Lacking the gear to game with (Patreon)

Here's a little unused bit of footage from the Google Stadia video. I was originally going to have it played through a Game Gear too, and my goodness it was a pain in the bum.

As you'll know if you've ever played one, Sega's Game Gear had a bad screen - blurry and indistinct even when brand new. And time has not been kind to them as they were relatively cheaply made, and the capacitors leak pretty heavily. So I got out my GG which had the capacitors for the screen replaced and looks as good as it can... to discover that the screen is utterly knackered again, and is unusably dark. Great.

I hadn't turned it on for a couple of years as I have a GG with an LCD screen replacement (The McWill mod). That felt a bit cheaty for the video but the TV Tuner didn't seem to work with it anyway.

Fortunately, Nostalgia Nerd kindly lent me his working GG. Except... He hadn't turned it on for 18 months or so, and it no longer works. Curse those capacitors!

I ended up borrowing a working machine from a guy who runs a retro gaming shop in Norwich (Last Level Games, local fact fans) and - hooray! - could actually record some footage of it, as shown in the video.

And then when editing everything together I discovered that 2 different screens were plenty and a third just spoiled the pacing of the video. And this one was so hard to record and looks so poor even with digital enhancement that it was pretty much unusable anyway. Besides... the black & white screens are just cooler anyway!

Odd thing: I had to transmit the picture to the GG as I couldn't get a signal through the external socket it has. No idea if it was a cabling thing or if my TV Tuner is a bit knackered.