The Sega Genesis Is Officially Back In Production (dailydot.com) 117
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Daily Dot: Sega may be done making the Genesis (known as the Mega Drive outside of the U.S.), but that doesn't mean people aren't still buying them. In Brazil, the 16-bit system is still hugely popular, and now it's being brought back into production. TecToy, which produces all manner of gadgets and toys, has launched preorders for all-new Sega Mega Drive stock, complete with support for the original game library and controllers. But what's even more astounding about the announcement is that it's all being done with Sega's blessing, making these official, brand new, Sega-branded consoles. The new consoles are spitting images of the originals, aside from the addition of an SD card slot, which makes it great for emulation. They're even complete with support for A/V cables, though there's no HDMI or other bells or whistles. That might seem like a bad move, but for the Brazilian market, it's a perfect fit, not to mention that you can easily pick up an A/V-to-HDMI converter for fairly cheap. The system costs roughly $125 (BRL399) and includes a SD card with 22 games.
Complete? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Complete? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a $125 decades old 16-bit games console being sold in a market of $50 Android TV boxes.
I think the lack of HDMI is just about the least strange thing about it.
Re:Complete? (Score:4, Informative)
This is a $125 decades old 16-bit games console being sold in a market of $50 Android TV boxes. I think the lack of HDMI is just about the least strange thing about it.
This is a $125 product being touted as "new" when we all know that Genesis consoles (along with Atari 2600 consoles) have been sold for years now, and one can easily find them at less than half this advertised price, and with three times as many built in games.
The largest unexplained oddity is why the retro-game-loving people of Brazil are completely unaware of this.
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Because these are not sold in Brazil, are likely illegal anyway [standard Brazilian outlook on this kind of stuff], and after you factor in the need for an international credit card, US$->BRL conversion and shipping, cost just as much (but have no warranty at all -- shipping makes it prohibitive to use any internationally valid warranty in Brazil that requires shipping overseas).
Oh, and TecToy stuff usually ends up being sold on toy stores across the country, with discounted prices and 10x in your credit
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What's the OPEX of a modern console? Buying new games is CAPEX. Power consumption is negligible. You probably have the internet connection anyway at a fixed monthly rate. Xbox Live/PSN isn't mandatory.
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modern console [...] Power consumption is negligible.
You'd be surprised. "Hardcore" consoles from the past decade (PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbox One) can burn 100 W or more if made before the process shrinks incorporated in "slim" redesigns.
You probably have the internet connection anyway at a fixed monthly rate.
Unless you live in a rural area, where the monthly data allowance under the "fixed monthly rate" often isn't enough to download modern games. I know nothing about the home Internet market in Brazil, but wireless (satellite or cellular) home Internet plans in the United States tend to run $5 per GB or more.
Buying new games is CAPEX.
Until the game's p
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You'd be surprised. "Hardcore" consoles from the past decade (PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbox One) can burn 100 W or more if made before the process shrinks incorporated in "slim" redesigns.
Don't "Fat" PS3's hit more than 250W sometimes? That thing is a powersucker...I didn't leave that thing on running Linux like I did the PS2.
[quote]unless you live in a rural area, where the monthly data allowance under the "fixed monthly rate" often isn't enough to download modern games, but wireless (satellite or cellular) home Internet plans in the United States tend to run $5 per GB or more. [/quote]
Even in rural areas, most people live in the towns...and probably have access to at least DSL, if not hig
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but it should work with the 32X and sega cd then.
sonic and knuckles lock on as well.
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As someone who grew up with genesis and SNES, playing Sonic with an xbox360 controller just feels weird.
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personally
as in looking exactly like the original that stomed a generation of coding with the original tapedeck which functionally could be
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It's simple logic, really.
Nintendo didn't do 9/11
Genesis does what Nintendon't
THEREFORE:
Sega did 9/11.
Tell that to the first post guy. Jews, sega, what's the difference?
Re:Complete? (Score:4, Informative)
Why would you want better clarity? The art in those games was designed to be shown in blurry screens. Showing them with increased clarity distorts the original game looks, as if they were processed by a sharpen filter.
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It's the lowest common denominator. I have yet to see TV without Composite video input, no matter how high-end and expensive.
Adding an RGB output should have been possible, it's actually on less processing step compared to Composite output.
