About 2 years ago I bought a Sega Mega Drive 2 in Thailand. The system was brand new in box, and came with a Super Hang-On/World Cup Italia 90/Columns 3 in 1 cart. When I was back home I tried the system out and I noticed that the build quality of the system was incredibly low/cheap. Cheap plastic, and the system felt very light. The documentation, the game and the joypad were all of much better quality then the system. Also the video output of the system is horrible. It's like a VHS tape being played and the player loosing tracking, all kinds of noise at the bottom of the screen. I started wondering if my Mega Drive is a knock off of some sort, so I opened it up and took some pics: Looks to me the board is "legit". The system has no internal shielding, and is light as a feather. Video and audio quality is really bad (probably because of the lack of shielding and the caps not being used in years?). Anyone ever seen this version?
It's real board for sure. It has some interesting improvements I can see. Some greater amount of eyelets, as well as less components.. Can you take higher resolution pictures, in macro mode, with flash off in lit room? thanks.
Will try to make better pictures tomorrow. Any suggestions how to improve the video/audio quality? I read in another thread that the wrong power supply can also introduce noise. I use the official one, but maybe there is room for improvement there. First thing is to get a broken Mega Drive 2 and use it's internal shielding.
For video quality, get a RGB cable, there's nothing much else to do, for sound, you need extensive sound mod which I created. VA0 and VA1 MD2s have the shittiest sound, video is hit or miss, some models look nice some absolute crap. RGB looks same on all machines though
Half off-topic, did Asia PAL have SCART. Also, are you running the system on a PAL TV? Dumb question I know, but that causes problems if you aren't.
^SCART is a European thing, apart from the Japanese type SCART which was wired up differently. I have a few of these Asian machines as well, so long as your AC adapter is the same rating as the original one, it should work fine. The adapter's that come with these are rated at 220v, so will work fine in Europe, although I don't use my one as we have 240v here in the UK, and I'm worried it may overheat.
All Sega HW has RGB outputs, and all of them use same connectors (i.e all MDs have same AV out, All Dreamcasts etc.). Same goes power (MD, SMS), they all use same voltages and polarities. Saturn and DC have different PSUs per region so a converter is needed.
