CatPix

Yes, with such low power requirement, this kind of adapter will do the trick. And you oculd use it for other systems and/or keep the other tip for a morer powerful power supply. There isn't such thing as "enough adapters" for power supplies

Good call on you to ask. Is that the model you own (asking because the original Cassette Vision and Vision JR may use different PSU) https://www.ebay.com/itm/EPOCH-CASSETTE-VISION-Jr-Console-System-Boxed-Tested-JAPAN-Ref-CV0227-/313011450716 If it is, then the answer is here : You need a 6V DC power supply, with + on the outside and - on the inside (which is the opposite way nowaday) and 300 Ma but that is so low you'll certainly find something with 500 or 750 Ma (which is okay). If you don't have a 6V power supply, you can try with a 5V one; there is no danger in feeding a console a lower voltage than expected, but the difference in power may cause the console not to power or to produce a too weak video signal.

Yep, it's what I was thinking too, sounds like the Shuttle might have landed in the UK 😛 An odd choice since the Shuttle was Japan-only and the major import by Telegames were of TG 16 games and systems.

That's your American point of view. In Japan, players regularly wrote to Hudson for them to keep producing Hucards. And they did. Regular PC-Engine were sold along the Duo until the end. (CD sales in Japan accoutned for half of the PC-Engines sales, and until the end, eveen with the Duo, NEC-Hudson counted CD systems as "add-on") They "replaced" it in the US due to the lack of sales, but this is simply a side effect of the massively poor handling of US sales by the importers, not a decision of NEC-Hudson to replace the same system by the same with a CD-ROM.

The Duo is a TG16 with added RAM and a CD-ROM, nothing else. That would be like saying that the Mega CD is the Megadrive 2 (errr.... I mean, a real second system and not a redesign)

Depends how you define video games systems bits? Is it by the highest or lowest able part of the machine? Internally, the 68K (or variants) were able to work in 32 bits mode. It's even why the Atari ST is called ST : For SixtenThirthy-two. Yet, most medias of the time and now always considered the ST and Amiga as 16 bits machines. Is the PC-Engine (TG-16) a 8 or 16 bits system? Is the Intellivision 8, 10 or 16 bits? I do agree that design incompetence and developpers lack of familiarity/effort shouldn't be accounted for (unless we're talkign about the "feel" of the machine and not having a technical point of view), but this doesn't solve the fact that the Jaguar is a mismatch of processors and parts that use different word lenghts. Though, in my personal opinion, one of the critical part in a video game console is the RAM bus width, and in the Jaguar, the RAM bus is indeed 64 bits. (It's stilll not the ultimate solution : the PC-Engine have separate RAM and VRAM and to my understanding, the bus width of the CPU is 8 bits, but the bus width of the VRAM is 16 bits - the same issue arise but in reverse with the Intellivision which get 16 bits RAM for the CPU and 8 bits VRAM )

Retuning might be in order, as well as checking your belt. I was like you recently, getting error 22 all over, and thoguh "Hmmm my disk belt is not even 2 years old, it can't be that". When I opened my Twin, the belt snapped in half. Discussing with people selling belts, there are alot of low quality belts on the market, and also, when reproduction was much more rare and expensive, sellers would hold of belt stocks for years. That "brand new" belt you got in your Twin Famicom might actually have been manufactured 10 years ago...

That's fair, then :jap: Still the "nihongo japanese fream" was undeserved. I got the point, but since the topic was about "Japan VS the world" (as stupid as it is) I read all yours comments as talking about "in general" not " the US market" which obviously, as you said "computer gaming was a Western thing" really read as "Japan didn't had any computer game" thus why I went about talking about the Japanese market.

Where have you seen that I was implying that Japan was dominating the gaming world? I'm just trying to refute your half-assed points that gaming computing didn't existed in Japan and that they started with the Famicom. That they are unknow machines in the West is not relevant. That would be like me saying that the Atari 2600 was a half-assed machine with mediocre impact on the gaming market, because it's precisely what it did in Europe. A mediocre impact. You would find this assertion unjustified, rightly so.

DLC is "downloadable Content" not "downloadable data". I always head it being defined as an addition to an existing game. However it asks the question wether game patches count (probably not). Thus early game downlad services doesn't count since they made you download the whole game without addition to the original game.

