Mega Drive Mini

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Since I was in Japan, I thought I’d head on down to the local Sofmap, and pre-register for the new and exciting Mega Drive Mini!

Although I did pick this thing up on the 19th, I was unable to use it until I returned to Hong Kong where I have a television. In my trip I did manage to secure a semi-furnished apartment, but buying a TV wasn’t on my mind. I did however buy a (then) gargantuan 30″ Apple cinema display! It’s so big, that I feel like I’m far too close to it, even with well over a foot distance as it’s just so big. Anyways using some mechanical HDMI to DVI connector and plugging that into the Cinema display gave me a whole lot of nothing. Sad.

But back in Communist China hooked up to my 52″ spytronic, supersonic TV, it works great!

Intrestingly enough it seems the American and European versions not only have the classic 3 button controller but have two of them, while the Japanese version has a single six button controller only. Having owned an ATGames POS, a fancy emulator / cart dumper (The Retro Freak!), and a $3 Chinesium clone, I have to say that SEGA has finally hit this one out of the park. Not only is the aesthetic pretty damned cool, but it performs and sounds great.

Of course an everdrive + real iron is the enthusiast way to go, but for the impulse / normies this is great fun too. As far as I’m aware though, the American version is lacking things like NHL 94 is seemingly embarrassing, but I guess it’s an EA licensing thing, and of course EA won’t rush to help you play a great old game where there is microtransactions to be had.

I was almost thinking of doing some graymarket export of these, but I don’t think it really matters as once you change languages it’ll change to the different territory version of the games, so I guess they are all international, with only the default language being the ‘region lock’ as it were.

4 thoughts on “Mega Drive Mini”

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