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There's times I think I hate my Genesis. I hate it because I love it, and it keeps making me cry. It's like romance I guess. I bought it as a kid with tons of saved up allowance money, wanting something closer to the arcade experience and it mostly lived up to those expectations. I came to learn later that it's based on the arcade hardware of the time (but cheaper), and understanding the hardware setup just makes me love it more. It's very reminiscent of the look and sound of a 16-bit arcade, which are the machines I played the most. And the model-1 just looks cool. It's really an awesome system. Well.. when it was only maybe 1.5-2 years old, it started having controller problems. The up/down directions would suddenly lock - either it wouldn't move in a direction, or more often it would be stuck as if I was holding that direction down. We took it to a shop, explaining it was intermittent, but they of course couldn't duplicate the problem and told me to clean the controller pins. After getting a Sega CD for Christmas, this problem mysteriously went away. For a while. Then it came back, and I discovered that pushing on the system would temporarily fix it. In the end that console was replaced with a boring and reliable model-2 with bad sound. Then my Sega CD died for the 2nd time, and I replaced it with a model-2 CD from FuncoLand. So by that time my working combo was model2+model2, but the model1+model1 is so much cooler (when it works). Fast forward, I got my model-1 Genesis out of storage one day and cleaned it up. It was working perfectly again. I wasn't playing Genesis games much anymore but I was happy it was working. Then the Z-80 got unstable. I was getting crazy glitches in Phantasy Star (on the PBC), and Genesis games were having sound problems and lockups. I cleaned the board thoroughly, scrubbing all the pins with alcohol and washing the whole board with Simple Green. This fixed it, for a while. Then the video crapped out. Then it got unstable again (sound problems and lockups). A few days ago I fixed the video. I'm really happy about that and posted about it in the hardware forum, but the instability is still there. And now the latest development: the old intermittent controller directionals problem, that I last experienced in the 90's.. is back. It also usually has sound glitches and lockups when this happens. Sigh... Why do I fight with this thing? Although I bought it well into 1990, it's a 1989-built model with no TMSS, good sound, and as my original console I can't just throw it away. There's some stubborn pride involved. But damn with all the troubles it feels like owning an exotic sports car.

There might be somebody out there with the same video output problem on their Genesis that I was having, so I'm posting how I fixed it. Hope somebody finds it useful. I partly feel like I should post this in the "classic gaming" section, but it is a hardware topic so I'll put it here. My Genesis has had lots of issues since it was only 1-2yrs old. Some of those problems have come and gone over the years. My board is a VA3 with all 1989 dated parts, and has a lot of rework so I think it suffers from early adopter disease. I got it in late spring/early summer 1990 so I'm surprised I got an 89 unit. A few years ago I took it out of storage, and after cleaning it worked well, for a while. Then 2 problems emerged, 1 was that the video crapped out. I took a shot at fixing it yesterday: That's not the camera, my screen really looked like that. It looked the same with RF and with composite output. I noticed that the video section of this board is located underneath the heatsink that cools the 7805 voltage regulators: It must get toasty in there. Also, some of the capacitors on this board (the 100uF 10v size on mine) are Chhsi brand, which was one of the most notoriously bad brands with PC motherboard problems in the late 90's and beyond. Not the same caps here obviously but same crap manufacturer. This shows the video section after removing the heatsink. I had to use a C-clamp to get the screw out of one of the 7805's. Those things are tight. == I didn't know how to diagnose my video problem, but I figured it was a good guess to try replacing the capacitors in this area, especially since they're living under that heatsink and they're not even 105C rated. The difficult thing about this board is that some caps need to be soldered on the bottom of the board, and others need to be soldered on the top. It's not like PC motherboards where you can easily just solder the bottom side and the via takes care of the rest. There might be a via there... but if so then mine must have been coming off easily. So leave the caps somewhat above the board (like Sega did) and try to dab some solder on the top side, not just the bottom. Some need it, others have no connection up there. As I removed the old capacitors, I measured their capacitance and ESR. I found a definite difference in the quality of the 2 brands on my board. The Elecon brand caps (10uF and 47uF) measured marginally within the +/- 20% tolerance, though a few were slightly out. ESR looked reasonable also. 10uF 16v Elecon were 11.49-11.75uF, 1.4ohms ESR 47uF 10v Elecon were 39.08-57.9uF, 0.90-1.1ohms ESR 100uF 16v Elecon was 116uF, 0.60ohms ESR 220uF 10v Elecon was 0.47ohms ESR, my meter can't measure that much capacitance. This is the inline cap on composite vid output. 100uF 10v Chhsi were 176uF, 183uF, 196uF, and 2 more were even higher - too high to get a reading on my meter. ESR readings on those caps were 0.68, 1.2, 1.4, 1.7, 2.7ohms. The 0.68 might be okay, but the rest are obviously very bad. So the Elecons look okay for their age, but the Chhsi suck. The failure isn't too surprising with all the heat, but it's interesting that only the Chhsi's went wildly out of spec. All the caps under the heatsink area were replaced with 105C rated caps from better brands. The only other thing I did was retouch a bad solder joint under one of the 32KB RAM chips. I doubt that had any relevance though. It's fixed! I was afraid it would be some other small component I'd never find, or I'd have to replace the video encoder chip. It's still not a usable console yet - it has an instability problem with the Z80 that's getting worse. I had that problem before, and it got better when I cleaned it, now it's worse again. But anyway, if anybody has had the above video issue, look into those capacitors, you might get an easy fix.

