Hell yes!

LEX@lemm.ee to RetroGaming@lemmy.world – 425 points –

This is my original Genesis I bought in like '92(?) with one of my first paychecks from my first job at Chuck E. Cheese's (yes I'm fucking old).

I thought I sold it years ago but found out it was sitting in one of my mom's closets, so I bought a few cheap carts and hooked it up to a crt I keep around for just such occasions. It still works!

I am so goddamn happy, I just had to share and I figured you all might appreciate that.

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Streets of Rage. I can hear the synthwave blasting from back in 1993.

It is on a 6 games in one cart (6 Pak) I got for ten bucks that includes five absolute bangers and also Columns.

SoR 1 is one of my absolute favorites of all time and I was glad to find it for less than like thirty bucks.

Streets of Rage 2 is my favourite game soundtrack ever, but the first one is excellent too.

all the genesis games had killing music. You can look at any sonic game soundtrack and every single song is a bop

I also had a Sega CD but I did sell that a long time ago.

I was going to buy a Super Nintendo because I was jealous of all the RPGs on that system, but my best friend convinced me the Sega CD was a way cooler investment, especially since I already had the Genesis.

So I went and bought the Sega CD, excitedly brought it home and popped in the included game, Sewer Shark.

It was at that moment I knew... I fucked up.

Well, you could have bought the 3DO like me. Three times more expensive, infinitely worse games. Although Gex was a pretty great platformer.

Same my friend, same…

I got a 3DO for Christmas when all my friends got PlayStations :(

Mine at least came with the 4 pack game of

  1. columns (Tetris wannabe, I loved it )
  2. Golden axe
  3. ? (I can't remember, maybe Tactical Enforcer?)
  4. Streets of Rage (My single favorite game from 2nd grade until Virtual Cop came out a few years later. I believe Street of Rage is the game currently on this amazing posters Wombo style television screen.)

But Sewer Shark was my first real game for Sega CD and my 2nd grade mind was not prepared. Young me thought I was dumb and couldn't do it because I was little.....nah that game is just rough.

Did you at least get Lunar at some point?

I did! I didn't finish it though. I put many, many hours in but I remember it was extremely long so I never made it to the end.

Honestly, I probably put the most hours into Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective :/

What rubbish. What balderdash.

I wasn't really used to jrpg's at the time and didn't realize what I was getting myself into lol. I didn't finish Phantasy Star II, either, even though I loved it.

I was making a reference. I never played the Sega CD version myself, but I did have the PC version growing up. Never got too far in that one, either, though.

Ha! Oh shit, that's amazing! I haven't touched the game since the mid nineties, so I don't remember many details.

For some reason, I distinctly remember a guy who flipped a coin along his fingers because I thought it looked cool so learned how to do that trick.

Anyways, thanks for sharing that.

I still have my OG Genesis in the garage. A couple of years ago I opened it up because the LED wasn't turning on - the system itself worked perfectly fine, just the light. Don't remember everything that happened but since then it hasn't powered on. I'm tempted to toss it, but then again, it's like 30 years old, so I think it deserves better.

I even remember the day I got it.

My parents would have killed me if they knew I spent money on a gaming console. I got dropped off over to my friend's house as a sleep-over because it was summertime. He lived within walking distance of Toys R Us. Went there with a bunch of cash and bought it and brought it back to his house. I knew I couldn't just bring the whole box back home without my parents knowing what was up, so I unboxed it and put each piece into a different plastic bag and mixed them all up in with my sleeping bag. To most people, it just looked like a mess of random electronic toys. When my mother came to pick me up, she started gossiping away with my friends mom for like 20 minutes. I asked her to pop the trunk and I snuck all the things into the car. When we finally got home, I pretended that I forgot the stuff in the trunk, so I went down to the garage and grabbed them a little at a time to bring back to my room. Thankfully the console itself wasnot that big so I kept it in one of the drawers in my desk, but I ran all the wires out the back. Over the next few weeks, I took out more and more of the parts and put them on my desk. At this point, it looked like any other piece of random electronics, so no one ever knew I did this. This is literally the first time I've ever told this story. Not sure if anyone else could relate, but toys and having fun were rather low priorities so ya had to sneak in whatever gaming you could do.

These older consoles are simple repairs. Start with replacing the capacitors on the board. If that doesn't do it, you can find the problematic component with a multimeter

Jesus Christ, don't toss it!

