Take Your Console with You
Track down exotic add-ons, find obscure originals, or make your own portable gaming setups.
Suppose you have a favorite console such as the Nintendo NES and its associated game cartridges. Sure, you can play your NES in your living room on your TV, but that isn’t good enough for you. You’d really like to scratch your gaming itch wherever you go. You could cheat by putting an NES emulator on an open-to-homebrew machine, such as the GP32 ( [Hack #23] ), but not only is that unhackish, it may be legally questionable.
Why can’t you play the original NES cartridge in a weird, bootleg, or add-on portable game machine? You can—for many consoles. Here are some options for running official console games in a different, more portable way than originally intended.
Finding Obscure Official Portables and Add-ons
The easiest way to play TV-based console games on the go is to dig out the sometimes forgotten, often unsuccessful official portables. These were often released during the early ’90s as limited editions. Now they’re hard to find or otherwise neglected, but are still cool; their bulkiness is retro, briefcase-cell-phone chic. Or maybe not. Anyhow, the following sections detail the prime contenders.
Sega Nomad
Released back in 1995, fairly late in the life of the Sega Genesis, the portable Nomad system plays all Genesis and Mega Drive titles. The backlit 2.5-inch LCD screen is pretty good quality. The extra port to plug a normal Sega Genesis controller into is a ...
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