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Well, yes and no. The games were meant to be show on CRTs, which slightly fuzz the pixels by design. But Composite video simply sucks ass, it has color bleed, ringing, ghosting, a whole host of problems.
Try hooking up a console with RGB SCART or Component to a good-quality CRT and be amazed, especially if you've only ever used RF or Composite video. 2D games in particular look absolutely amazing when given the best possible conditions. The CRT itself does all the blurring and fuzz you need, there is no reas
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I wonder how many european countries or other had SCART, but I remember SCART to be the default, all 8/16 bit consoles used it and 1980s TVs would support only RGB not composite. PS1, PS2, N64 etc. then came out with composite cables and the RCA to SCART adapter, so the PS2 would display a worse pictures than Master System, SNES, Megadrive. (NES looked a bit weird, but quite good enough)
RF was for Atari 2600, C64, Pong clones i.e. prehistoric cavemen stuff.
S-Video might have been useful but most experience
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SCART was pretty much exclusively a European thing, dreamed up by the French to protect their own TV manufacturers. Japan has/had the JP21 standard which uses the same connectors with a different pin assignment.
99% of consoles hooked up using SCART connectors output Composite video, RGB was either not available or required an expensive add-on cable. All TVs with SCART plugs support Composite over SCART, some support S-Video, and the best TVs support RGB and sometimes even Component (YPbPr). Some consoles (m
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Thanks, so RGB-only SCART was a French thing? Fun fact, there were never such a thing as composite SECAM.
The classic consoles were wired for RGB in the French market at least. The NES couldn't do RGB, so the French NES uses a built-in composite to RGB converter. Only later did French TV support composite PAL, such that after a SNES that only did RGB, we got an N64 that only did composite.
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That's really interesting stuff, I didn't know that about SECAM :-)
I would assume not all console had native RGB output, so a lot of them probably used internal composite to RGB converters.
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That's because you're comparing a "fuzzy-by-design" composite connection with razor sharp pixels on an HD display. Neither option is optimal, but you're correct that composite is closest to how most people experienced it back in the day, because they simply didn't know or didn't care that better connections were available. I've done a [b]lot[/b] of tests on various connection types, under very good conditions. RGB and component beat every other connection by a huge margin.
My background is that I used to wor
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RGB/component is superior still to s-video, with either the individual red, green(+sync) and blue channels on separate cables for RGB
Small correction to myself, the sync for RGB is carried on the composite video line in a SCART RGB connection, not on the green channel. Sync on green is used for PCs, not TVs.
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Sorry, but for all your knowledge, you are wrong.
Some consoles in those days used what's known as artifacting in order to gain colors or other effects. What this means is that they rely on the fact that some pixels will fall between colors on the screen to get more colors out of hi-res images. When you "improve the fidelity with better connections", it does in fact become "too good".
As an extreme example, look at this image: http://www.atarimania.com/8bit... [atarimania.com] and this image: https://www.google.com/search?. [google.com]
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That was an awesome accidental troll.
I was squinting and putting my face to the screen and pulling it back trying to find the difference.
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You're talking about significantly older consoles, back when RF (or composite if you were lucky) were the only options. In those days, of the Atari 2600 and the Apple II and CGA-equipped IBM PCs, composite color tricks were definitely a thing. And yes, I've seen demos like 8088 MPH and studied the techniques they used, very cool stuff to get over a thousand colors from normally 4-color CGA: http://8088mph.blogspot.com/20... [blogspot.com]
What's actually happening is that if you send a signal that changes color too fast, t
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uh what? If you were alive when the SNES and Genesis were the dominant consoles you would know that people wanted the sharpest possible picture, they did not just hook it up with a coat hanger as a wire and say "this is what the game designers intended."
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HDMI is DRMed garbage
Only for sources enforcing HDCP. The OUYA console had HDCP that even a game's developer could not turn off, and I believe this contributed to its failure to thrive because a game's developer had no way to capture the stream to make a promotional video for YouTube. But the Hi-Def NES (HDMI mod for the Nintendo Entertainment System) doesn't add HDCP to its HDMI output, and neither do the NES-compatible consoles Analogue Nt Mini and RetroUSB AVS.
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MIST is what you're looking for (Score:2)
VGA out, and it runs a host of old hardware. Sega, NES, Amiga, C64, Apple II, too many to mention. [github.com]
And they come with a full development kit. Altera Quartus and GCC, and you can make it do pretty much anything you want.