The first arcade I went to was Showbiz in Wichita. I don't know which game I played first, but I remember Donkey Kong was a hot item. That game had a crowd around it and I think it had the overhead 2nd screen, but of course it's a vague memory from when I was little. Maybe it just loomed over me. I thought it looked awesome, and some much older kid let me in to play. I only managed to reach the 2nd girder as I remember it. Other than that, I was mostly in an adjacent room with less popular games in it. I played a bunch of those BB gun games, and also what must have been Sea Wolf. Out front, they had Dragon's Lair. Never played it.

Just be aware that not all PBCs have the card slot. The official ones that don't are more rare, have a different name (Master System Converter 2, AFAIK), and only came out in Europe. Well that's a lot easier then. I thought I'd seen pictures of regular PBCs (shaped the same as the original version for model 1s) that don't have a slot on them. But I just tried an image search and can't find any such thing. I don't know what I was remembering.

Just be aware that not all PBCs have the card slot.

From how it's described on wikipedia (assuming that's accurate), it sounds like they programmed it to render an image into cartridge RAM. Then the console would probably copy that into console memory, add little stuff like the score, and draw it to the SNES graphics chip (as if it was a flat 2D image). There'd be some inefficiency from having to time share the cartridge RAM, ie they couldn't both be accessing it at the same time. The program code for the SuperFX is probably also in the cart RAM during run time. If so the SuperFX would have to halt while the SNES was reading from it. Running SuperFX code directly from the ROM wouldn't work because it would constantly interfere with the SNES (whose code also runs from there). Above is just my own speculation, it could be totally wrong.

Just to have some data points on the record, do you know what type of processor and sound card are in each of those machines?

It is a pretty new and growing problem IMO. I don't think major retail got comfortable selling stuff like this until within the last few years.

Looks good. Ultima: Quest of the Avatar is miswritten as Quest "for" Is that rarity correct for Battletoads & Double Dragon? I was surprised, so I looked it up on ebay and it doesn't look very rare. Not trying to dispute it really just wondering if that's a typo.

This isn't directed at you, but towards the subject you bring up in general. For me, the irony in it is people get upset at this but have no problem producing, selling, and buying homebrews that violate the same properties (i.e. ports of a game property, proto repros, hacks of code, etc.) True. I just don't worry much about it with a small-scale homebrew release selling maybe a few hundred units. Mass produced stuff violating 100's or 1000's of copyrights at once, and being sold in retail by 100K's or millions of units, crosses a much bigger line and can do real harm. Another big difference (to me) with homebrew ports is they're usually written from scratch, not copying someone else's code. They represent original work and have creative value.

This is a situation where I wish I could vote for more than one. They're all good picks except barnyard blaster.

From the story Marty linked to, they apparently get hundreds of tips, and they simply might not have the available personnel to give you an individual response. I think you (and others) should continue writing. I wasn't really expecting a reply to my email, though a form letter would have at least let me know someone read it. I was just surprised at how long it took before they apparently did anything about it. I had previously read about those pirate devices, probably the same article that was linked, and thought they'd react more quickly. I wrote them in mid-November, and the kiosk was still there until at least spring of the following year. I gave them the name on the kiosk, the name/location of the mall, link to the mall's web site, etc. They were there for so long I'm not sure if Nintendo ever followed up on it, maybe the vendor just got bored and found something else to sell. But if I was more determined to get them shut down I should have written more people, or really just talked to a mall manager. Part of me didn't want to let the mall off that easy though. I wanted somebody on the outside to know what was going on there, because it was disgusting to see that stuff shamelessly on display in the middle of the biggest mall in our region. If it was a flea market I wouldn't care as much. I can't believe nobody in mall management, security guys walking by, etc realized that stuff was illegal. If management didn't know it was there, then they need to get out of their office once every few months. They were just turning a blind eye to it.

