The most unrealistic thing about this post is the idea that you might drop a GBA and break it’s screen. Those things were practically indestructible.
Not unrealistic at all. I traded someone a shiny blastoise for one with a broken screen that still worked fine. Still think I got the better end of that deal.
Really curious what was broken about the screen. There is no glass, the LCD is recessed… Did a connection come loose?
Just no glass, it worked fine otherwise.
That’s an easy repair, literally just https://www.ebay.com/itm/284415448140?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-213727-13078-0&mkcid=2&itemid=284415448140&targetid=4580909053911848&device=m&mktype=&googleloc=93527&poi=&campaignid=603247654&mkgroupid=1236951625700523&rlsatarget=pla-4580909053911848&abcId=9316139&merchantid=51291
I once called Nintendo as a kid when my DS hinge broke for no reason. I had it for under a year and there was info about a warranty. They told me that they had already fixed that defect and they would not cover it.
Did you try flying to Japan to exchange it?
How the fuck did anon post from the future though?
Just America’s stupid date format.
mm/dd/yy is a crime akin to min:sec:hour
There is min:sec:hour? I feel incredibly fortunate to have never interacted with it.
I think I heard the whoosh.
It makes sense with spoken English. You say March 3rd not 3rd March. You could say 3rd of March, but it’s a bit uncommon
I get the increased efficiency of ddmmyy in a number based format, but it’s not hard to see how it evolved the other way from the language
But why do US-Americans say March 3rd? The British don’t. They prefer 3rd of March. And the USA loves their 4th of july…
You are right we do still say 4th of July, but usually we tend to just prefer a different format when talking about everyday things. I’m going to visit on July 15th, I have an appointment May 12th, etc. This is much more natural in American English. Saying the “12th of May” just sounds overly formal. Which is fine for a holiday, but not everyday speech.
So I guess the question is when did this shift between American and British English occur in relation to the creation of our dating formats.
I assume, like most things English, Americans kept the language more or less the same while the Brits shifted how they use the language. The European languages that are spoken in the Americas haven’t changed much since colonization while the Europeans have been changing their languages drastically in the past 4 centuries
You say March 3rd not 3rd March.
If you are Yoda.
Yea makes total sense - so you’d go for the logical yyyy-mm-dd format then, to fit with how you speak the date? Right? 😅
I’ve never met an American English speaker that says today is 2026 March 3rd. They would say today is March 3rd 2026. If the year is included at all, usually it isn’t and is understood.
USians. The rest of America uses metric and normal dates
Fair point.
I’ve been using yyyymmdd and was appalled when I found out the ones appaled by the American method uses ddmmyyyy. It doesn’t even sort chronologicaly in alpha numeric ordering. Just why???
Edit: I just realized that ddmmyyyy looks like dummy and that’s how I’m going to refer to it from now on.
It’s worse, the American standard is mm/dd/yyyy.
I go by yyyy/dd-mm:ww because I’m special
Oh boy, never look up big / little endian in computers
Both big and little endian make some logical sense, unlike the US date format which instead is like the middle endian (in)famously used by the PDP-11.
Yeah, I seem to remember that architecture code is done little endian, and the network stack is big endian. Then there is bi-endian, which I have no clue how that works.
When naming files that need to be alphanumerically sorted, yyyymmdd it’s absolutely what anyone I know will use. But in writing or language, mmddyyyy is the way to go. You start with the most gradual denominator, since it’s the most important and you sometimes skip the larger ones because they can be evident
You start with the most gradual denominator
So, the year. YYYY-MM-dd.
and you sometimes skip the larger ones because they can be evident
So, skip the month: dd-MM-YYYY.
There’s no scenario in which MM-dd-YYYY makes more sense. Unless you’re expecting to communicate with someone with heavy brain damage who cannot retain information for 0.2 seconds, I guess?
Unless you’re expecting to communicate with someone with heavy brain damage who cannot retain information for 0.2 seconds, I guess?