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Not providing HDMI is indeed a mistake, but what's unforgivable is the lack of even COMPONENT outputs, or even VGA. It would have been easier to convert the output to RGB than to convert it to composite, and you would have way better clarity on today's televisions.
As the summary says, it's for the Brazil market, a market that is mostly Standard Definition TV's.
So it's not a mistake, it's intentional because they aren't selling it to the USA or Europe. Since Sega seems willing to have the Megadrive be produced again, why don't you put together a company, throw some specs at Sega and get their permission to make a modern Megadrive? Then you an correct all the wrongs you see done and make some money.
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What makes you think the connector doesn't support both RGB and composite like the old Genesis/Mega Drive did? Where are you getting your information?
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Okay, I read the FAQ [tectoy.com.br] translated into English, and you're right, it will not support RGB:
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I don't know many people who don't have HDMI or component inputs and would spend $125 in an outdated game console.
150 percent sales tax (Score:2)
Then you probably don't know anyone who lives in a country with prohibitive import tariffs on toys. If you had to pay the equivalent of 150 percent sales tax on toys, you might see how $125 comes about: $50 cost of goods plus $75 in import duty and VAT. The people of Brazil through their legislators appear to have chosen to fund the government through import duties, presumably to subsidize the building of a domestic chip fab.
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My brother he has all the vintage games from atari to sega and still plays them. He even has a big Nintendo sign that he got from a store that went out of business.
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Shadow warrior 2 may lack multiplayer arena combat (I'm not sure) but supposedly it's free from copy protection(?)
If you want the multiplayer aspect there's Quake3-like games released as open-source and so on which you could run.
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The Quake 3 games aren't quite playable on linux though. The gamma correction or "brightness" slider doesn't work, so the game is dark and can't be brightened up. Perhaps the Quake engines did something wrong, this used to be an occasional issue with Quake 1 and 2 in Windows 15 years ago but you could fix it with a change of driver or setting higher system wide gamma. But to this day, you can launch Open Arena on some MESA based open source driver (which is all you will ever have on a lot of hardware) and t
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True, the xgamma command brightens up about anything. Anything except my game of Open Arena, because that's what the bug does.
Also, Quake 3 with Wine is broken, problems with input it seems. (I should not have gone with "devel" version of Wine, or I should have installed PlayOnLinux likely)
Also when I quit dosbox, the desktop is at 640x480. lol I know, you didn't ask for that but it's amazing how some former bugs and quirks from the old Windows gaming days still are around but on linux instead. Quit to 640x
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retro multiplayer fps games make a comeback that don't require a steam or origin account
GOG [gog.com]
$125 seems like a lot (Score:1)
Couldn't I do an RPi based emulator with controllers for like $50? Or for $25 get a PS Vita? or for $25 less get an Android tablet?
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Due to Brazilian import tariffs on electronics, a Pi might cost $100-$150.
Brazil might be able to manufacture its own version of the the Pi, but then it's a question of scale and market viability.
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But this seem to be the original + more rather than something modern using an emulator. This isn't a modern design with much more efficient components and manufacturing.
Re: $125 seems like a lot (Score:3, Informative)
You have to think about the distorted/inflated prices found in anything electronic in Brazil.
A RPi3 or Odroid c2 plus controllers is about US$ 125 here. Even then they are better alternatives of course but I understand the Genesys appeal for the layman.
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
The NES Classic Edition is in stores right now for $60. It has the games built-in but it does have an HDMI output.
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That's a pity.
Maybe we should get a kickstarter to spin one of the NES FPGAs into a proper ASIC, and fix a lot of the crappiness of the NES-on-a-chip products out there.
But I doubt we could raise $500k spin an ASIC (I'm over estimating, they are actually a lot cheaper for old process). Might be $50/console and get 10k-20k people, assuming Nintendo doesn't step in and tie the project up with legal notices. (It's legal to make a NES, you can even use the same mask as the original 6502-variant because masks of
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NES Classic Edition is an emulator console (with actual authorized game-titles.)
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And due to Brazilian import tariffs, it'll probably end up at $150 if it ever gets there.
