude.

    and they are expensive as fuck, lol

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