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I got a Mega drive :-p

Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 9:58 am
by lightfoot256
So with all this sonic talk I was interested in building my own uzebox and wanted an original Mega drive controller; I searched eBay and people were asking some really rediculous prices for 15 year old controllers. I followed a few and people were just bidding too much for them with each coming out about £4/5 with another couple of quid on top for postage; By accident I did the wrong search and managed to get a list of consoles and came across an old Mega Drive with no bids, 20 minutes to go and starting price of £0.99. The postage was about £10 (probably could have been cheaper by courier but ah well) and it was apparently working, included all the cables and was in good condition so I made a bid and won it!

Unfortunately I don't have any games left (my parents sold our old md at a card boot sale many years ago) so I started hunting down all the old Sonic games, and one after the other they went for much more than I was willing to spend - eventually I won Both sonic 1 and 2 for 0.99 each with free postage - Sonic 2 arrived yesterday and they'd actually paid £1.50 for postage so I felt a little guilty but it's just the way it goes I guess.

Anyway; Plugged the mega drive in, switched on the TV... and ... ah... RF... wtf do I do with RF? How do I tune stations? OMG. Seriously. Anyway, my memory started coming back to me and I waded through the horrific tuning features of my modern LCD tv - which incidentatlly has never had an RF lead plugged in as we'd always used Sky and Scart. After about an hour and a half I still couldn't tune it in; I'd learned that it worked on UHF36, which is about 590Mhz and when I get there I have UK channel 5 (even with no areal) and a fairly huge section of blackness. I can see "something" out of the top corner of the screen as if it's not syncing properly so I preeceed to fine tune all the way betweeen 580 and 600 - but still nothing.

I started to have my doubts about the Mega drive or the cartridge so shoved in some headphones at the front to check if the console was actually working... Switched it on... Nothing. Dammit. I pulled out the cartridge and gave everything a good blow to clean out any dust... Nothing... So I gave the catridge pins a good cleaning and then cleaned out bits of crud in the cartridge slot... Still nothing. Dammit.

I lent over to check the power supply and in doing so pulled the power cable slightly in the back of the MD, next thing the earphones are nearly exploding with "SEGA" HAHA, it works. Turns out the power lead is a little dodgy and doesn't work when fully inserted; You just have to pull it out a nick to get it to work; After about 3 or 4 reboots from crashes (I guess it'd not been started in a while) I finally got the game to load and challenged my GF at a game of sonic 2 (she'd never played it before) and she actually won! - I had hit one of the screens that switched our places just before the end but ah well, she won.

Anyway; The signal from the RF is absolutely crap - I tried fine tuning it some more but I couldn't get the lines to straighten up. Up close it's like every other line is slightly offset - the signal is mostly steady throughout with a little bit of noise just at the bottom of the screen which could be something else. I was looking at getting a scart adapter for it but we'll see how it goes.

Re: I got a Mega drive :-p

Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 6:50 pm
by paul
Weird, I just bought one from ebay, too. It was dirt cheap, so hopefully it works. Also coming with:

Sonic 2
NBA Live 95
Golden Axe
Tazmania
Mercs

:mrgreen: