For a moment, I was deeply disappointed that nothing displayed. Then I remembered that they came with a brightness rotary dial. Swung that around and it was as good as the day I got it. The cartridge even held my childhood save.
What an incredible device.
Edit: got it, you helpfully left some batteries in the Gameboy for future you; you're not talking about opening the cartridge..
And I made that 18 years ago.
I had to change my intel q6600 only after upgrading my camera as Lightroom grinded to a hold with the bigger raw files.
Besides the Mainboard / capacity apocalypse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague?wprov=sfla1 ) I'm genuin happy with how well older things still work.
The last few years have seen people learn how to “roll”, effectively lightly pressing left or right and then drumming their fingers on the back of the controller, getting discrete taps far faster than typical. That lets modern players continue playing at level 29 speeds, and since the speed never increases again, they can play until the game gets to situations that could reasonably be ignored as impossible in the 80s.
The essence of this trick being that one can move multiple fingers to hit successively with time intervals impossible for a single finger; the same mechanism is also how fast typists work.
This is also an interesting one...
Thought 1 - is this a result of the limitations of assembly coding? Is it more efficient (either computationally or memory-wise) to store 29 constants rather than doing it computationally? This would make "29 levels" a conscious assumption and I'm assuming there must be some kind of technical hardware limitation that makes it 29.
Thought 2 - is this a result of game coding logic?
Game code runs on a game loop. So there is a "minimum" logical number of frames that things could possibly happen i.e. 1 frame. So, the "max speed" is set at 1 frame. You can't go any faster than that. So if they just made (e.g.) 1 frame less per next level, they just decided that 29 frames was a nice starting speed.
This makes "29 levels" less of an assumption, and more a consequence of other decisions.
In short, you hold the controller so that you have a finger resting on top of the d-pad, and then with your other hand, you drum your 4 fingers in sequence against the back of the controller, causing the d-pad to press into your finger in extremely rapid succession.
Tangentially to this, I'm part of the speedrun community, where controller legality can be a hot topic on a per-game basis. I think it's equally cool to maximize skill within the restrictions of the original controller as it is to use new hardware to break that barrier. Different communities decide upon what mods or alternate hardware is acceptable based on what they feel is appropriate for getting the most enjoyment out of their game.
Vod here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2011328765
It's mesmerising.