Where does that weird notion come from? In Japan, the gaming market was almost always dominated by computers. You rarely see Japanese computer games for the simple reason that Western computers didn't really get a foothold on the Nippon archipelago until the 2000's, when NEC discontinued the PC-98 series. Japan had their own computers which were, for the most part, not exported either, or in unsignificant numbers due to their high price, driven mostly by the need of high resolution and large ROM for displaying kanjis - this also explain why Western computers were never popular in Japan in the 8 bits era; try drawing a recognizeable kanji with a ZX Spectrum... Notable Japanese computers include the NEC PC-8800 series, and the succeeding one that dominated the home and office market until the 2000's, the PC-98. But there was also the MSX, the Sharp MZ series, the Fujitsu FM-7... Most of those machines never saw export, or only a limited one ( the most successful being probably the MSX and to a lesser extent, the Sharp MZ-800 in Europe); also, publication of games on those platforms, unlike what happened for consoles, was entierely in the publisher's hands; if arcade games were easy to adapt for Western audiences (with many arcade games from Japan being written with english already, meaning that they didn't even had to change the game, unless the game title had been changed for export) the bulk of Japanese games were adventure and RPG games, requiring lenghty and costly translation work. Many Japanese editor didn't had and still don't have any Western presence, making it simply impossible for them to publish their games outside of Japan unless they partnered with a local editor or a fellow Japanese editor with a Western presence.

I took more high profiles games, but most (all?) MSX fans consider those games to be MSX. If you wanna talk about the MSX1, then you mention the MSX1 In the same vein, when you say "Amiga games" I very rarely say people referring specifically to Amiga-500 games; and in fact if you go anywhere into an Amiga fanbase and ask what you need, people will usually say that you need at least 1 Mo of RAM or better, or even to directly go for an AGA machine like the 1200; yet, they are still "Amiga games".

If you say the MSX is subpart, obviously you haven't been checking enough. Metal Gear is subpar? Was there anything like Vampire Killer (Castlevania) on the C64 or Atari 8 bits or even the ST/AMiga? What about Psycho World? Or just aobut most fine ports of other games on it?

By definition, dry caps can't leak; ceramic cap doesn't contain anything that can leak in any way. The white stuff you see is simply glue used to stabilize components : vibration from the mains (60 or 50 htz) will break solder joints, so glueing the bigger components reduce the stress on the soldering points. In fact you can see on your picture that it's the big black component that was glued, not that capacitor. That being said, it doesn't hurt to replace electrolytic caps on your power supply.

From my experience, repros from AliExpress are all over the place. My copy of Zelda Minish cap looks stunningly genuine (except the cart shell is translucent green, which is cool and pretty Zelda esque but was never a thing). I ordered Super GnG and Super Metroid on SNES. The shells are certainly not original but they looks solid enough; sticker reproductions is low quality and weird (one looks like a mismatch of the US and Euro one). I got Majora's Mask on N64, boxed. While the cart itself is very good, the box is cheap, made of thin cardboard, and the manual repro is a joke, glossy paper with poorly, blurry reproductions of parts of the originam manual. The worst I got were 2 Megadrive games (admitedly, they were sold for cheap) which came boxed. The boxes themselves, while not up to Sega standards, are decent and useable. The cover reproduction is decent. If you look close, you can still tell it's laser-printed, but it's certainly better than what I could have done myself - and it's glossy paper. The carts, on the other hand... One of the shell snapped in half when I tried to remove it FROM THE BOX. Yes, it's that bad. The plastic is weirdly matte and nothing like regular carts, and most importantly, they are slightly too thick and hardly fit in the console. And the sticker reproduction is just passable. Overall... As I said, it's all over the place. Generally, I found out that GB repros are the best, probably because they have been manufacturing the shells for decades and the stickers being smaller, the smuding of poor scanners and cheap laser printers isn't as noticeable. Let's not forget that AliExpress is not a monolithic entity but a front-end for various shops, so there is no central quality check, and due to the very illegal nature of those repros, there are no shops that stay long enough to establish an aspect of reliability and quality.

And the MSX!

As for the original post, MSX were used in professionnal setups, mostly MS2 and TurboR in Japan. In Europe there were mostly game machines. In the US and elsewhere, Yamaha sold them as MIDI machines (the only source of "American" MSX2, tho given they are Yamaha sound tools they are more expensive than importing a MSX2 from Europe (MSX2 from Philips are still largely under the 100€ mark if you find someone in the Netherland to get it for you) or Japan. Yamaha also exported several MSX and MSX2 as educative computers, most notably in the Middle East and even more famously in USSR (KYBT and KYBT2). So yes, the MSX are powerful gaming machine but also saw serious use; though as with other computers, especially 8 bits (except maybe for the C64) those uses are largely forgotten. Yamaha CX5M The most famous example : Sony MSX2.. on MIR. Yes, the Soviet Space Station. According to a forum "In France during the late 80's, begining of 90 The "Sncf" (national train company) was equiped with Msx2 Sony (certainly HB-F900F). Some other Sony Msx2 were found in some "Edf" offices ( French national electric company) , one was seen in a nuclear power plant (office !). Some "Gendarmerie" (Police departments) were equiped with philips Msx2 computers." Yamaha AX350 with Arabic support. Yamaha YIS503 III, KYBT2, used in Soviet schools (with a master computer being a more evolved Yamaha YIS 805) MSX2 were also used in video editing to overlay text over images, or different video feeds. As for the legacy, MSX appeared on the market in 1983. The last MSX Turbo-R was made in 1993. While it's a lifespan very comparable with other famous 8 bits, it's the only one that received considerable support and upgrades with full backward compatibility (save for Turbo-R machines dropping tape support - but not MSX1 compatibility) which kept MSX fan interested. A MSX3 should have been released in 1993, but Panasonic was, by then, the only company remaining interested, and they dropped the MSX3 in favor of the 3DO. Oh well.