I repair older consoles insofar I come across them. They're not made anymore so I like to preserve them.

I've kept it this long because I too would like to preserve it, and up until a couple of years ago, it was running fine. I'll keep it in the garage for now and see if I can get it going again one of these days. I even brought home this old flat plasma screen that work was throwing away. This predates HDMI and digital signals. But its a big screen (40"+) for it's age and rather thin. It was probably a $10k screen at the time. I kept it around because one day I wanted to hook up the Genesis to it because it takes in analog inputs like component and composite (as well as VGA).

Sounds great, but I'll have you know you can buy a cable to connect to composite. That's how I hooked up mine to my modern TV. Works great. I have an old CRT too, that's where it's hooked up most of the time.

Well that's as authentic a retro experience as it gets!

The sound is what stands out the most! It's so good!

I figured it would be that unique CRT visual quality that kind of enhances the pixels. Never even considered that the sounds would also come out more the way the designers intended. Cool!

And you are not wrong the visuals are an absolute treat! Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to keep that TV around, but it always pays off eventually.

I don’t think this is what you were referring to but I bet those old tvs had better speakers than modern flat panels.

I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised! Plenty more room.

But yeah, I was referring the unique crunchy, farty quality of the Genesis sound chip. It's meaty and delicious in a way emulators have a hard time reproducing.

They absolutely did. So much more room for air/sound to flow through those speakers in CRTs. That's why most people resort to sound bars at a minimum to get halfway decent sound for today's flat panel televisions. You just can't fit powerful speakers into them.

Nice. I'll never forget getting the Sega Genesis with Sonic 2 for Christmas one year. That was one of the first stops on a lifelong journey of gaming. I still play the old Sonic games once in a while on newer platforms and the nostalgia hits hard. Enjoy yourself.

Damn awesome you need to play shadowrun that was my favorite genesis game!

I like the Cyberspace of the Genesis version but the real-world of the SNES version.

For me the Sega version beats it by far, but I still love both those games. So good either way.

The Genesis was the first console I bought with my own money. Kid money (allowance plus birthday money, etc.). It was definitely a few years into its life, and I remember it being on sale for something crazy like $60 at Canadian Tire. Everyone I knew, myself included, had a SNES, and inviting friends over to see the Genesis brings back some good memories. I remember playing Sonic 2 and discovering that you could plug a Sega Master System controller into the second port and your friend could play along as Tails. Mind blowing. The sound was so amazing too. That Yamaha sound chip brought the music of the arcades to life in my living room. I eventually sold my Genesis to EB for about the same amount and bought Night Trap for PC. Not a great move in hindsight, but I did keep all my games.

This is hitting me right in the feels. I need to dig mine out of storage.

The first time I visited a family friend and watching him boot up Castlevania Bloodlines I was absolutely flabbergasted how amazing that game looked. I still have that reaction to this day when I boot it up on my emulator when feeling nostalgic.

Someone just posted that background and both your posts ended up close to each other in my feed. https://toad.work/post/1039482

I have edited one of these backgrounds to span over 3 monitors and not repeat on any of them. If I can remember it later tonight I will upload it.

What are you like 41. That's not old gtfo of here. Go live the other entire half of your life.

Lol I'm around a decade older than that, give or take.

Lol yeah I did the math and I was thinking that guy needs a calculator lol.

I'm 40 and my first job would have bought me a dreamcast instead

I'm 41, I bought my genesis with paper route money as I wasn't old enough to work a real job.

I had the wide genesis also, but I had the newer CD so my genesis hanged off the side.

I got a mega-cd 2 with an original megadrive and it had an expansion plate for the md to sit snug.

maybe sega of America cheaped out on that small bit of plastic to save a buck.

I think mine did too, that sounds right. I guess there was another model with a slot loader underneath?

I got that one. I wanted to build the tower of power, but the mega cd is YUGE. Works great, but clunky to use. I think the Sega CD is a lot easier and smaller to boot

I found my dad's old genesis in the attic and I need to clean it up and hook it up to one of our two CRTs we have in our basement.

I have very fond memories of playing Sonic 2 at the ripe age of 2, as well as the old monopoly game. Looking forward to getting it cleaned up when I have some sparetime and running some of my earliest gaming memories