hello. getting into the sega cd again. i) is it possible to hook up a JPN megadrive model 1 to a PAL sega cd 1? basically, im wondering about the voltage. (were there separate power adaptors?) ii) are backups and region-free mods available now? lest one needs to open their sealed rarities.. also if anyone have one for sale, send me a pm. that's about it, cheers.
There are region free BIOS for the Sega CD. I have them for all 3 console region variants. I don't think they can change the Genesis side of things though because that's in the hardware.
I've installed region free BIOSes into SegaCDs before, from what I recall the Genesis still wants *something* for a region and the BIOS simply ignores the region coding of the disc. The genesis side, however, still knows you are using a US/JPN/PAL BIOS. Gotta match em. And yes there are several revisions of the same model console BIOS but the usefulness of most of them is debatable. Not like SEGA put out a "whatsnew.txt".
So if I put in a region free bios to my Sega CD, would I need to to put a region free bios into my Genesis? Or since both the Sega CD and Genesis are US region, then just modding the Sega CD bios will suffice?
You completely missed what I meant there. I was referring to the JUE region. I know there was over 20 variants of the BIOS. I meant the different regions.
If you use one of the modified BIOS's for the MegaCD, all region protection is bypassed/disabled. That is a MegaCD with a modified BIOS will run on ANY megadrive/genesis and it will also run ANY region disc. But note that a game that is made for 60Hz and runs on 50Hz hardware (and vice versa) may not run correctly, this is nothing to do with the hacked BIOS but to do with the timing differences of the hardware.
i need to do this to mine, as it wont boot if i have the MegaDrive in 60hz mode (but it's fine if i switch after booting game)
All kinds of region control is disabled on the BIOS images I hacked. ALL. If a GAME checks the MEGA DRIVE EXPORT flag, there's nothing the BIOS can do to prevent that. The BIOSes which detect VIDEO mode (Mostly the Southern ASIA MEGA-CD BIOSes do that) do so for keeping sync with the VIDEO refresh within themselves. I did not mod that behavior (or tried to not disrupt that mechanism the best I could). As RAQ mentioned on his post, it's up to the game to sync correctly or not with the video refresh rate. And reinforcing, some EUROPEAN games do check the MEGA DRIVE unit region flag (MEGA-CD hardware has no region flagging on itself as the BIOS was meant to provide that functionality) with the purpose of preventing execution if the console being used is a Japanese MEGA DRIVE or a SEGA GENESIS.
