Owning weird consoles back in the day

[Anonymous No.5877905]

Did you or any of your friends own any of the stranger retro consoles growing up? I'm pretty much talking about anything that wasn't made by Sega, Nintendo or Sony during the 90s, or anything not Atari, Sega or Nintendo during the 80s. What was it like, any weird or interesting stories about how you came about getting one of these back then or owning one?

Pic related; some spoiled brat I knew back in the 3rd grade had a Jaguar and of course he liked to say how much better it was because it was 64-bit. Not going to lie, it made me jealous as a Genesis owner. Only got to play it once and remembering that the controller was weird as shit. We played Cybermorph I think and some other game I can't even remember. Kid's dad was a millionaire businessman, but he lived with his mom. He was a total prick and had anger issues.

[Goys R Us No.5877917]

Our family computer was a TI99/4A when I was a kid. After that I chose what platforms we had.

[Anonymous No.5877976]

Went to a middle and upper class highschool from 1990-1994 and I knew all the gamers. The genesis was by far the most represented console followed by the SNES. No one admitted to owning a game boy or game gear but one student had a lynx.

No one had a neo geo, jaguar, cdi, 3do. There was a single sega CD owner. Not only did no one at my high school have one of those systems, they did not personally know anyone who had one either. Most normalfags and casual gamers didmt even know those systems existed unless they read gaming magazines.

There was a single game specialty store in my city that had a 3do for rent, and I grabbed it for a weekend and had some friends over to see what ot was all about. So out of myself and hundreds of peers and thousands of their family members, no one actually owned one of the exotic systems.

Keep in mind this school was made up of families of government employees, restaurant owners, car dealership owners, professors and a handful of doctors and lawyers. These families could easily afford the premium consoles but ignored them.

[Anonymous No.5878000]

>>5877917
>TI99/4A
Same here. With floppy drive, the unwieldy PEB and a color monitor. I got it when my father bought a Commodore 64 in late 1983. I actually managed to learn a bit of TI basic on that machine, but never got as far as my father who wrote small games on the TI and - later - C64.
My next own machine was the A2000, bought in 1987 with financial backing from my parents.

[Anonymous No.5878071]

>>5877905
I had the jaguar. My dumb ass brother plugged the wrong power supply and ruined it. Dino Dudes (Jaguar version of The Humans) was my favorite cart.

[Anonymous No.5878091]

>>5877905
My mate grew up with a 3DO, seems his dad loved buying strange, overpriced electronics and still does. Last thing he bought was one of those record players with a laser stylus.

>>5877976
why would no one admit to owning a GB? Was it seen as kiddy in your high school?

[Anonymous No.5878094]

>>5878071
I hated Atari for using terrible plug choices. Burnt out my lynx because my third party power supply demonstrated that the power jack and the headphone jack are fucking identical.

[Anonymous No.5878547]

I had a Microvision back around 1980.
>inb4 grandpa

[Anonymous No.5878564]

One of my friends had the Sega Channel for a bit and a 32X. Another one had a 3DO, but I'm not sure when he got it. I don't think I really remember playing it at his place until middle school, so that would've been the late 90s/early 00s and not when it was really current.

[Anonymous No.5878584]

>>5877905
I had non retro stuff like a gp32 and ngage.

[Anonymous No.5878678]

Had a Sega CDX after begging my parents to buy me a Genesis. My sister's friend used to bring her younger brother over and he would always badger me to sell it to him. It's like he knew the system was an oddity and would be somewhat valuable someday. I think he's a drug-addict now

[Anonymous No.5878785]

>>5877976
makes sense to me. Network effects are a thing with consoles; a more popular console will attract more attention from publishers who will make more games which will attract more consumers, and so on and so on. So even if you're rich, there's little reason to bother with "alternative consoles" because you know they're only going to get a couple games and probably die off soon after that anyway.

Only exception I can think of to this would be the Neo Geo. But that was a different scenario because it was essentially just consolized arcade equipment, so it was just getting good games by virtue of being the same as the MVS, which is where SNK's focus really was.

[Anonymous No.5878825]

had a 3do back in the day and wasn't bad at all, was pretty sweet, had some amazing games like Star Control 2, Killing Time, Return Fire, Road Rash, Need for Speed etc...biggest regret was selling it with like 100 games for a Saturn with 3 games. huge mistake.

[Anonymous No.5878830]

>>5877905
I know you said no sega, but there was ONE kid I knew in the late 90s with a dreamcast. Nobody else had one, and until I moved to a new city in 2001 he was still the only kid to have one. I remember him telling me you could play online which sounded cool but i never was at his house when he hooked up to the modem.

[Anonymous No.5878840]

>>5878830
Come to think of it I was one of the only people i knew that had a Dreamcast. My cousins did too, but that was it.

[Anonymous No.5879974]

I remember playing Duke Nukem on this. It was weird.

[Anonymous No.5880086]

>>5877905
Weirdest thing I ever saw as a kid was a Lynx. I learned about the Game Gear from Sonic Jam and I asked my parents for one but never got it. Everything else I learned about from magazines but never saw in person until much later.