I mean, that’s not an argument for a better system, though; if you’re saying, “Yeah; you won’t be able to contextualize this info. yet until the next bit of info. in 0.2 seconds,” a person can certainly do that but it’s still working-around the inefficiency by retaining the day – which means nothing in any context which requires knowing the month – until you find out which month the day in question is in 0.2 seconds later.
I’d much rather have consistency. If yyyymmdd is the best solution for file names, it’s the best across the board.
How do you say it though? „It’s the 2026 March 12“?
Writing and speech don’t need to be the same. You can say “March 12th, 2026” while writing it as either (all numbers) 2026-03-12 or (as spoken) “March 12, 2026”. Just like you might write “$100”, even though you’d never say “dollars one hundred”
That just makes texts harder to read. In my native language, we‘d read 12.03.2026 as „12th 3rd 2026“, not as „12th of march 2026“. My instinct would instantly just read 2026-03-12 as „2026 oh-3 12“. Which, I guess is understandable but not a great flow.
But I also don’t get your dollar thing. We write it 100€ because that’s the way you read it.
Here in the states we use short hand usually. So your date would just be stated as, “March 12th”. Long format would start off as, “in the year 2026 AD/CE…” which is usually done in things like proclamations by local governments for naming a specific day in someone’s honor.
For previous and current dates, people definitely use mmddyyyy and I don’t like it. I would much prefer to use something along the line of star-dates from star trek time expressed in years only: 2026.19178 (March 12 00:00). This fixes the need for leap years/days/seconds in calendars and instead dates become accurate.
They don’t use ddmmyyyy, but mmddyyyy
That’s not the future it’s 26th March 2001.
No, 26 March 2001 was a Monday, not a Saturday. Something’s very fishy here, the screenshot seems to be fake.
deleted by creator
The memory of breaking the screen of my Gameboy SP.l is burned into my mind forever.
What a great lesson to stupid kid me: Maybe don’t keep expensive tech in your pocket as you wrestle the other kids 🤦
Were GBAs region-locked?
They are not. They are region free.
They’re not even connected to the internet. Why would region matter?
DVD players used to be (probably still are?) region locked, and those didn’t require internet service either. The region was either hard coded or could only be changed like 5 times.
It was an attempt to enforce geographic licensing fees and stop piracy.
Yeah, if media companies can torture consumers they will usually try to. See also the Sony Rootkit.
In that light it’s actually surprising that the Gameboys never had region locking.
Yeah, I have not given Sony a dime since they thought they could install malware on consumer computers. When they got caught, they doubled down and released a “fix” that was even worse malware. FUCK Sony.
Regional game releases were language limited
For some media formats there were legitimate issues.
For instance, American NTSC encoding’s 30fps (29.97 actually, but not diving into color encoding right now) refresh rates were due to the 60Hz American electrical grid, whereas PAL encoding’s 25fps was due to a 50Hz electrical grid.
It’s also why American tvs showing a panning shot of a film (24fps) or a European TV program will sometimes look choppy. They added filler frames when re-encoding for NTSC.
The GBA was region free, but Nintendo was region locking their consoles from the start. For example, the n64 is capable of playing games from any region, but the Japanese games had different tabs, and wouldn’t fit in a US console without modding the slot.
You wouldn’t be able to play American cartridges on a Japanese one if they were region locked. I ran into that with a dvd drive in my PC once. It’s not checking anything online, it was something on the disc/drive.
PS2 was region locked as well, although you had the possibility for a network upgrade I never had that extention.
My father brought over Crash Bandicoot from the states one day and it had a red label instead of the black/blue one we had in the EU and completely refused to play on our PS2.
Nintendo did it to control their three markets separately. JP games came earlier and Nintendo carefully planned when games were available in each market. They also did it cause some regions were cheaper and they didn’t want anyone not paying NintendoTax™.
