Sorry to burst your unrealistic bubble, but your little Game Gear? It's likely not working anymore - with a failure rate closing in to 100% due to degraded capacitors. You will have to pay dear money, or know how to solder new ones yourself. Same thing applies for quite a number of other Sega consoles. Your (unlikely to be) beloved Jaguar CD? It is no longer working either. Some systems are more resilient, like your Game Boy, but many others are already facing real disc rot. Even then, for some of your old Nintendo games with a soldered battery, you will need to learn basic soldering to remove it and install a new one - and forget about your save file from when you were a kid. The data has long been gone. Your first few 3D0 and possibly Sega Saturn games? Might not be working anymore. The drive on your first gen Playstation? You might need to recalibrate the potentiometer if you are lucky.
My point is that the narrative that the old libraries we have still 'just work' is also false. There is a reason why retro gaming enthusiasts are increasingly having to learn general principles of upkeep and game preservation - or they move into emulation altogether as the best way to 'preserve' these games. I have a vast collection of oldies, amassed from when I was a kid in the 80s. I am under no illusion, that most of the games I have actually do not 'just work' anymore.
