oh huh, apparently the main reason the game gear was such a battery hog was that it used a ccfl backlight
apparently you can mod a game gear to use an led backlight pretty easily and modded ones have comparable battery life to a game boy (about five times a stock game gear)
@packbat you don't really think about how recent LEDs usable for lighting are as a thing, really
as an electrical engineer today, we would never even consider using a CCFL for anything battery-powered
@Felthry oooh, that is quite cool!