Hi, Just finished soldering and tested my Mega Drive out. Hooray! It's full screen and the music runs faster, bingo! but,, uh, the switch has no effect, and it seems to slow down when sonic gets his speed up-the frame rate is not what it should be. Any ideas?
Hi, we could do with a little more info, like a small picture maybe, and just 50/60htz or did you do the language too. ive done a couple now and find that most of the problems are poor soldering (myself im talking about) and incorrect or loose joints. Are you sure your switch is functional? new or secondhand?
In 60Hz, CPU has much less time between the frames to calculate... and thus you get frame rate issues when there's too much data... only way out : overclocking, or switch back to PAL.
Thanks for the replies. My M/board is the later revision, with the JP set of contacts next to a chip. Very awkward. I resoldered my joints etc to no avail, on my new switch. So, I took ALL my connections off, bearing in mind I left a trace cut. Aaand.. the console is running in 60hz, full screen, with no graphical glitches. This was just a little project to see if I could manage some soldering work in a console. If I get a Master System or another Mega Drive with an earlier revision board I'll give it another go- I think I must have done something to a connection close to where I was soldering (although I can't see anything) Cheers for your help.
I've never had a problem with the 50/60Hz switch being ground / floating but I have had problems with the English / Japanese switch on a couple of machines which seemed to crash if the signal was not +5V (other jumper) and was floating instead.
Sonic dropped into 2 frames on PAL Megadrives so I assume the problem is worse at 60Hz. They used a simple method to dump all of the frames of nearby enemies into VRAM all at once (and we all know that you can Y-sort them and download HBlank time)... it was a lack of machine usage thats to blame. Oh, I came up with that HBlank dump method for Chuck Rock on the MD.
