Sega's Mega Drive was first born in 1988, made its way to the US a year later and at last to Europe in 1990. In the United States, it got a change of name: Genesis. At the time, the 16-bit marvel was just amazing, giving us an almost perfect home version of Streetfighter II and the iconic (and dizzying) Sonic the Hedgehog. I had one, and I loved it.
So imagine how I felt when I found one on the street corner this past weekend, sitting alone without controllers, cables or games, but in otherwise perfect condition. That's how we recycle in Barcelona -- we leave things on the street -- so I grabbed it, took it home and opened it up. Guess what's inside? Not much:
This is the control center. You have headphone volume (also used to hook the machine up to a stereo), a reset button and a cartridge lock which, I have discovered, works by stopping the double flap on the game cart slot from opening.
The underside. Not much here but patent numbers and and a slide-off hatch to access an expansion port on the side.
The controller ports, just like VGA sockets. At this time you only ever got two ports, so you'd have to buy a 4-way multitap adapter to add more players.
The logo. If I remember right, only the early models had that hideous burgundy-colored strip below the cart-slot (in my photo, it has come out pinker than it really is). In later models it changed to white.
In and out. This is where you would hook up to the TV, providing a stunningly high resolution of 224 lines (US NTSC) and 240 lines (PAL). One great hack was to buy a US model and hook it up to a TV capable of accepting an NTSC signal. Because NTSC runs at 60Hz and PAL at 50Hz, doing this would give your games a 20% speed-boost. I owned a US SNES which I used for this purpose.
No torx screws here. The Mega Drive is held together with plain ol' Philips-head screws.
The innards, most notable by the amount of empty space and lack of fans. The old Motorola 68000 chip must have run a lot cooler than today's power-guzzlers.
The chip.
Close-up: It's like a tiny cityscape in there.
The reverse of the circuit board. And finally, just because I can:
Yes, it works: I just slid an iPod dock inside, secured it with gaffer tape and ran the USB cable out of a hole. Once the circuitry is out of the way, there is plenty of room in there for modding. I considered putting the guts of active speaker system in there to make a standalone iPod music center, but it's just more junk taking up space. This Mega Drive will be going back to the street from where it can find a new home.
Photos by Charlie Sorrel under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
