Category: Games Console

I had kind of forgotten I even pre-ordered this many months ago, but a few days ago an Amazon parcel arrived containing the new Game & Watch from Nintendo. This time it’s Zelda that gets the game and watch treatment. The small device contains: The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link and Links Awakening. Along with a bonus game and watch game and the clock functionality.

I was a bit surprised/disappointed to find that Links awakening was the original Gameboy version and not the Gameboy Color DX version. Seems a bit of an odd choice since the other two games are NES versions and are therefore both in colour. Still, it’s a nice little device and I guess people who buy it and more interested in collecting things like this rather than actually playing them. There are many easier ways to play these games and more without buying a new handheld each time you want to play a different game 🙂

Another new one for the collection arrived today in the form of a top-loading Neo Geo CD. Unboxed, but it’s in great condition. The console has a Sega Saturn sort of aesthetic to it, but the controllers are really nice. I am loving the micro-switched joypads!

I decided to go for the CD version as the game cartridges for the Neo Geo AES were expensive when they came out, and haven’t gotten much cheaper! Looking around, the cartridge games seem to be in the £100’s of pounds each. At least with the CD version, I can play CD Backups relatively easily. My initial experimentation shows my Verbatim discs seem to work pretty well but I do get some errors occasionally, even after burning them at 4x on my Sony IDE CD-Writer. Maybe a replacement laser assembly is on the cards for this one in the future. The original games work though, and the lasers in these older consoles can be very picky at the best of times (I’m looking at you 3DO!)

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I have been looking at these machines for a while now and monitoring what prices they go for. Then just before the weekend, I saw this one come up on eBay for a reasonable price. I then noticed that it was actually located in Bristol which is only a day trip away from me. With a bit more digging around I found he had also listed it on Facebook marketplace without the price to cover eBay fees. A few messages later and a deal was done.

The next bonus to my newly planned day trip was the fact that the guy runs the Retro Arcade in Bristol that I posted about earlier. All of that combined with a trip to Za Za Bazaar for lunch, made this look like a promising day out!

The day was a great success but what I brought home with me was this gorgeous piece of history. The Vectrex has its own display built into the console but instead of displaying pixels, this console drew its graphics using vectors and is the only console ever released of its kind.

The display itself is monochrome but colour was added to the games by sliding a coloured film in front of the display. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the original games yet (apart from the built in game) but I do have some modern Neon UV filters on their way which look really great when combined with a UV light source. I will do a post about this once I have it all set up.

For now though here is the console in all its glory, along with an acrylic light that I made to sit alongside it to add to the whole vector effect.

I know this is far from retro, but if I add it to my collection now, it saves my having to do it in 20 years when it will cost 3 times the price!

Anyway, considering I have the original XBOX and an XBOX 360, it only seemed right to add an XBOX One to the collection. And at least I can play some of the XBOX exclusive games that I missed out on being a Playstation fan.

This is a fully boxed and as new, XBOX One S with 1TB Hard Drive. Hopefully one day a decent exploit will come out for this and we can fill that drive full of the best titles 🙂

Well since I had a PC Engine in my collection now, along with a flashcard, I figured it would be rude not to get the PC Engine handheld console also since they can share the same game cartridge.

Looking on eBay I found one for a reasonable price and made an offer which was auto declined so I left it at that. A few days later the seller out a generic offer to people watching the listing, this gave me the option to send another counter offer which I was expecting to be auto declined again, but this time it was sent to the seller for consideration which he accepted.

So here it is! The PC Engine GT 🙂

I had done a bit of reading up on these before purchasing, and one thing that was clear was that it would need to have the capacitors replaced if it was going to survive. So I purchased a capacitor kit for the unit from console5.com

I could have sourced them all myself but knowing this pre-made set would have every value I needed, just made life a little easier.

My next step was to open it up and get to work. This is actually the first console I have tried recapping, and although I have all the required tools it was still going to be a bit of a learning curve. It all went well but I did run into one issue where it seems at some point in the past this console has had a “repair” done to it previously. The audio capacitors had all been replaced with standard through-hole capacitors rather than the surface mount ones. My original plan was to swap these out with the new SMD ones from the kit, but this is when I realised, whoever had done this repair had ripped all the solder pads off the board! I expect this is why they then went with through-hole capacitors so they could fix their mistake.

After carefully working around this bodge job and replacing the remaining capacitors, everything was cleaned and re-assembled. I now have a nice condition, working PC Engine GT which will hopefully last for a few more years to come.

What a great handheld this is! I can’t imagine how amazed I would have been if I had seen one of these back in the day. Even the display on it is pretty good and clear compared to the absolute garbage that was the Sega GameGear.

The Wii mini was an odd choice by Nintendo. Designed to be a cheaper version of the Wii, but lacked Gamecube game support, WiFi, 480p video output and the SD Card slot. It seemed to be the console that nobody had asked for. I’m pretty sure by the time it launched, everyone and their granny already owned a Wii anyway.

It did however have quite a stylish look to it and the Wiimotes included the Wii motion plus functionality. But the main reason I never looked at it again was that it was classed as “un-hackable”

Without internet access or the SD card slot, non of the known exploits would work on this unit. But recently I saw an article saying it had been hacked. It turns out it was actually hacked way back in 2020 but it seemed to go pretty much unnoticed.

Anyway, since the option was there now to mod it and loads games from a USB stick, I thought it would be rude to not have one in my collection. I have added it to the Nintendo shelf in the bedroom so I can have some late-night Mario Kart action 😁.