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nintendoHow to buy an original Game Boy without getting a re-shellSlide the battery cover off before you talk price. On an original Game Boy — the grey DMG-01 brick Nintendo shipped in 1989 — those four AA terminals will tell you more about the machine's last few decades than any glamour shot in the listing. By spec-sheet logic, the brick should have lost. Its Sharp LR35902 ran at roughly 4.19 MHz and drove a 160×144 screen in four shades of pea-soup green, while Sega's Game Gear and the Atari Lynx offered full-colour, backlit displays. But those rivals devou
GamesHow to Tell a Genuinely Rare Retro Game From a Merely Expensive One"Rare" is the most abused word in a game listing. Here's how to tell genuine scarcity from a common game wearing an expensive word — before you pay the premium.
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