The Beamscope TV Magnifier - one of the most worthless game accessories of the 1980s.

Comments

• marlowe221@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The product may have been useless, but they had some awesome art for their advertisement!

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You needed something to convince gamers it was worth buying. Note the awesome art doesn’t actually give any sort of realistic idea of what the product was like.

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  • billiam0202@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s a pretty accurate summation of gaming in general in the 80s. The art in the book was nearly always better than the gameplay for lots of games.

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• SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I have something like this, but it’s for game boy.

  Also utterly worthless, it was distorted in uncomfortable ways, and honestly was a much worse experience than just using the screen.

  It’s also only a couple inches bigger, so dumb.

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  • sploosh@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I had one for my Game Gear that added more than few inches to the handheld’s depth, but did a decent job of semi-rectilinearly magnifying the screen. The backlight probably helped, since it wasn’t relying on light bounding in through the lens and then back out.

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  • PunchingWood@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You mean one of those bad boys with foldable zoom lens and light attachment that ate like 4 AAA batteries?

    I still have one of those here, thing was amazing to play in the dark lol

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• hahattpro@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is it a magnifying glass in front of the screen?

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Basically, yes.

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