Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN FEBRUARY 2025?

On Sun, 09 Mar 2025 01:49:26 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote:

Yes, I was serious. Ugh, passive LCDs. Yeah, I didn't like those on
computer screens. Hence I preferred CRT back then.

But it was really hard to do hand-held portable devices with CRTs,
which meant they were fragile, expensive, and they ate batteries like
nobody's business!

(which were the GameBoys's biggests strengths: it was cheap enough you
didn't have to worry about little Timmy breaking an expensive device,
it was rugged enough that little Timmy would have a hard time breaking
it, and you weren't replacing its batteries every three hours... this
being in the era before useful rechargables were a thing).

There actually were a handful of devices that used CRT screens
(although I don't know if any were used in gaming devices), like the
Sony Watchman. But even the Gameboy's competitors -like Sega's
GameGear and the Atari Jaguar- languished on the shelves partly
because they opted for better, battery-hungry screens. In almost every
respect, the GameGear was a far, far better machine than the Gameboy,
but its 6 AA batteries lasted 3 hours, compared to the 15 hours for
the two AA batteries in the Gameboy. Sure, that meant that, with the
GameBoy, you were stuck with only monochrome color, but you were
'stuck' with it for 15 times the length of time it would take to power
a GameGear.

TL;DR: the LCD screen on the Gameboy sucked, but in a good way. ;-)