I have this weird LCD game that I believe is so rare, at least I have no traces of it anywhere in the internet since I started looking for it approximately in 2009, nor did the bunch of collectors I emailed 5 years ago found anything..
A few days ago, I found a collector's website that looked promessing for me from the diversity of consoles & games he had there.
I emailed him images of the game [see under] and a link to video I specifically made for the occasion in my crappy English.
And he luckily figured out its manufacturer among other things using a UK patent database website after I snapped for him a picture of the game's back that had a patent serial number that also mentions it's designed in UK.
I felt so stunned for not thinking to lookup the existence of such database, my patents research was limited to Google patents website (you would think they'll have everything there).
My LCD game featured in the retro games collector website.[PDF archived print]
Pictures I sent him in the first email asking for ID:
The ones I sent him for display:
But it's no good story without some tragedy & an open ending.
The collector was so amazed by the playable ball bearing system it had -even though it didn't work for me since owning it in 2000/2001- that he asked me if I can open the game to take pictures of it's insides to match the patent's drawing of the playable ball bearings system with the image in his website. Which of course I knew it was a bad idea as well as he knew saying it in the email.
I wanted to tell him that the inside of the game doesn't look like the patent among other configurations the board had that might damage it if token apart (I already opened it 5 years ago to see if there is any stamp of the manufacturer in the board), but then I decided to open it and snap for him pics of what I see inside.. I did, but the price was the battery wire snapping (all the wires seems to be very weak).
It seems that the game only needs some soldering, but at the moment I don't have my soldering wire to do it, so things may go just OK; but because I know how jinxed sometimes I can be when around electronics, I'm afraid to do the mistake I always do when soldering an electronic component, which is touching by accident the plastic edge of the device and leaving there an irreparable dent, so I'm thinking that I may just take it to a friend of mine who repair smartphones to do the job!
If I've read what a collector said in the point 5
here earlier on, it would've saved me the hustle, but I'm the one to be blamed :-P .
The insides' pictures I took and sent him:
I 'm still waiting to receive an email from him if these last two images are good for display or he wants others in a different angle or something.
I'll update you if I fix it or not. Wish me good luck!
UPDATE: I fixed it with no issues. And the guy didn't email me back anymore nor did he add those pics to his website, that tells me he probably didn't see my email (or don't care, whatever).
UPDATE 2: The guy eventually responded when I showed him this blog post with that update at the end.
UPDATE 3: He lately sent me new information about the handheld game !! He was able to identify the producer of the game as Videojet through an Ebay sale! My courtesy in the older link has been moved to the newly found game's type in the Videojet section! [see the link above under the olde junk link]
Here is an updated pdf of the correspondence I had with this collector:
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