If buying old games is a disease...

[A Black Falcon]

I saw one Saturn in a local pawn shop, but don't know if it has any cables (power supply, etc) because it was just sitting there by itsself... I could ask next time I'm there though.

Oh, and of course I really, really want a NES, and have since... pretty much forever... but I can't convince myself that one of those Asian NES clones that don't even support real NES controllers is worth it, and real NESes are hard to find. And break quickly. New NESes are cool, but those are really rare...

Around here there are a number of used game stores that have a LOT of used Saturns. Keep in mind that the one weakpoint of the Saturn design is that blasted save battery. It drains a tad too quickly and you'll likely need to buy a replacement (just a basic watch battery) when you get one. Go to eBay and search for "memory card" or anything like that you find the SAME IDIOT who's been making money for MONTHS at least selling a standard watch battery as "important replacement part for Saturn memory". It is annoying because he's selling a million at once at any one time and if I'm actually searching for the Saturn memory card it gets flooded out by those entries. The saturn memory card doesn't use a battery, fortunatly.

Something to be thankful for, with so many other old consoles that are battery-only or battery-mostly (NES, GB, SNES: battery only. Genesis, battery mostly. 32X: I don't know. Then there's fun stuff like the Sega CD (internal unchangable battery AND memory cards with internal batteries as the only save systems), Sega CD/Turbografx/3D0/CD-i (internal unchangable batteries inside the consoles... at least I think the Turbografx does, like those other ones...), the GBC with mostly battery save carts, the GBA and N64 which split between flash memory and battery save and for the most part it's anyone's guess which games use which (especially for the GBA... at least for N64 we know what uses batteries: the memory cards and 12 games, most all of which are unfortunately quite good and many people have.)

Yeah, the Genesis is weird. Most Genesis games don't have saving, of course. Of the ones that do, I know some use batteries, but others use a type of flash RAM also found on some GBA games called 'FeRAM' or 'Ferroelectric RAM'; I've seen a cart scan of NBA Jam for the Genesis and there's no battery there. But unlike N64 and SNES, I can't find any other Genesis cart scans (not one!), so very frusteratingly I have no idea whatsoever which Genesis games have FeRAM (which I'd assume would last much longer) and which use batteries... and I don't have the screwdriver that can open up the carts. Same goes for 32X. Sega CD I know has an internal battery and I know that I have read that its backup save carts also use batteries. But I'd really like to know which Genesis games save to which type of saving! Bah...

Compared to stuff like that, a battery you've got to change once a year or something, combined with flash memory save carts for backup, doesn't sound too bad... (Saturn)

(Oh, the Dreamcast has an internal rechargable battery you can't change too, but that only runs the clock, which matters for like one game, aside from dates on save files...)

Of course flash memory goes bad too, as anyone who's ever had a PSX/PS2/GC/DC (or Saturn, given how its memory carts are flash) memory card go bad, but at least it doesn't continue to go bad while it's sitting on the shelf, for the most part.

... actually, that brings up a good question. "Why the heck do you buy battery-backed games, knowing that a lot of them are already running dead or dying batteries??" ... and again I have no good answer... umm, for Genesis I only have a few games that have oncart save... for SNES it's a few more and some of them do have bad batteries, but I couldn't resist... but I am using that for one reason that I didn't get LttP yesterday, though. With the others being 'I already have it for GBA and haven't managed to finish it yet, and wouldn't really want to start again' and 'it'll be on Virtual Console for sure...' (those same three reasons are also why I haven't gotten DKC1 and DKC3, though I did get DKC2 -- I did want to have at least one of them...)



On another note, I found a store yesterday that had a lot of great stuff... some boxed NES and SNES games, a bunch of boxed Genesis games, Sega CD stuff, a lot of Atari 2600 carts (and even 2 5200 games and a 7800 game or two).. I've seen plenty of used 2600s though, but I'm just not interested. Maybe if I was five or ten years older...

Sega CD... not exactly much available. :D Loadstar, Sewer Shark, Third World War, a few others even less worth mentioning... Saturn's not in great shape either, with only a few titles. I've seen Clockwork Knight, that motorcycle game from the arcade, Shanghai, Criticom, Street Fighter: The Movie, Blackfire, Stellar Fire (or something like that... Stellar Assualt?), a few others...

What I got yesterday, though, was pretty nice. Axelay, Super Castlevania IV, and F-Zero for the SNES and Contra: Hard Corps (with manual), Golden Axe, Outrun 2019, Phantasy Star II (with manual and map), and The Haunting starring Polterguy for Genesis (all of those Genesis games came in their cases)... I really wanted F-Zero, Axelay, Golden Axe, and Outrun 2019. Great to find them. :)

I also saw (for Genesis), but didn't pick up yet, Lightening Force, Arrow Flash, Kid Chameleon, Street Fighter II SCE (SFII Turbo for SNES too, but I have SSFII for SNES already and the Genesis controller is better), etc... a bunch of stuff...

I also saw a bunch of Master System carts, more than I've seen anywhere around here. Made me have slight interest in a Power Base Converter, if I ever see one...