Can anyone tell me about my strange not-FCC-approved Sega Master System?

I've been meaning to post this here for awhile after being referred here from the gamecollecting subreddit.

So I've had this Sega Master System since I remember, played a ton of Fantasy Zone growing up on it. Recently brought it out of storage, and I notice it's got this sticker on the back. I can't seem to find any information about it, or any pictures of other master systems with similar sitckers. I also never realized, because I'd never seen other master systems, that it has no stickers at all on the bottom.

Other than those two differences I think it looks pretty normal, but here's an album with a couple more shots in case I missed something. Do I have some kind of pre-release/beta/in-store display console? I'm really curious to find out the history of the thing.

 

If I were to guess, this one would have been some sort of promotional item that was in the US prior to the actual release. The SMS would have been in pending for approval and they put that label on... but the other interesting thing is that yours has nothing on the bottom...

I see you got referred to from Reddit. You may also want to post on SMS-Power:
http://www.smspower.org/forums/f1-Main

 

Idk a lot about SMS, but I do know that label is very common for pre-production units. Alpha and beta hardware tend to have that labeling on it.

 

all in all I really cool find, if you a Sega collector.

 

Well, like others have said, stickers like this mainly mean final production but just pending FCC approval

 

Have you opened it up ?

 

I think you might be right, I found this thread over on SMS Power that has pictures of a system that look similar to mine (same sticker on the back but no pictures of the bottom). I'll have to see if I can boot it up and find out what BIOS version it has to compare, and also do some research there on the games I've got for it. Thanks for the help!

I haven't; not sure yet what I'd be looking for but I think with that SMS Power link I now have a good starting point to see if anything's different inside.

I think my original reply got eaten, because the one I made after it appeared right away, but thank you for this! I managed to find this thread over on SMS Power that has a unit that looks much like mine. I haven't powered mine up in quite some time so I'm going to see if I can find out if it's running the same BIOS version, and take another look at those games I've got for it as well.

 

Tidied your post up a bit, there. Try to use the edit and multi-quote buttons rather than triple posting

I was going to say Omar/Bock is your man to ask. He hasn't been active here in a few weeks, at least, but you'll get him on SMS Power. It'll basically be a demonstration unit used internally or for review purposes, e.g. a trade show. They were sometimes given to developers as test units, too.