I bought a modified Mega Drive with lots of games on a flea market a few days ago. It has switches for 50/60hz and region lockout. in one of the game boxes was a cartridge called NOVEL ITEM TV Game Computer Cartridge Converter Does anyone know what it is ? I would say it's for playing NTSC games. But in this case this wouldn't make sense, because the Mega Drive is already modified. So what could that be else?
It's a region convertor. It's possible that the original owner used this as a temporary solution until he/she could get the mod done.
Well the switches as he stated are on the Megadrive... I am willing to put large amounts of money that the cartridge is one of the first convertor cartridges that came out and is nothing more then a Japanese locking switch / cartridge port bypass. You are probably thinking of the Super Mega Key convertor which has dips to play most games.
These are super common,found in many forms. The less common ones have switches on the back to select region.
The ones with switch have a chip inside that latches the bus up, hooking into the region switch hardware. You can even use them to make the MEGA/SEGA-CD run on a mismatched region console, just put no cartridge on top of it.
Latches the bus up? Do you mean it overpowers $A10001 in contention? (So the hardware would be a decoder and buffer fed by the switches.)
There are such fun signals like Bus Request, Data Acknowledge and others that can be used without any stress to the HW... I think it will affect some bus timings a little though.
Nomad has some singals missing on the cartslot, 4 to be exact... Nomad is nothing but a MD2 inside so in theory it should not have any issues unless the SMK does not use any of those missing signals, seems it does.
Bad wording from me, here. I meant to "latch in" as connecting to it, not as brute forcing in as conflicting. My bad.