Yep to understand MSX, you have to realize that MSX is both a line of standards and also a series of evolving machines... not sure how to express that, but, for most people, "MSX" mean "MSX 1, 2, 2+ and Turbo-R" machines. And let's be fair most people into MSX have at least a MSX2 machine, which is on some levels more powerful than a Famicom (basic one). MSX are also famous for being extremely flexible; they are easily turned into Frankein-monsteriffic machines - the reason is that MSX designers knew that their original machine was "lacking" and left the inner ROM "open" to being upgraded by expansion carts - making integration of updates easier and more streamlined than with other systems. It's also worth nothing it was one of the only 80's computer that got consequent VRAM (128Ko of VRAM on MSX2, expandable to 192Ko) It's also (In Europe) the only 8 bits computer that had 3"1/2 floppies as a de facto standard (on MSX2) allowing for large games and saves. MSX being a standard, there are several machines with various styles, options, etc... but at core are compatible with software, making MSX very versatile machines. MSX is also famous for being the "Konami machine" with loads of games that would later get on Famicom/Nes debuting on MSX (Mostly, MSX2). Cart games were common and allowed for expanded sound capabilities; for several games on floppies, external "sound cards" did the same : plug your sound cartridge, play your floppy game. It's what make the MSX line different from the likes of Atari 8 bits, C64 or Spectrum : versability and extreme compatibility.

Though, there was also how they could negociate the costs. Nintendo managed to convince Ricoh to cut the price of their 65C02 CPU by HALF by saying they would order a crazy amount (If I recall, basically about a year worth of Ricoh's CPU production). I doubt MB did that much, but getting a 15% cut for the more expensive CPU may have been a better strategy than a 10% cut on the cheaper one.

If I remember how the games are made, well the CPU is probably the biggest costly component. If I remember correctly, the 8021 is a microcontroller (a stepped-down microprocessor) with included ROm and RAM, so to make a cartridge game, it was advantageous as you didn't needed costly extra ROM and RAM, and also made PCB much simpler to design... basically just a straight connection to the console board, nothing else. So choosing cheper chip was the only way to cut cost down on the cart making, really.

Rayman (French game), is probably one of those "everybody knows it" game. Angry Birds is a Finnish game. For gamres with a bit of knowledge, Alone in the Dark ,and Another World (two French games) That's absolutely untrue. In fact, gaming in Japan is mostly on computers, even in this day of smartphones. The thing is that easily 90% of those games never leave Japan and are absolutely unknow in the West.

NTSC-J, U, PAL B/G, PAL-I, etc... are video standards defining the RF signal. Because some regions have adopted a connector standard unlike the others, there is usually an understanding that NSTC-U (USA) and NTSC-J (Japan) are going to use a F connector, and PAL/SECAM systems are going to use the Beiling-Lee (or FM, as it's also found on some FM antenna) connector, but there isn't any requirement about this. The most likely explanation is that your hardware was made in China for the Chinese market; China officially use PAL-D and the FM connector, but in reality there are lots of NTSC hardware in China due to them picking up whatever they can/want from their own factories, including NTSC hardware.

If it's soldered to the board with pins, then I smell a cold joint. An easy fix (which, if it does no good, won't do any bad either) is to reflow the solder joints. Its beginner's level unless the access to cramped or blocked by other parts.

Colecovision is kinda "between two seats" when it come to generations. The OP asked for a second console after the Atari 2600. Intellivision and Videopac have the same "flavor". The Colecovision is kind of the "middle gen" (kind of how the PC-Engine is the "cross between the 8 bits and the 16 bits generation". Also, the Colecovision is flaky (albeit fixable with standard parts) and prices are all over the place - at least in Europe; I haven't seen a single loose Colecovision game sold for under40€ lately, and acquiring a loose Colecovision system for under 80€ is a pipe dream. Those are two reasons to recommande a Videopac or an Intellivision over the Colecovision (or over the Astrocade and Channel F) both are machines that have that distinct 2nd gen flair, and remain affordable and straightforward to use.

What are the games? I hope one of them is KC Munchkin. I think, with his random maze generator and that "chase the dot" mechanism, that it's one of the most inspired Pac-Man clones. Two small changes that make it so much more fun than most Pac-Man clones or variants. Even if the random generator can result in unfairly hard mazes or pretty easy ones... each maze is a new challenge. KC Crazy Chase is fun, but mostly if you get The Voice! else... it's a bit meh, due to the maze layout never changing.