Understood. My questions pertained to pirate game units in general, not just the crummy ones with duplicate or defective games. The unit you bought clearly contains pirate copies of old NES games; the "arcade" and "ColecoVision" titles you mention are in fact NES ports, if my guess is correct. No legitimately licensed product could offer so many games from so many publishers for only $10. My question is how the producers of something so blatantly illegal have the balls to bring it into an established, legitimate store; one would think they would limit themselves to selling them out of the trunks of their cars in the parking lot. Perhaps nobody is really interested in going after these guys; if that's the case, I don't think we should be supporting them by buying their products, even if they look like a good deal. It only makes the market more difficult for the "good guys" (such as Curt and Legacy Engineering), who play by the rules and properly license the games they sell in products like the Flashbacks. Agreed. I was amazed when I saw pirate devices being sold in a major mall, but that was still just a fly-by-night kiosk, not a major store. I'm even more amazed now that stuff like this is at Walgreens. I emailed Nintendo, to the piracy email they set aside for this purpose, regarding that kiosk at the mall. But it was still there through the whole Christmas shopping season and months afterward. If Nintendo actually cares about these things then they sure don't act like it. I probably could have also emailed Konami, Capcom, etc. (whose games were being pirated) but I didn't.

The original DOS X-Wing on the PC was one of my favorite games. But it needs a precise joystick, my favorite is the CH Flightstick. I was determined to play it on our underpowered 386SX-16. I remember struggling to kill enough TIEs to keep the framerate playable. But it was much more fun after we got a 486. My favorite ship was the A-Wing, awesome dogfighter. I also had the B-Wing expansion, which is the best bomber. The X-Wing and Y-Wing are old jalopies. I was so into that game at one time, that I started reverse engineering the file format for the missions. I printed out the hex for some similar missions and highlighted the differences, tried making changes to individual bytes, and gradually figured out what things were. But that doesn't matter anymore, as somebody since then made an editor for it.

Due to the bureaucracy of larger companies, these releases are too small to be worth the IP holders' time working out formal licensing. There might also be legal complexities they have to deal with that prevents them from being flexible. I think there's been cases of old games being formally licensed for a homebrew release, but that's rare. Usually the programmer just goes ahead and hopes for the best.

I've never sold on Amazon, but I'm pretty sure you can set up an account where you send Amazon your inventory and they fulfill your orders. That might be what the source is.

It's awfully hard to stay alive long enough to get enough firepower to kill anything. And then you can still die pretty easily. I was about to give up with a 5000 score but beating the first level gives a big bonus. 16,650

I use "simple green" to clean motherboards, but I haven't tried any other cleaners so can't say if it's the best. I also scrub connectors and IC pins with an alcohol soaked toothbrush. There's probably more effective things than alcohol for connectors though. A generic cleaning like this fixed some weird instability problems I was having on my old Genesis. It still has video problems but at least it stopped crashing. The Z80 was going nuts - sound was bugged in most Genesis games, and Phantasy Star (through the SMS adapter) was having crazy glitches like popping up random text messages.

Yeah, he kicked my ass pretty good. I knew I was in trouble when hitting him didn't take down his health any. It needs the music from Walker: Texas Ranger

Isn't the RAM at least 512KB, or a bit bigger? On the 4-game "Sega Classics" disc, I noticed that it doesn't seem to ever access the disc once the game is loaded, except to play music. All those games are 512KB titles, which I figured was not a coincidence.

It also shouldn't include a cleaning cart. And to legitimately make it bigger, they should have used a front loader CD.

I agree, though I think it probably started with 16-bit computers before being applied to consoles. Marketing people needed a concise way to explain the benefit of a newer system that primarily operates on 16-bits at a time, so they started calling the machines "16 bit". They couldn't convey the advantage just by talking about how many MHz the processor ran at. The term became increasingly fuzzy as time went on and architectures got more complex. By the time of "64 bit" it had become meaningless. I saw some kid refer to modern game consoles as "512 bit". Who knows what the hell they're talking about with that nonsense now.

That's a really cool site. Those patterns are crazy - the 1sec pattern I watched looked very unnatural, nothing like how a normal person would play. Are you allowed to die in a "perfect" game? The article doesn't say. I would say no, but I'm not the law. Supposing someone messes up and loses the pattern, dying would be a way to reset the ghosts.

Unless Mame is actually running at the same time, then having it installed shouldn't make any difference. Sounds like it's probably a result of the DirectSound issue. If it was working before, then something must have broken DirectSound somehow.

When did you write that letter? Please tell me it was recently, because if so Panasonic has a great sense of humor.