SEGA GameGear

The SEGA GameGear is a nice handheld which was released in 1991, and AFAIK the first handheld to sport a (backlit !) color LCD display, seven years before Nintendo released their GameBoy Color (which came quite late IMHO). The GameGear contains an 8-bit Z80 CPU (the predecessor of the 8088/8086 on which the PCs as we know them are based), running at 3.58 MHz and has 64kB main and 64kB video memory. The display was a backlit color LCD with a resolution of 160x144 and the video chip is able to display 64 colors at a time.

Although technical supperior to the GameBoy in many aspects (the GameBoys' only advantages are that its' Z80 was running faster and that the display had a higher resolution but only 4 shades of gray) it never was as sucessful as the GameBoy mainly for cost reasons: the GameGear was about twice as expensive as the GameBoy. Oh, and a GameBoy runs about 6+ hours on 4 AA batteries... the GameGear only about two and a half hours with 6 AA batteries (the backlit color LCD eats a lot of power).

Nevertheless there are some great games avaible for the GameGear. And it has some nice add-ons: there is a TV adapter which turns your GameGear into a small mobile TV and another adapter allows you to play SEGA MasterSystem games, which are almost bigger than the GameGear itself ;-)

Unfortunately I had lent my GameGear to a friend, but then we lost contact and I've seen my GameGear again. Years later I remembered this nice handheld and wanted to buy one again. I had to pay as much in 2002 to get one in original packing and condition as I payed back in ca. 1993/1994 when I bought my first GameGear (about DM 300,- which should be about $150), but getting it in "mint" condition was worth the price to me :-)