"Fairly cheap" A/V-to-HDMI converters (Score:2)
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There's a reason people spend several hundreds of dollars importing Micomsoft's XRGB-series upscalers from Japan.
Because their TV has a crappy scaler? I've played retro games on my 52" Sharp 1080p LCD and they look great. And the scaler has basically no lag.
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That depends heavily on your TV and its processing lag, and which connections it has.
A lot of modern TVs don't have SCART/Component inputs, so you have to convert the signal to HDMI somehow. The XRGB does this with very little lag, unlike a lot of cheap converters/upscalers.
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There's little point anyway. You need to keep a CRT around for light guns :)
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I've always believed that those "input lag" people are basically the video game equivalent of those "gold unidirectional cables make HDMI sound warmer" people.
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I've always believed that those "input lag" people are basically the video game equivalent of those "gold unidirectional cables make HDMI sound warmer" people.
Well, their math seems pretty convincing to me. If it takes multiple frames to perform a scaling operation, and that adds up to approach human reaction times, it makes sense that it would produce a perceptible lag. I don't play fighting games and I'm not a platformer hero (my big accomplishment was beating Ninja Gaiden back in the day) so it's of little consequence to me. But even so, the primary thing that really separated SHARP AQUOS from other TVs (except maybe Bravia, this is the most substantive differ
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Given the track record of tectoy lately.. (Score:2)
This box won't even run sega genesis games that well. [youtu.be]
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Badly flickering sprites, mostly. The original hardware didn't do that.
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Low frame rate, audio completely ruined and sprite flickering.
It's like ancient MS-DOS emulator.
It's got an actual 68k (Score:2)
Been around for years, this is not new. (Score:2)
Why are we touting this as new?
I've seen "brand new" Sega Genesis console packages alongside "brand new" Atari 2600 consoles being sold in stores for years now. I'll probably be able to pick up one for less than $30 when Black Friday rolls around, and many of these consoles come with three times as many built-in games.
For some odd reason the people of Brazil representing the target market are unaware that this product already exists and for less than half the cost? What the hell am I missing here? Are th
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For some odd reason the people of Brazil representing the target market are unaware that this product already exists and for less than half the cost? What the hell am I missing here? Are they really charging a 400% markup on the new(er) console because of the addition of an SD card slot?
They're charging 400 percent markup because the manufacturer got it past Brazilian customs and into toy stores.
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For some odd reason the people of Brazil representing the target market are unaware that this product already exists and for less than half the cost? What the hell am I missing here? Are they really charging a 400% markup on the new(er) console because of the addition of an SD card slot?
They're charging 400 percent markup because the manufacturer got it past Brazilian customs and into toy stores.
Sadly, yes. TFA should focus on the fact that this has a hell of a lot more to do with trade/commerce agreements and licensing instead of claiming that the Genesis is "back" in production.
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That's an awful lot of money (Score:2)
There are still many TSOP-reflashable Xbox (original, that is) units lying around at flea markets for basically no money. If you want to play classic genesis games, that's a much better way to go. Google for "GenRen" to find roms. All of them. You could buy carts and dump them of course, either with a ~$60 tool or with a Sega CD and your PC [retrodev.com]. You can get a Sega CD and a real Genesis at the flea market, of course. I think I got rid of my Sega CD already...
Not worth it (Score:1)
What hardware? (Score:2)
It'd be really cool if this was running on the original chips. As opposed to the NES it seems the Genesis used pretty standard hardware: A Motorola 68K, a Z80 a pretty common Yamaha sound chip.
Alas, it's probably more expensive to build a device with those chips nowadays than to use the ARM and emulator option.
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Why not Dreamcast? (Score:2)
It seems odd to me that Sega would pick the Genesis not the Dreamcast.
I mean wasn't the Dreamcast way more iconic and popular than the Genesis?
curso NR 10 (Score:1)
And remember (D) stands for "Dolchstoss" (Score:2)
And just remember kids, (D) stands for "Dolchstoss" (look it up in German history).
[/sarcasm]
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I recommend downloadmoreram.com [downloadmoreram.com]
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Did this come about when the patent on Connectix RAM Doubler software expired, allowing the creation of zswap [wikipedia.org]?
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If you're a beginner at it, then no. I'd recommend you start with a Game Boy, work your way up to a Game Gear, then try to take on the Game Cube, and only after that go for a Super Nintendo or Genesis.