i once met the dev team of the "stella" atari 2600 emulator at a C3 conf. they were competing to make the smallest possible demo for the console, and they'd made a thing that fit into 14 bytes. it just drew some colors, nothing fancy, but still. to demo it there was a real 2600 and a pcb with a compatible edge connector. the only thing on the board was sixteen 8-position DIP-switches, which the dev set by hand to the code of the demo. ran exactly as well on actual hardware.

sidenote, stella is a neat little emulator because not only can you see and edit all those 128 bytes of ram at once during runtime, it also has a "beam display" that shows you where the electron gun in the actual tv would be pointing at any moment in your program. since the 2600 is so barebones you basically have to compute pixels on the fly exactly when the beam passes over the correct position on the tv. they call it "racing the beam". there's a whole book about it.

There's multiple consoles which were nothing but a display and controller adapter for the cartridge which needed to have all the smarts

And in the middle to end of the Gameboy Color era and Gameboy Advance era most game cartridges had extra processing power internally.

Honestly it kinda looks more like a North American Saturn than a Genesis/MegaDrive or Master System. In which case the batarang controller would be slightly more accurate.

Sidenote: I still haven't sorted out what the difference is between the three-button and six-button controllers.

I didn't have a Genesis as a kid so I only occasionally got to use them.

I remember grabbing whole collections of NES games at yard sales for like $10-20. It's wild how much people would just let stuff go for. And the general consensus was always that they didn't know what they were worth. Like... You dropped $60 on one of these games, and now I'm buying them off you for $2 a piece? I'm just gonna hand you the money, try not to look excited, and walk away like this was a smooth drug deal...

I also picked up a working NES from the curb, on top of a trash can. I assume they left it on top in case anyone wanted it, but still, that thing was an hour away from going to landfill.

Thanks to exploiters like Jim Halperin!

Not if they're in a poor state like from a dumpster (-: