Related buyer guides
Condition & GradingBuying a Game Gear or Lynx? Check These Failure Points FirstPop the battery covers off a Sega Game Gear and sniff. That faint fishy smell is leaked electrolyte from failing capacitors — an amine odour every Game Gear tech knows — and it means the console in your hands is running on borrowed time, if it runs at all. Cartridge collecting is mostly about cosmetics. Classic handheld collecting is about the hardware itself, because on a Game Gear, an Atari Lynx or an early PSP, the shell can be showroom-clean while the inside is quietly dying. Here's how to
playstationWhy PS3 Collectors Check the Model Number FirstFlip a fat PS3 over and read the sticker before you even glance at the disc tray. Those five characters — CECHA, CECHB, CECHC — decide what your library even is, because the PS3 is the rare console where the hardware revision matters more than most of the games it plays. Why collectors read stickers, not spec sheets The Japanese and North American launch units — the 60GB CECHA and 20GB CECHB from November 2006 — carry actual PlayStation 2 silicon on the board: the Emotion Engine CPU and Graph
nintendoWhy GameCube Collectors Check the Back Panel FirstThe first question a seasoned GameCube buyer asks has nothing to do with the games. It's "does it have the digital port?" Spin the console around: early units carry two video sockets on the back, and the smaller one — labelled Digital AV Out — quietly decides how much that little cube is worth to a picture-quality purist. Why the back panel matters more than the colour Nintendo launched the GameCube in 2001 as model DOL-001, digital port included. A later cost-cut revision, DOL-101, deleted i