[Anonymous No.5880187]

i knew a kid who had a turbo grafx. i know its sega but my little brother got a 32x addon for our genesis. we also had gamegear and saturn. and i know its Nintendo but he also got a virtua boy for his birthday once. that thing would kill your neck. i knew a kid who had the neo geo. he always talked about having it but never about what games he played/had. i knew a kid in high school who had the jaguar and the jag cd. i owned a 3do in the early 2000s... and a pc engine duo r. i used to try to sell them back when /vr had the b/s/t thread.

[Anonymous No.5880251]

>>5878094
I got this old DJ mixer where the power supply uses a 3.5mm jack plug. What the fuck are these people on?

[Anonymous No.5880723]

>>5877976
>5 years to finish high school
Fucking idiot.

[Anonymous No.5880730]

>>5878830
I knew plenty of people who had a Dreamcast back in the day. It was the hottest shit for a split second in 1999-2000 before the PS2 released.

[Anonymous No.5880773]

>>5880730
This. Knew a dude with a DC, shit was the tits.

[Anonymous No.5880821]

>>5877905
Had this.

And Slayer for it, worth it.

[Anonymous No.5880827]

>>5877905
I had a friend with a Master System and he never wanted to play it, which sucked because that was the only one I ever saw personally and wanted to see what it was like

[Anonymous No.5882852]

>>5877905
I remember in the mid-90's I was earning $4.25 pre-tax an hour and spending almost my whole 2nd check on a console by Victor called the WonderMega. I remembered seeing how cool it looked in EGM and I always wanted one. Everyone was really into the Playstation at the timeso $70 for the system but the $80 to ship it from Japan was really costly. I was surprised the door is motorized and is opened via software, instead of a mechanical spring/latch mechanism, which I thought was real cool that the EGM articles never mentioned.

Before the Dreamcast released, I got a TurboDuo and TurboExpress with a lot of great games all at once from a collector. It was a huge bundle for $200USD, but I've always wanted to play all the cool PC-Engine games with their cool cutscenes. I had a few friends that had the TurboGrafx and PC-Engines at the time and they all loved playing games on it and I wanted to enjoy that too like they did.

All of my friends bought a NeoGeo Pocket Color, but I didn't have the money so I always went over to their places to play the games. Years later, one found it and gave it to me. I still enjoy playing the system, and I wished it stayed around longer as a lot of the games are really good.

Back in school, I remember playing a lot of Tetris on TI-85s. It did not have the gradients like a GameBoy, but only the few rich kids were able to have Gameboys back then.

[Anonymous No.5882863]

>>5880821
>Slayer
That's one of the DnD games on the 3DO, right? How is it?

[Anonymous No.5883118]

When I was growing up, retro consoles were still a much more niche interest, so even the mainstream ones like NES and Genesis were considered strange

[Anonymous No.5883134]

I had a cybiko if that counts. Maybe it’s more a /g/ thing mostly used it to shitpost in local chat rooms with anyone else at my school who had one.

[Anonymous No.5883156]

I briefly owned an Action MAX. It was a light gun based console that used VHS tapes for gaming media. It was utterly fucking shit.

[Anonymous No.5883297]

I knew one kid in middle school with a Neo Geo Pocket Color, other than that all the kids I knew had Nintendo/Sega/Sony consoles. None of the stores near me really carried the other stuff so it's not surprising.

[Anonymous No.5883348]

I remember they built an Incredible Universe store near where I lived and going there once with my dad. They had so many consoles I'd never heard of before. At the time I remembered thinking that they weren't real consoles or something. Only one I remember specifically was the Neo Geo AES because my dad freaked out when he saw the price (I think it was $700 or around there).

[Anonymous No.5883541]

>>5877905
>anything not Atari, Sega or Nintendo during the 80s
Your zoom is showing. The first half of the 80's existed.

[Anonymous No.5883806]

>>5877905
The spoiled kid I babysat for some reason had a NGP, but never played it
My best friend had an A'Can, but it sat in a box in the closet the whole time he had it.
2 friends with dreamcast, rest had SNES a few had a Genesis.
A lot of my babysitters had a NES well into the 90s. Was fun because they had games I didnt have. Rad Racer, Zelda.. not much else I remember

[Biff No.5883815]

Why are the 3DO and Saturn fans always coming to the Jag forums just to flame? Stay on your own board.

[Anonymous No.5883856]

>>5877905
My friend had a jag he let me borrow sometimes, was a cool machine. Later when ps1 came out I bought some kids 3do for cheap and that was good times too

[Anonymous No.5885748]

>>5883856
>when you're such an underage, poor larplet a "jag" is a shitty old game toy

[Anonymous No.5886152]

Back in the early 90s, NEC was going to launch the TurboGrafx in my home country (SPAIN) but it seems that they cancelled at the last minute. Somehow... some shops got some stock to sell.

In 1994/1995 I was going to buy the MegaDrive version of ThemePark when I saw that they were selling a TG16 pack with five games for the same price I was going to pay for ThemePark and thought it was a no-brainer.

I enjoyed it a lot (Blazing Lazers!) eventhough I couldn't get more games back in the day. I still have the system

[Anonymous No.5886159]

>>5877905
A friend owned an SG-1000 back in the NES era. Only game I remember him having was Bomb Jack.