It wasn’t that good. The system already drained AA batteries like virgin sacrifices but imagine fm radio dials to sync for tv channels… That being said.. chefs kiss…
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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I had the AC adapter when I got mine as a kid, which helped a ton with that. It was definitely hungry.
I think it was pretty rare, at least after the first year or so. I had a Game Gear maybe a year after it launched, and I desperately wanted this as a kid so I could watch TV in my bedroom or on car trips. I searched everywhere, called stores, etc. but never did find one.
I got a GameGear from a garage sale that had a bunch of accessories including this... It was definitely rad for car trips, but it would chew through 6 AAs in about 2.5-3 hours, and my parents shut that down pretty fast.
Yep!
An every time I was in Toy r Us, Babbage's, Children's Palace or looking througu the JC Penny's Christmas catalog, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and oh so desperately wanted it....despite not owning a Game Gear...😅
That would have been so baller back in the day.
I wonder whether it digitised the video signal and sent digital RGB data over the connector, or whether there were analogue video channels provided for such a device.
Also, in any case, whether any hobbyist hackers have built adapters to use their Game Gear as a monitor for anything else through the same mechanism. (A HDMI in adapter would be cool, if slightly ridiculous.)
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TIL
Yes! I remember wanting one and envying the kid on the bus with his!
I gotta get my gamegear fixed. It’s too bad we switched over to digital OTA signal because I would love to mess around with this tuner.
There was one for the Gameboy Advance too! Loved that thing.
I saw this once or twice. Taxi driver had it mounted on his panel to watch something on break. Somewhat solved the power draw problem with a car adapter...
This is the handsomest piece of analog gear I have ever seen. Absolute peak max sexiness, holy shite
Bubble-economy Japan led the way for an insane amount of features, aesthetics, and innovation for personal electronics. Most of it was dead-sexy stuff.
One of my favorite examples, the Sony MSX HitBit F1XD:
Is this a computer in a keyboard ? Staggering beauty. Magnificient arrow keys
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Everything is a rectangle now 😭
I wish I didn’t lose my gamegear
That is amazing
Had a Game Gear and really wanted one of these as a kid.
Still have that Game Gear and still really want one.
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Several of those old portables had tv tuners. None of them work anymore, at least not the USA.
There is a project out there that transmits video on UHF or VHF over short distances, basically a work around for old analog tuners. Basically hook up a video source and it will encode and transmit so you can watch stuff on gadgets with these old tuners.
Also, I don't recall if they all have the a/v in functionality like this one, but that provided another option for using the thing as a monitor for other things.
Xbox ONE, PS TWO, PS THREE as well
I understand why they think they needed to do it, but killing analog OTA television was seriously the stupidest decision I’d ever seen prior to 2009.
After that it kinda started to happen a lot. Which, uh, must be coincidence.
Back in the day I had the portible TurboGFX with TV tunner. Seemed so cool but rarely got that much use.