Video Games 101 comes from a period when explaining a console meant putting the CPU clock speed, RAM, color palette and screen resolution right next to the history.
Eric Arnol-Martin’s site, carrying a 2012 copyright notice, describes itself as a source for detailed history, information and specifications for video-game consoles. It also contains Tomb Raider walkthroughs, icons and wallpaper, because independent websites rarely respected the departmental boundaries a modern content strategy would insist upon.
The console section runs from older systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo through the Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox, then onward into the Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One era.
Each entry pairs a short historical description with “Quick Specs.”
Those specs are the good stuff.
Hardware history before every number became searchable metadata
The pages record CPU names and frequencies, memory amounts, graphics capabilities, resolutions and other compact hardware facts. The handheld section similarly covers machines such as the Nintendo DS, PSP, Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita.
The historical prose is worth reading as a period artifact rather than treating every claim as definitive. Some summaries compress complicated market histories aggressively, and the site occasionally preserves the perspective of the moment it was written. A Nintendo DS page, for example, discusses stores selling out around February 2005 rather than describing the machine from the comfortable distance of two decades later.
That is part of the value.
A current encyclopedia can tell you what ultimately happened. An older enthusiast page can tell you what facts seemed important while the hardware was still culturally alive: bits, clock speeds, launch competition, backwards compatibility and whether a new handheld was actually sitting on store shelves.
The site has also picked up some of the grime that accumulates around long-lived domains, including an unrelated gambling link on the current homepage. That does not erase the surviving console material, but it is a useful reminder that keeping a domain online is not the same thing as preserving it perfectly.
For retrocomputing research, exact model names and specifications provide the long-tail search surface that CacheRat wants from the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list. Old enthusiast pages often preserve both technical numbers and the contemporary assumptions surrounding them.
There was a time when knowing how many colors a console could display felt like knowing its horsepower.
Video Games 101 kept the spec sheet.