Sega Mega Drive gets micro makeover Check this out: you can still buy new Sega Mega Drive consoles. These ones are a fraction of the size of the original and come with more than one built-in game. Relive those 16-bit days and dig out old Genesis cartridges from the storage box in the loft. They may need a good blow first, but it will be worth it. Megadrive …
Because then it wouldn't cost £35.
This product is hardly aimed at hardcore gamers, hungry for the highest quality possible. As with most things from Firebox (including remote control helicopters, Y-front styled hand gloves, Universal remote controls with integrated bottle openers and Wi-Fi bathroom weighing scales), it's for very single men with far too much disposable income!
They should do a special bundle offer of one of these with 3 bottles of cheap-brand Vodka. for £49.99; I'm sure they'd go down a storm with the target market.
This will more than likely be a clone of the megadrive (it may well be 'on a chip' but it'll still be a clone) therefore it's using the original graphics chip, which will be outputting in analogue rgb / composite. To get hdmi you'd either have to re-design the graphics chip so it natively outputs digital, or sit a hdmi upscaler after the analogue graphics chip (which is what is happening in your telly). Given the idea of these things is to keep the cost down, what's the point? Either way you'll just be upscaling crap. I'm not too convinced there would be much of an advantage over using RGB scart and letting the telly do the job.
These things tend to have compatibility issues with plenty of games. For example I've yet to see one of these that can run Contra Hard Corps without all sorts of scrolling glitches. They're usually alright running the built-in games (barring the usual minor sound, colour and timing inaccuracies) but with other games it's hit or miss depending on how well they've cloned the original hardware.
Nice hardware, but apart the videogame fetishism, what's the point of it?
You see, I have a Mega Drive emulator loaded to my Nintendo DS, and ROM's can be found on the interwebs by the bucketload. I can play virtually anything I want, wherever I want. What good an actual console would make?
I loved my MD, but the sad truth is, today it serves me better disembowed.
There's been a few variation on the handheld Megadrive consoles - aside from the standard one which has been floating around for a year or two, there's also a version which has twenty built-in games, six buttons (i.e. perfect for later games such as SF2) and an SD card slot. Sound emulation is poor and compatibilty looks to be a bit hit-and-miss, but it's quite cheap (£38 on Ebay).
It's a shame noone seems to have figured out to hack it - it runs on a generic 32-bit SoC, so in theory, you could boot up an OS on the machine and/or emulate other systems such as the ZX Spectrum...
(http://www.ereleases.com/pr/digital-media-cartridge-announces-new-32bit-technology-chip-for-lowcost-allinone-tv-game-market-5360)
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