I own an old Game Gear from the early 90s, and have been curious for years as to why it's such a power hog. It takes six (SIX!!) double-A batteries, all of which can drain within an hour or two of playing.

The original GameBoy only used 4 AA batteries and it certainly did not drain as fast as the Game Gear.

I understand that they are from different companies and used different concepts, but what exactly was the Game Gear doing that used so much power? I know it has color, would that make a difference?

4 Answers

According to Wikipedia: "[Game Boy's] monochrome screen, lack of a backlight, and less powerful hardware" is at the root of the problem.

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The poor battery life on the Sega Game Gear is caused by the backlight in the screen. It is a fluorescent tube which eats the batteries up at a rapid rate. Recently several people have experimented with replacing the fluorescent tube with LEDs, this dramatically increases the battery life, thus proving that the main power drain comes from the back light.

My understanding is that essentially the color LCDs of the time were big energy hogs. All the other color handhelds competing with the original Game Boy suffered from the same issue. The ones that offered backlighting also suffered from similar power drain there.

I can't comment on the issue of the power consumption of the chipsets, but that was likely an issue as well.

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I think that the battery life is about the game cartridge memory allocation: it's really large sometimes, but very rarely while playing (for example, Sonic the Hedgehog).

In addition, the color and the battery lasting more than 5 hours is a joke.

Edit

What I mean is that, in some games, it uses a lot of memory from the cartridge and if theres a lot of colors, it drains the batteries quickly: it's all a matter of how many pixels, colors, and memory is loaded. This is easily noticeable when the game slows down.

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