PixlBit

Maybe dedicate a month or two to handheld console generations?

My favorite console generations was 16-bit.  Also have a soft spot for 8-bit and 32-bit.

Oh darn, totally forgot about handhelds. I'll add them into the appropriate generations. I added three before gen 1: Board Games, Minatures and Pinball. 

I can't decide between gen 5 and 6. It's probably when I had the most fun with gaming. 

Cary's absolutely right, it's all about the handhelds, man. 

I'm basically putting the handhelds in with the consoles of their generation like the Gameboy with the NES. 

Switch is kind of an odd beast. It was released in the latter half of 8th gen and will be competing with PS5 and XSX|S for some time as well. 

My favorite gen was 6th gen (PS2/GC) but my favorite system is the Switch.

These generation borders are pretty fuzzy especially recently. 

I liked gen 6 quite a lot. I was heavily collecting, magazines were still a thing, I was going to flea markets for deals - pretty fun times. 

Handheld, Arcade and PC are less well-defined ... well, ok handheld definitely has its own generations if we're talking major video game companies but even still ... 

It all gets pretty messy trying to define definite time periods for all this stuff. It seemed like 5 years was a generation until gen 7 and then they get longer like 7 years. 

There were a lot of intermediate systems that came out in the middle of a generation that don't fit in with the big dogs of the generation and didn't match the power of the following gen's mainstays. In the 80s and 90s, those systems came from would-be rivals, but over the last ten-15 years they've been mid-generation refreshes from the Big Three.

Examples would be the Atari 5200, which came out around the time of the Colecovision, so the CV and the 5200 could be seen as a mini-generation between the 2600, Intellivision, Odyssey2, and the Bally Astrocade. The Atari XEGS, which was an Atari XE repackaged as a console, and the 5200 itself was based on a simplified version of the architecture thaf powered the early Atari 8-but computers; it very was easy for hackers to port 5200 games to the 8-bit computers. Atari's third gen entry is generally considered to be the 7800, which was outclassed by the NES and Master System. The CD-I, 3DO, and Jaguar, which were positioned as more powerful competitors to the SNES and Genesis, yet were badly outmatched by the Saturn, PS1, and N64. The Wii U, which was not as powerful as PS4, X1, or the Switch. The PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. The Switch itself is competing against the 8th and 9th generation Playstations and Xboxes. 

Yeah, if I include stuff like the Vectrex and such things get really messy. 

I was interested in the other Atari systems back in my collecting days but I never found them locally or had enough games I wanted to really pursue them.

The Atari 8-bit line (400/800/XL/XE) had a lot of games, and I'd call it the second best gaming machine of the 80s, after the NES. It had RPGs, adventure games, action games, and most of the same ports that the 5200 did. I liked the XL/XE version of Donkey Kong better than Nintendo's NES version, in part because that was one of the few versions to have all four levels in it. Most home versions omitted the Cement Factory level, including the NES version.

And the best part was that you could play all these great games with a standard 2600 joystick instead of the horrible 5200 joystick. So the 8-bit line was basically what a really great version of the 5200 would have been like. And later on, I found out that Genesis controllers would work perfectly on the Atari 8-bit, since they both have the same 9-pin connectors.

Anyway, those were suggestions if you wanted to stretch this out to a twelve-part series.

I remember seeing other Atari systems for sale at Radio Shack back in the 80s and was always curious about them. It would be neat to pick up an Atari 7800 and dig deep into its library. I may do that someday. 

jeez.  We're old. 

My life basically began at the creation of video games, but why not go even older. I can't play the games of the future, but the deep past is accessible.