Brad_from_the_80s

Email says to update your address if you've moved by June 20, so may start shipping in 1-2 weeks I'd guess.

Well... I tend to play on a modded DMG a lot. I had an original in 1990, played it for years until it developed lines in the display. It's in a box somewhere. By time GBC and GBA were things I was "too old" or too busy for that stuff. I did buy a Pocket around '96 to replace my ailing DMG briefly before it was also relegated to a box. Recently I took a scratched and beat up (but working) DMG off ebay, got a TFT display kit and a $8 Chinese shell (in red) and assembled my own "Play It Loud" model DMG. I even put the stickers on the back. I don't care if it isn't perfectly correct/original, I love it (I also have one in original DMG gray). Love the form factor, the heft, how it feels to hold it, how it sounds and plays. I simply cannot go back to original display technology - even back then I knew it was kind of terrible, and almost any LCD upgrade is about 1000X better. With the display problem solved I play the crap out of this thing with a flash cart - all the original GB library, any backward-compatible GBC. We only had so many game carts back then, so I still have a ton of this library to explore. I say that as someone who owns an Analogue Pocket. For GBC/GBA and any other handheld (GG, Lynx, etc) it's my goto for exploring those libraries, but to relive the Game Boy experience I fondly remember it's DMG hardware and games for me. Oh, and I had a lot of fun with the Super GameBoy back when also. Our old SNES is still around somewhere, but my "solution" these days is just loading a few SGB games on my SNES Classic for the occasional taste of that experience.

Imagine [for a moment] you're in a one-man space shuttle travelling through the heavens at the speed of light. You and your tiny ship are totally engulfed in darkness, except for the luminance of an occasional passing star. Suddenly, without warning, there's a brilliant flash straight ahead. You check the radar screen. Nothing. Pretty soon there's another flash, and another. Next thing you know the flashes have turned into one gigantic force field of some kind and it's dead ahead. You check the radar screen again, still nothing. The colors in this mysterious force field are so bright, they're almost blinding. And they seem to be in layers. But the strangest thing is that nothing shows up on the radar screen. What could that mean? Is it possible to travel through this mysterious force field or will you crash and be destroyed? And what about the layers? If you make it through one, can you make it through the next, and the next? It's decision time and there are only a few seconds to think about it. Turn back or blast ahead and try to make it through the layers of the brightly colored force field. It's up to you. [In... The Twilight Zone.] Regular Breakout had a couple different motifs, including breaking through a brick wall, breaking out of prison.

This and Ms. Pac-Man are the 7800 games I probably play the most. The missing level was dropped from almost all ports back then anyway. I really enjoy this version for whatever reason. The NES version is great of course, and really they're quite close in quality. The 7800 "suffers" in the sound department, but I kinda got used to it. I simply cannot cotton to the Coleco 2600 version. But this version I pick up almost every gaming session. I think there is a homebrew/hack that "fixed" a lot of it (audio, missing levels/animation), and it's quite an achievement, but I still like having this vintage copy.

I decided to count my carts and turns out I'm up to 129 working games. Actually 130 with an unopened Radar Lock. That's mostly 1st- and major 3rd-party games (Activision, Imagic, M-Network, PB, Sega), a small handful of more obscure games, plus the 2600+ launch carts, maybe 10-12 vintage 7800, and a few early Atari XP carts. I haven't bought more than a 2 or 3 in the past three months, after I bought up almost everything obvious to have, including a few more rare/expensive games. Somebody gifted me another copy of ET, and my Centipede copy got so flakey I had to replace it, but have otherwise avoided duplicates. I don't have a lot of homebrews or more obscure branded carts, but picking up a few of those and maybe any more new releases is probably the only way I'll get to 150-ish, and not sure I'll ever go far past that. But still... that's a lot of Atari games for somebody who started with almost nothing back in October.

The bigger the better, the sharp graphics are glorious.

Bentley is a new arrival. Lost Caverns I've probably had for 6 months, but confirmed working now on latest exp firmware I just loaded.

Somebody say bowling? And Lock'n'Chase was a 1981 arcade game in its own right, but yes still basically a Pac-Man/maze game clone. I enjoy it from time to time.

All our Activision heartaches are solved?

FWIW, it isn't unheard of for these types of devices to be updated by connecting a flash storage device with firmware file or attaching to usb in connected drive mode just to drag-and-drop firmware. I get why it wasn't a priority, but I do think these options should become the norm by design instead of variations on installing the crappy RockChip drivers and flash tools, which doesn't even work consistently for all people. Then your OS really doesn't matter.

I'm Gen X. We exist, and we're also cooler than everybody else, but generally don't need to tell you all that, because everybody knows it anyway. It's not really even debatable. You can have another opinion, you'll just be wrong. Our group has lived experience that spans technological and cultural eras in an almost historically unique way that groups before and after us do not. In brief, we're often pretty up to speed with modern digital tech, even leading the revolution still, but we know or experienced a lot of what came before, even decades or centuries before, much more so than later generations commonly do. I'd say we have a lot of... perspective. And all the best music.

"Worst game ever" is a tired old exaggeration. It's a neat little game and totally classic and historical Atari 2600. And it's not that difficult to get the hang of it just by reading the manual once. Looks like a nice clean copy.

Meh. I didn't buy a bunch of duplicates, but I do have a clean Haunted House just for the artwork.

I've purchased a few individually without issue. I assume these are just passing through the hands of somebody reselling something they found, probably don't even have a working 2600 to test with. All of them have worked, and the odds are high that they will in fact "just work" most of the time IMO. I don't know how likely it is somebody would go to all the trouble to just be dishonest about it for a few bucks, but untested probably calls for a bit lower price than average.

Ouch, those tricky ColecoVision carts. PB in their wisdom, geez. I've tried to warn people about that one. Don't need one myself, sorry.