Congrats!! 🥳

No, really, I used to end with negative scores all. the. time. 😅

What, you don’t think a self-professed “former therapist” is an expert on infectious disease and vaccine development??? 😂

I do have to agree that the medical and scientific community’s consensus shouldn’t be “beyond reproach”, but only because the scientific method requires being open to new evidence that shows past theories to be flawed. (Key word evidence.)

Alas, a common tactic for spreading misinformation can be summed up as “a mosquito doesn’t care if the window is only open by an inch or all the way, it’ll fly inside regardless.”

Mod chips used to be necessary for playing games on CD-R, but now that can be done with just a 4-in-1 cartridge using the PseudoSaturn hack. My recollection is that Saturn mod chips only defeat the copy protection check and you’d still need another solution (like the 4-in-1 cart) for disabling the region-lock.

I used to think along similar lines, but later came to understand structural inequality. You see, we don’t all start on an even playing field. The children of wealthy adults have far more opportunity than children of working-class adults, for example. Children from families living in poverty may struggle to keep up with their peers in school if they aren’t getting adequate nutrition. (School lunch programs help, but don’t fully address the problem.) Our lineage and our luck play a large role in what we might think of as “merit”.

When it comes to racial equity programs for college admissions or the like, these programs exist because we acknowledge that people of colour — especially Black people — have been systematically oppressed for generations in ways that impact the following generations.

• Chattel slavery in the US wasn’t all that long ago, and when it finally ended, the former slaves didn’t receive any reparations — the slaveholders did, and Black people with no wealth and no land were essentially forced to work for what we’d call pennies in today’s money.
• The Jim Crow era is still part of living memory. The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was literally just a single lifetime ago and decimated one of the few communities were Black people had managed to accumulate wealth, killing an estimated 150 to 300 Black people and caused massive economic losses for the survivors, not to mention the immense trauma and the implicit threat it sent to similar communities.
• The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s is quite recent history, and there are still many people alive today who remember when Dr. King was assassinated while advocating and organizing for equal protection under the law.
• The War On Drugs was predominantly focused on Black communities in its 1980s heyday. Plenty of white people used the same drugs at the same time, but law enforcement disproportionately targeted people of colour. Aggressive policing of Black communities continues today, resulting in a lot of children with jailed parents.

Try to imagine being a Black child growing up today. You’re more likely to be in poverty and going hungry than your white peers, more likely to need to drop out of school to earn money, more likely to have a parent jailed, the list goes on, all while constantly getting subtle (and sometimes blatant) messages that you’re “inferior”.

You and I obviously didn’t create this situation, but the fact remains that we don’t all start life on equal footing. Yes, there are plenty of white people who grow up in poverty, have parents in jail, etc… but it’s not systematic for white people. Affirmative action in education is a way we can ensure more of the most talented Black minds can access the education and experiences they need to help break this repeating cycle and someday, hopefully, build a society without such immense barriers beginning from birth.

(edit: I’m Canadian now, but I grew up in the US so I’m much more informed about its history.)

If you want a more authentic experience, Retro-Bit made some officially-licensed Saturn and MegaDrive replica controllers including USB and Bluetooth versions. Or you can get a DIY Bluetooth conversion kit for Saturn controllers from 8bitdo.

For sure, the Fenrir ODE (optical drive emulator) is a great option if the CD drive is dying or dead. The drive in my Saturn still worked fine last time I checked, but I was lucky enough to pick up a Satiator which plugs into the rear expansion port and leave the CD drive intact. (I think the MPEG decoder for VideoCD was the only official peripheral made for that port.)

It’s very easy to get around region locking with a “4-in-1” cart, plus two of the other functions are RAM expansion (1MB and 4MB modes).

In addition to what others have said, it’s also becoming more difficult to find Saturns with working CD drives as they continue aging.

PS2 defaults to 4:3, digital out can be things besides HDMI, and the vast majority of 360 consoles sold had HDMI out. If you want to draw the line elsewhere, no big, do your thing, there’s no one True answer to OP’s question… but your comment feels like whataboutism to me and adds nothing of value.

In my view, systems without an HDMI output or which default to a 4:3 aspect ratio are retro. But I don’t expect everyone else to share this opinion, and that’s totally fine. 🙂

Direct link to the PDF: https://segaretro.org/images/8/8c/SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf