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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
Condition & GradingThe Original Xbox Clock Capacitor Is Eating Your ConsoleEvery unserviced original Xbox from the early production runs is carrying a small time bomb on its motherboard. It's called the clock capacitor — a stubby little component whose only job is to keep the system clock ticking while the console is unplugged — and on revision 1.0 through 1.5 boards it has a well-earned reputation for leaking electrolyte as it ages. That fluid is corrosive. It creeps out from under the capacitor, eats the copper traces around it, and does all of this silently while th
Condition & GradingHow to Grade GameCube Discs, Cases and Console BundlesTilt a GameCube mini-disc under a desk lamp and turn it slowly. Honest wear looks random — a stray arc here, a fingerprint there. But if the whole surface carries one uniform, circular swirl from hub to edge, like it went for a ride on a buffing wheel, you're looking at a resurfaced disc. That's not automatically a dealbreaker. It is something the seller should have mentioned. Small disc, small margin for error The GameCube's proprietary 8 cm disc is based on miniDVD technology, and its size