August 2012

Here’s another Sega Saturn giving me trouble. This particular PAL machine powers on, but the CD drive makes some horrible noises and refuses to recognise discs. I’ve already tried adjusting the little orange trimpot on the laser assembly without success, so I think it’s time to replace the optical pickup.... Continue reading

Sophia is still out and about! I’ve been giving her a bit of attention today, starting with a careful dusting using a paintbrush to get rid of the top layer of smokey dust. She looks considerably cleaner now, although you won’t see that in the photographs above. I took those... Continue reading

Here’s one of my Sega Saturn Model 1 consoles that I’ve managed to get working again. This one is particularly important to me because it has a VA0 mainboard, from the earliest PAL Saturn revisions. The problem was the CD lid, which wasn’t pressing down properly to activate the switch... Continue reading

Two Sega Saturns. Two copies of the same game. Two power supplies that produce rolling horizontal lines. The best clues always seem to arrive by accident. I had been testing my Japanese Saturn through a 240 V to 120 V step-down transformer. That particular project failed, more on that later,... Continue reading

EverDrive, is there anything you don’t do? I’ve been thinking about getting an external Mega-CD running with either the Amstrad Mega PC or the Sega TeraDrive, and one of the first problems was how to load the Mega-CD BIOS. I originally thought I’d need an Action Replay or Datel CDX... Continue reading

A few interesting things are making their way into the collection. Sega Mega-CD VHS First up is a sealed Sega Mega-CD promotional videotape. Brand new and sealed. I’m looking forward to opening it, smelling that ’90s air and getting the video uploaded to YouTube. I still need to upload the... Continue reading

It’s pretty cold here at the moment and I am in the process of moving house, so things have slowed down significantly. I am currently looking into purchasing an old PC from my youth. When I was a child I had a computer that was quite fast at the time.... Continue reading

I was going to sell this Mega Drive for scrap, but some more testing made the fault considerably more interesting. The yellow and green video flicker only happens from a cold boot. After the console has been running for around thirty minutes, the picture settles down and the flickering disappears.... Continue reading

It looks like I’ve been lucky enough to pick up a copy of the unreleased Geist Force prototype for the Sega Dreamcast! Well, not an original Sega release, of course. This is one of the limited reproduction copies being put together by the ASSEMbler Games community, and I’m rather looking... Continue reading

She’s a bit dirty. I’ve got the Sega Saturn Sophia development kit open on the bench, so I thought I’d give everyone a proper look at what’s inside before I start cleaning it. There’s quite a collection of boards in here, and I’m interested to see what Sega managed to... Continue reading