This is my original Genesis I bought in like '92(?) with one of my first paychecks from my first job at Chuck E. Cheese's (yes I'm fucking old).
I thought I sold it years ago but found out it was sitting in one of my mom's closets, so I bought a few cheap carts and hooked it up to a crt I keep around for just such occasions. It still works!
I am so goddamn happy, I just had to share and I figured you all might appreciate that.
I still have my OG Genesis in the garage. A couple of years ago I opened it up because the LED wasn't turning on - the system itself worked perfectly fine, just the light. Don't remember everything that happened but since then it hasn't powered on. I'm tempted to toss it, but then again, it's like 30 years old, so I think it deserves better.
I even remember the day I got it.
My parents would have killed me if they knew I spent money on a gaming console. I got dropped off over to my friend's house as a sleep-over because it was summertime. He lived within walking distance of Toys R Us. Went there with a bunch of cash and bought it and brought it back to his house. I knew I couldn't just bring the whole box back home without my parents knowing what was up, so I unboxed it and put each piece into a different plastic bag and mixed them all up in with my sleeping bag. To most people, it just looked like a mess of random electronic toys. When my mother came to pick me up, she started gossiping away with my friends mom for like 20 minutes. I asked her to pop the trunk and I snuck all the things into the car. When we finally got home, I pretended that I forgot the stuff in the trunk, so I went down to the garage and grabbed them a little at a time to bring back to my room. Thankfully the console itself wasnot that big so I kept it in one of the drawers in my desk, but I ran all the wires out the back. Over the next few weeks, I took out more and more of the parts and put them on my desk. At this point, it looked like any other piece of random electronics, so no one ever knew I did this. This is literally the first time I've ever told this story. Not sure if anyone else could relate, but toys and having fun were rather low priorities so ya had to sneak in whatever gaming you could do.
Jesus Christ, don't toss it!
I repair older consoles insofar I come across them. They're not made anymore so I like to preserve them.
I've kept it this long because I too would like to preserve it, and up until a couple of years ago, it was running fine. I'll keep it in the garage for now and see if I can get it going again one of these days. I even brought home this old flat plasma screen that work was throwing away. This predates HDMI and digital signals. But its a big screen (40"+) for it's age and rather thin. It was probably a $10k screen at the time. I kept it around because one day I wanted to hook up the Genesis to it because it takes in analog inputs like component and composite (as well as VGA).
Sounds great, but I'll have you know you can buy a cable to connect to composite. That's how I hooked up mine to my modern TV. Works great. I have an old CRT too, that's where it's hooked up most of the time.
These older consoles are simple repairs. Start with replacing the capacitors on the board. If that doesn't do it, you can find the problematic component with a multimeter