Anyone else have one of these? My friend got one (along 4 other decrepit 386 and 486 machines) for the bargain price of 0. It's one of those PCs Amstrad made with a built-in Mega Drive - a bit like the Tera Drive, but not the same. There's a page about the Mega PC on this site somewhere but I only found it through Google - I didn't see any actual links on the site. Does anyone know much about these? It seems to be pretty screwy stuff - the MD's on an 8-bit ISA card, with just a small ribbon cable joining to the motherboard - possibly to send the video, which goes out the same VGA connector the PC part uses. But the monitor's nothing normal - it seems to work at both standard TV frequencies (H:15kHz/V:50Hz) and VGA rates (H:30kHz+) - I can tell because when the MD part is turned on I can hear that high-pitched noise that CRTs make now sound like a TV. I thought (well, hoped) at first it was playing MD games at full 60Hz, but playing Sonic 2 for a couple of minutes proved me wrong. Though that would make sense because it was sold in Europe, so they probably wanted PAL games to work properly on it. They've kinda stretched the picture vertically with MD games to kinda hide the borders, which kinda confused me at first. The really shitty thing about the monitor, though, is the actual screen - it's got those large dot-pitch rectangles like on a TV screen instead of the little circular dots like on any normal VGA monitor - so any PC stuff on it - even the POST text - looks like blurry ass. I dread what Windows (3.11 of course!) will look like on it! Does anyone know much about these PCs? And more importantly does anyone know if you can mod these to run MD games at 60Hz? I'll put up pictures as soon as I get a chance to steal my brother's camera ;-)
What do you want to know about them? Do you have the 386 or the 486? Ignore what is written on it, check the POST! No you can't mod them as far as I remember, and I wouldn't try. It is indeed a PAL machine. You want NTSC? Get a TeraDrive. Whilst it isn't that valuable, it is getting a bit scarcer. Modding is for cheap consoles, not something that may turn out rare - you would regret modding it when you try to sell in a few years. Whatever happened to if it ain't broke, don't fix it?
I'd class something running games 17% too slow as "broken", but that's just me ^_^. I was hoping there was some retardedly simple way to get them running at 60Hz, like some jumpers or something, but the on closer inspection the only jumpers on the MD card are the IRQ settings for the Adlib sound. It's a shame, too, as Japanese carts fit in it perfectly. And it was a bit broken at first - the pins on the MD controller port 1 were all bent in making the whole MD side unuseable, but Mr. Soldering Iron came to the rescue. The hardest part of that was trying to take the bloody thing apart - I had to remove the entire MD card along with the ISA riser (which of course couldn't be removed without first taking out the floppy drive and HDD), several plates and too many screws to get at the PCB with the controller ports on them! I've seen a Mega PC go for about £40 earlier this month on eBay - not bad for (what was even in the early '90s) a really crappy PC with a Mega Drive stuck in it. And that one didn't have a monitor - God knows how the buyers will play MD games! The one my friend has has been upgraded though - it's got a whopping FOUR MB of RAM (instead of the 1 that came with it) and the shitty 40MB HDD has been replaced with something absolutely insane for a 386 - it's like 1.2GB or something. I'm surprised the BIOS even recognises it properly. Unfortunately nothing can be done about the horrendous 386SX-25 (the Intel SX's were the Celerons of the time for anyone not in the know), as it's SOLDERED ON the motherboard! Would these upgrades make it worth more, or less because they're not the original parts? Though saying that, 30-pin RAM is *not* the easiest thing to come by these days. Besides all this it's in pretty good condition - it's not gone too yellow (nothing compared to the ones I've seen on eBay!), but it's only got the original (cheap crappy) joystick - the keyboard, mouse and MD joypad are missing.
Yeah, but they're not exactly easy to come by for normal people. Not everyone owns an arcade! I've heard of a few old NEC Multisync's which work at 15kHz, and possibly a few others, but they don't seem to be too common from what I've seen. I suppose you could wire it up to the RGB inputs of a TV set, but you'd have to composite the H and V sync. And when you want to use the PC part you'll have to plug it back into a VGA monitor (unless you have a scanrate convertor handy). I was thinking that LCD projectors could solve this problem, as they can usually handle TV and VGA scanrates, but looking at the manual for one of my college's projectors it says the RGB input can only take 24kHz and higher.
Agreed they are much harder to find now, going through some Amiga sites might turn up something Microvitec used to make loads of them as they were quite popular with Amiga users as they could sync low enough to run old software I think the NEC was the multisync 3D or something along those lines, Siemens also used to make a few different models.
