I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a majority of us who grew up with video games at some point wanted to untether our consoles from the TV and play where ever we wanted. I know I’m not the only one who sat inside during a rainy recess at school thinking of playing Spider Fighter on my Atari VCS or perhaps try and beat Super Mario Bros. during my free time at lunch period years later. Console manufacturers anticipated their audience’s wishes for freedom from wires and built many a hand held system from the venerable Microvision, to the Game Boy and Game Gear, all the way up to today’s PSP and Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, none of them allowed you to take the console games from your library and play them “on the go”.Only two hand held systems accomplished this feat: the NEC Turbo Express that played TurboGrafx-16 games and Sega’s Nomad that played Genesis games.While both were technical marvels of their time and did a great job of “breaking the cord”, the high prices ($299 for the Turbo and $179 for the Nomad), the size (The Express was rather thick and the Nomad was thick and wide) and the low battery life (around 3 hours each with a bunch of AA batteries) essentially killed those portable platforms.Even though we’ve come a long way since then with technology, we still can’t play our modern consoles in our down time away from the TV.Thankfully the big brains between AtGames and Hyperkin have taken those entertainment advances and applied them to give those who love the retro a chance to fulfill that childhood or teenage fantasy. Introducing the hand held system that attempts to do what Genesis Does: The GenMobile game system.
The GenMobile is what’s called a “Genesis clone”. It doesn’t have the original hardware or a retooling of the chips that Sega used to make its 16 bit powerhouse but instead has its own custom chipset that tries to mimic the original. This officially-licensed-by-Sega hand held resembles a small Sony PSP in shape and has a 2.4″ back-lit LCD display, a single speaker, a Playstation-style directional pad, six action buttons with a “start” and “reset” button, an audio/video out jack (allowing you to play the system on a TV), a headphone jack, a built in rechargeable battery (with power adapter) and about twenty games built in. It weighs a scant few ounces, but gets weighed down a bit when you use its best feature: the cartridge slot.Kept clean thanks to the spring-loaded hinge, you can pop in a majority of your Genesis cartridges and play them where ever you go.
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