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Game Gear
That color screen made those motherfuckers chew through batteries. My brother had one, and it drove him crazy.
Color wasn't to blame. It was the cold-cathode backlight.
Tbf, given the time and available tech, any other options would've been worse, considering there were any.
Reflective LCDs would have been equally blurry, in full color, and still tolerated optional tennis-ball-green frontlights for playing under the covers.
The real surprise came a decade later when everybody except Nintendo missed that active TFTs made color a decent option.
First thing that popped into my mind as well.
It was ridiculous how fast it could go through those 6 batteries.
Eventually my parents got sick of having to buy them and I was only allowed to play using a power adapter.
Yeah I wanted the power back but really I just stopped buying games for it and went back to my game boy. The main reason I wanted it was for the TV card and never ended up getting that.
The last boss of Sonic was that red light
Yes! I remember getting one for my birthday, and the damn thing died in 2 hours.
I just wish the modern things would use standardized, field-replaceable batteries.
Fucking everything.
- 80s
But especially maybe the Game Boy. Or ghetto blasters.
Edit: Walkman is a better answer.
ghetto blasters.
❤️😂 Yes!
My “Pow-Pow-Power Wheels” quad. Would also swap out those bald ass plastic wheels for some rubber.
Oh god, Ni-Cd. Six hours of charging for fifteen minutes of use.
Neighbor here has one of those for her kids with an adapter to plug in batteries from Ryobi tools. Nice idea if you have a stack of batteries around already that can be swapped on the fly.
I think modding older stuff to use rechargeable batteries is not too difficult. I think the harder thing is replacing the nonstandard charging ports with usb-c.
I’d love my 3ds to just have a usb-c charging ports I’m considering doing the mod myself.
My RC hovercraft! I loved that thing, but it had such a short battery life, it was basically unusable
The tyco one?
I loved that thing.
Nothing I had as a kid ran on batteries. It was all springs.
You think I'm doing the "riding dinosaurs" spiel, but I'm not that old. And, yes, there were things that had batteries, but not most kid toys. I had a 3' tall battle robot from some TV show, pre-transformers, that shot hard little plastic missiles from one fist, and the entire other fist could be spring-launched hard enough to bruise a younger sister's forehead. Not that I'd ever have done such a thing. I had an Eagle lander from Space 1999 with detachable cockpit, which also must have been 3 or 4' long. I had fucking lawn darts, perhaps the most incredible and incredibly dangerous weapon sold as a toy, which we would try to launch over the house into a yard we couldn't see, and compete for who could get their's stuck most deeply in the earth. When I was 6, I had a full-on pump-action BB gun capable of putting holes in thin plywood.
We didn't have a lot of batteries, but we also had almost no regulation in the toy industry, and it's honestly surprising to me today that so few of the neighborhood ended up in the hospital from just the toys.
Shogun Warriors:
Damn. That's them. Did you have one? Which part did you lose first? I think the missiles were the first to go; they may not have survived the holiday season. Then I lost the hand. I'm pretty sure mine had switchblade wings and maybe a switchblade sword, too, although I'm not sure about that.
I was 7 or 8, and not great at keeping track of small parts and these things disassembled quite a lot.
But what I really miss is that Eagle Lander. I'd pay good money to find one in good condition; they were the coolest things flying, at the time.
I only had 2 of the big ones, but they came in different sizes, and I still have all the small ones.
Little axes and things always got lost, then people would steal them out of the boxes on store shelves, so if you were looking for a new one you always had to verify all the parts were there. :(
I got one big one and the Lander the same Christmas; we weren't well-off, and that was an extravagant Christmas, the best I'd ever had, haul-wise.
It was the year before my parents divorced, and that probably had something to do with the largess.
We couldn't afford the one I really wanted. Combatra! It split up into 5 different vehicles(!)
I remember that!
They look way less detailed and fabulous than I remember; that's imagination for you. I just remember them being nearly as tall as I was, and it was glorious.
Game Boy/Game Gear
Modern batteries = sealed inside the device and not replaceable, so you have to throw the device away when the battery craps out? No thanks.
You, in particular know that's not a requirement for using modern batteries, but a user-hostile decision companies make.
What if he's inserting that batteries are now better because user-hostile decisions.
They are replaceable.
You mean lithium cells ready to become spicy explosives?
I would want the great rechargeable eneloops for sure. Those would have been game changers in the good way.
Game boy
One of my favorite things was a power cord that let me play my GameBoy as long as I wanted, also the wormlight thingie
I had this toy robotic arm called Armatron and the thing chewed through D-cell batteries.