People will argue Switch 2 isn’t region locked, but I’ll be fucked if Japanese only language in JP Switch 2 isn’t a region locking mechanism. That thing is half off in Japan compared to EU. Maybe its not a traditional lock but they’re doing selective exclusion.
Blatantly fake. Anon is talking about Nintendo.
No. A random game shop
Who remembers where they bought their game consoles? Did he give the address of a Best Buy off the top of his head?
Its odd what becomes a core memory to an 8 year old.
Yeah OP says 12 year old. I guess I can see you remembering a purchase like that around that age.
And I guess I remember where I got the phone I’m using right now.
Ebay?
To this day i know exactly where my first Gameboy color was bought. I even know the street name off the cuff, not the number tho.
Not as unlikely as you think i would say
I do. Especially when I was young. This was 2002, so it’s probably the same store he went to all the time to browse. (Assuming this is real, of course).
I don’t know where the consoles my parents bought me were from, because they were always surprise gifts. But I sure as hell remember where the ones I bought with my own money were from, where a I bought a few particularly important to me games, and where I used to browse with my parents. Not address off the top of my head but I could pretty easily look most up now, or even years ago with the internet.
Kirby’s Dreamland 3 was from a discount bin at the Walmart where my family lived until I was 8. Death and Return of Superman for the SNES was from the video rental store we used to frequent after we moved, when they started selling off their old SNES games. Lots of games from one particular Gamestop in between the grocery store and the movie theater. Midnight release of Smash Bros Brawl there. Got a used N64 and some games for it there during the early 360 era too. PSP and some games for it was my first “real” purchase completely with my own money (no birthday or christmas gift money towards it) and was done at a Gamestop in the corner of a local mall. Moved 8 hours away with a GF and picked up Aladin, Starfox, and Super Metroid for the SNES for prices that would now be robbery from a local retro games store before the collectors started getting into retro games (still haven’t checked if they’re legit or repros, and I should because that store sold a few romhacks on physical cartridge from a different display area in the store). Moved back with my folks after a rough break up. Bubsy 3d from a new store that sells all sorts of used stuff out of what used to be an old Border’s book store where I had previously been to for a midnight Harry Potter release (cut me some slack I was like 10 for the Potter and it was long before any of the drama). Switch from a Gamestop in the town where my wife grew up.
Yes, I wish I remembered more important stuff, but I think people have forgotten what buying video games was like in the “old days”. You had word of mouth, experience with previous games in the series, cart and box art, and maybe a review from a gaming magazine to go off of. So it was an experience. Unless you were one of those kids that was going out to buy a brand new game, you used to actually browse and decide. It was a big deal because you’d get maybe one new game for 6 months at a time. I used to strecth things by trying to get a few used games instead of just one new one. Sometimes you got a flop, like when I bought Croc and Croc 2 because they looked fun and I liked the humor on the back of the box. Not bad games, but I already had experienced Crash Bandicoot 2 and Spyro 3. Early 3D platformer controls like Croc just weren’t my thing by that point.
In some ways I miss it. On the other hand, I have a lot less “meh” games hanging around now.
“Fun” fact I just remembered. Shortly after I graduated high school, a former classmate of mine became the manager of the Gamestop I used to go to the most. While I was out failing out of university, 4chan’s /v/ideogames board started the “meme” of prank calling Gamestops and finding increasingly roundabout ways to ask if they had Battletoads. This former classmate of mine had a total crashout when his store got hit and ended up rage dumping on Facebook, where he had his employment listed publicly. Eventually he started posting the numbers they were getting the calls from trying to get people to spam call back. Cost him his job.
My dmg was a gift from my father when i was 12.
I bought my snes from gamesworld. The wii from ebgames. The switch from catch.
I got my 2600 on ebay
thats nice dear
Im happy for this fake person
How did a 12 to know ? How did the shopowners know that he wasn’t lying?
