I have an old Sega Genesis and 20+ games for it. A few
of
the games seem to be wearing out, because I need to
mess
with them quite a bit to get them to work. It's not
because
of the Genesis itself-most of my other games work fine. I
also remember having a Sega CD as well, and by the
time
the sega CD crapped out, several of my games weren't
working very well (yes, I was one of the few people who
actually liked the SCD)
Now, I probably could have found parts to fix the Sega
CD
itself, but I didn't see any point in doing so (or finding
another used, but working, machine) for several reasons-
1. Most of my games were dying, and 2. I don't know a
whole lot about fixing electronic devices, unless it's an
obviously broken or loose wire or component.
If you google "Repair parts for (insert "old" console here)"
you'll probably get a lot of hits. But, the same can't be
said
for the games themselves, or the controllers for that
matter. Cartridges are generally more robust, but even
they eventually stop working.
Emulation is one solution to this problem, but it comes
with many legal issues and is basically stealing. That is,
unless, you still own an original copy (working or not) of
the game. Frankly I don't see why emulation of games no
longer sold, shouldn't be legal. I can understand,
however,
lawsuits reguarding emulation of games that are still
available as a NEW purchase-the company that made the
game doesn't benefit at all from garage sales, ebay or
pawn shops. Unless the game is available as part of some
"classic collection" disk in it's original form.
I propose the "Retro-Rescue Console" as a solution to
this.
The machine is about the size of, say, an original Xbox,
with several cartridge slots for different consoles on the
top, and 2 CD drives, one of which can burn CD's. It
comes
with pairs of re-makes of the controllers from all the
consoles it supports, including a "game gun" that can
work
with non-tube TVs, which plug into one of the USB ports
on
the front.
The console can play the games from the cartridges/CDs
themselves, and use a controller designed to duplicate
the
original controller from that console, but it doesn't end
there. If you have games that you play a lot and are
worried about wearing them out, you can put it into the
appropriate cartridge port or the first CD-ROM drive, and
press the "rescue" button on the console. It prompts you
to
place a CD-R in the drive, or plug in a USB drive. It then
proceeds to copy the game code into the CD-R (or RW) or
the USB storage device.
To play a CD-R backup of the game, you simply put it in
the drive and start it up. It's that simple. The backups
can
be played in any "Retro-rescue" console, but you can't
copy
the backups with the console.