Warning! This game is not compatible with this system

December 26, 2024 12:16 AM

Remember back when portable video game platforms transitioned to color, and how they all had games that required the newer in-color hardware? And if you put the cartridge into the older thing, you'd get a screen that said you can't play it on there? Anyway, someone has collected every single one of those warning screens for Game Boy Color, Neo Geo Pocket Color, and Wonderswan Color.
posted by DoctorFedora (6 comments total)

This is fun! My first thought was "why didn't they just implement a standard screen in the original non-color machines for this?" but of course that would have required them to be aware of the future, since the color versions didn't exist at the time. Since everyone was left to implement it themselves, we get this gallery!
posted by jordemort at 7:51 AM on December 26

Here is a similar site compiling warning messages for TurboGrafx/16 and Sega CD misconfigurations.

The Turbo (PC-Engine in Japan, and most affected games are Japanese) had a variety of add-on cards for its CD-ROM unit, so if you were using a System Card instead of a required Super System Card or an Arcade Card, you got yelled at. Likewise, if your backup RAM was full and a savegame couldn't be created, you can see a different lecture here.
posted by delfin at 9:06 AM on December 26

I’m a little surprised no one made a tiny Easter egg game, like a themed implementation of Snake or something, as a consolation prize.
posted by jedicus at 11:20 AM on December 26

Someone did. King of Fighters: Battle De Paradise for Neo Geo Pocket Color is a completely different game on the original model - a port of the 1979 SNK arcade game Yosaku, one of the company's earliest.
posted by BiggerJ at 1:09 AM on December 27 [1 favorite]

Castlevania Rondo of Blood on PCE famously had a goofy game if you had the wrong RAM card in, too
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:42 AM on December 27 [1 favorite]

Didn’t the Gameboy Color have perfectly square cartridges to prevent just this? The original Gameboy carts had a cut out in the top right corner that the power button slotted into, locking the cartridge in place, so if you tried to place a GBC cart in an original Gameboy it physically wouldn’t be possible to turn the system on. Definitely could put it in a Super Gameboy to get these messages though - just thought it was interesting to see the varying degrees of effort that went into these given how unlikely it was that somebody would see them.
posted by bookwo3107 at 9:35 AM on December 27 [1 favorite]