Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached 1,000 subscribers! A thousand people! That’s quite a lot of people when you try to imagine them all standing in one place. Thank you very much for watching and subscribing!

As a little celebration, I’ve decided to pull apart a Sega Master System Converter II. It’s not quite the exotic development hardware I’d usually like to show off, but I don’t have any of that here at the moment. Never mind, let’s see what’s hiding inside this thing!

The converter allows you to play Master System games on a Mega Drive, and one of its most important features is the Pause button. Very handy when you’re playing Wonder Boy and don’t want to fall off a cloud into the water!

There’s also an interesting little spacer fitted underneath. The Mega Drive Model 1 and Model 2 have slightly different cartridge-slot arrangements, so the spacer allows the converter to sit properly on the smaller Model 2. Remove it and the converter fits the original Mega Drive instead. Rather thoughtful of Sega, actually.

My converter has a few scratches and had already taken a tumble onto the floor earlier in the day. Fortunately, everything still seemed to be in one piece. The plastic surrounding the cartridge connector looks like something that might become rather brittle with age, so I’ll be careful with that.

Time to remove the screws! There are six around the main housing, plus a couple more hiding near the top. Naturally, I’d thought it would simply fall apart after removing the first six. Sega apparently had other ideas.

Once the case was opened, there wasn’t an enormous amount of circuitry inside. We’ve got the cartridge connections, the Pause button, a handful of components and some familiar-looking chips. There’s a rather nice collection of Rubycon capacitors in there too.

It’s quite a neat little accessory, and it’s interesting to see how Sega packaged the Master System compatibility hardware for the Mega Drive. Much simpler inside than you might expect from the size of the casing.

A quick take apart of a Master System Converter II… and 1,000 subscribers! Wow! Thanks again, everyone. There’s plenty more in the pipeline, so stay tuned! :D