I wired it up to a modern USB power supply
Are batteries that much different? I was born in the early 60s, and the batteries my toys used seemed like the same AAA, AA, C, and D batteries we use mostly today. I think the key difference is that a lot of things take a lot less energy than they used to.
Quite. Unfortunately, most devices that use modern batteries have the battery sealed inside with an onboard charging system, such that when the battery wears out, the device becomes e-waste. There are many standard, or semistandard sizes of cylindrical lithium-ion cells, and devices could be designed for field-replaceable versions, but the only product category where it's common is high-performance flashlights.
Even in common consumer form factors, there have been improvements. Here's a test of one of the best alkaline AAs. Note how the capacity drops as the load increases - by a factor of about six at 3 Amps. Contrast the Eneloop NiMH rechargeable, which has less capacity under light load, but barely loses any at 3 Amps and can handle 10 Amps while retaining most of its capacity.
The best Li-ions in a form factor similar to AA, called 14500 have even better performance with over 5 Watt-hours of energy, but devices have to be designed for them since the voltage is much higher; putting one in most devices designed for AA will result in damage, if not fire.
There are many standard, or semistandard sizes of cylindrical lithium-ion cells, and devices could be designed for field-replaceable versions, but the only product category where it’s common is high-performance flashlights.
An important thing to keep in mind is that most cylindrical lithium batteries don't have protection circuitry since they expect the device itself to have it, so if the battery shorts out while outside the device, that's a really big problem. Same with many RC/drone batteries. I guess manufacturers could embed the protection circuit in one of the terminals but that's expensive so surprise surprise no one does it.
Rectangular batteries used in older phones and laptops do have built in protection, but there's also no real standard sizes and shapes. The closest thing might be the Fairphone or Framework Laptop batteries, at least those companies probably wouldn't care if someone else started making third party batteries of the same form factor until it becomes a de facto standard. Kind of like how everyone cloned IBM's PC until it became the standard.
I guess manufacturers could embed the protection circuit in one of the terminals but that’s expensive so surprise surprise no one does it.
Battery OEMs don't do it, but adding a protection circuit to the end is extremely common in the flashlight industry. Ideally, the springs in the battery compartment provide some flexibility about battery length so both bare and protected cells work.
I grew up in the 90s and I remember how many things took D cell and AA. What got me thinking about this was cordless drills. D cell drills were pretty worthless, but now with today's batteries, they are just as good as corded. Shit I was at Lowes the other day and you can get a riding lawn mower that is battery powered. So yea today's electronics are much more efficient, but batteries last longer, can be recharged, and provide substantially more power.
Yeah, good point. I can't think of anything I had as a kid that would be drastically improved with modern batteries, but for sure cordless power tools are a big change. I have a cordless electric chainsaw - that wouldn't have been feasible in the 70s.
From 1990 to 2000, AA capacity in watt-hours basically doubled. Which did mean anything you had could have modern batteries, since you'd just... buy new batteries.
This is mostly how the DMG Game Boy needed 4 AAs and the Game Boy Pocket got away with 2 AAAs.
Honesty, honestly half the time I would appreciate some good ole double A's in my e-waste
Sega GameGear. That thing had a better screen than any portable gaming device would for another 20+ years, but it would eat 6 AA batteries in less than an hour. There were rechargable battery packs you could get for it but they were heavy as shit and didn't last noticeably longer, you could play it with the battery pack plugged into the charger but then you're not actually mobile at all so you might as well play the same games on the Genesis.
The car 12v socket adapter was awesome though!
Do you remember how hot the big wall brick would get?
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Everything that was destroyed by leaking alkaline cells or stripping the battery door screws. LR44-powered toys were the worst.
It's good that we don't use mercury in button cells anymore, but it was exactly mercury that inhibited the off-gassing reaction that eventually leads to leakage.
My parents were wealthy, but stingy as fuck. Batteries of that time were just fine.
Literally anything. Even the things I still have that use AA and AAA batteries (of which the newest things are my VR controllers which is so stupid...), I have rechargeable lithium ion AAs and AAAs for so I don't have to constantly buy batteries.
As a kid, tho, I loved 9volts because they had the best connectors. I could take a little battery powered motor apart, glue it to some legos and use it to make machines that moved or did stuff. I almost killed myself once wondering what would happen if I took the cord from a busted fan, wired it to the 9volt battery motor and the plugged the cord into the wall outlet.
It blew up the motor and started a fire. 🤣
As a kid, tho, I loved 9volts because they had the best connectors.
It's the best connector because you can lick it
OG Game boy
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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