Winding the voltage down via a variable DC-DC step-down converter. It’s interesting to see what happens, as the Aiwa Mega-CD once showed similar symptoms on the Mega Drive side when early testing was underway.

With Pac-Panic running on the Mega Drive 2, I gradually reduced the supplied voltage to see how the console would behave. Everything appeared reasonably normal at first, but things started getting interesting as the voltage dropped further.

At around 5.7 V, the audio became noticeably quieter. Between roughly 5.7 V and 5.4 V, the colours started disappearing from the picture. A little further down, and the game stopped working altogether.

By the time the supply was down around 4.5 V, the console powered off. Bringing the voltage back up quickly enough could get it booting again, although there was plenty of strange flickering along the way.

Some of the effects looked rather familiar after my earlier Aiwa Mega-CD experiments, where insufficient supply voltage had caused problems on the Mega Drive side. Similar-looking corruption doesn’t necessarily mean the two machines have the same fault, but it’s an interesting comparison.