Toomanywires

I'd been on the lookout for a replacement Dreamcast since late last year. My previous DC had several issues, and buying a replacement model seemed more reasonable than trying to identify and fix each of them. I own a soldering iron, as well as several screwdrivers, but have no tinkering skills to speak of. After weeks of Mercari searching, I finally found what I was looking for: A Dreamcast that fulfilled all my requirements. 1. No yellowing 2. Photographic evidence of it reading a disc and running a game 3. ¥5000 or less 4. Non-anime avatar seller It was actually a lot harder than I'd expected to find what I was looking for. But I eventually got lucky, catching a listing just before I slipped into bed one evening, two weeks ago. A brilliant-white Dreamcast, a photo of it running a disc, ¥5000; non-anime avatar. It didn't have a VMU, nor was it boxed, but I didn't need any of that.  I dreamt about all things SEGA that night. It arrived a few days later, encased in bubbl...

After a few attempts, I was able to post a score worthy of the Cosmic Smash Top Twenty rankings. The built-in, hi-score table - a low bar that is in no way representative of the scores that real humans were posting back in the early-2000s - now had my name on it.  But Cosmic Smash wanted more. Upon completion, it gave me a 17-digit code that I could use to upload my total to www.cosmicsmash.com. As with any good arcade conversion, I was on the clock, and my precious passcode would disappear after 30 seconds. Intrigued, I snapped a picture and headed straight for my browser. Of course, the website was dead - a useless code for a long-since expired URL, and a leaderboard that no longer exists. While the website may be defunct, the scores have thankfully been recorded for posterity. According to Wikipedia: "At last update, the highest score on the third-party leaderboard was a two-way way of 590,678,903—both entries by an English player named "Alex" with a listed age of 11....