![]() ![]() His rather grim reaction to the photos I snapped told me all I needed to know – the news wasn't good. I knew that Lock's speciality was Mega CD systems, hence my initial contact. He's got a fondness for Sega's '90s hardware, and has resurrected Famicom, Famicom Disk System, Twin Famicom, NEO-GEO AES, MVS, Master System, PC Engine Duo, Mega Drive, Multi-Mega, Saturn Mk1/Mk2, PlayStation, and PlayStation 2 consoles during his career. He has repaired countless machines over the past few years, many of which were seemingly destined for the scrapheap. ![]() Lock is, for want of a better term, a technological wizard. ![]() All it took was a few photos of the inside of the Mega CD – snapped at Lock's behest – to totally destroy that mindset and send me spiralling down a rabbit hole of retro gaming despair. While I'm keenly aware of the fragility of optical media and the sensitive hardware required to read such discs, I've always laboured under the impression that anything cartridge-based is near-invincible, and is still going to be in good working order when I'm touching 80 – at which point I'll no doubt be getting comments from Elijah Wood-style punks mocking me for 'using my hands' to play my 'baby's toy' (if I'm still in any position at that age to even do so, of course).Įven when I approached Simon Lock, someone I've followed on Twitter for years thanks to his fascinating documentation of retro repair jobs he's undertaken, I was still of the opinion that while my beloved Mega CD might be to blame, it was perhaps more down to it being a hardware revision that the folks at Analogue hadn't encountered previously, hence the weird issues. If you're anything like me, you've got a sizeable collection of treasured retro systems, ranging right back to your childhood (my first love was the Mega Drive) to more recent curiosities (last year's big retro purchase was a Japanese GameCube complete with HDMI connector). "Everything put together falls apart" is the kind of sage-like adage that you often hear elderly relatives offering up over the dining table in-between moaning about Brexit and discussing the weather, and is a phrase most people under the age of 30 will surely dismiss out of hand, but for me personally – as someone who hits the ripe old age of 40 this year – it's becoming harder and harder to ignore, for more reasons than one. ![]()
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