If you think that's bad, I keep seeing people talking about the shitty Atgames clones still over at Facebook. And those have been around for years, like the Tectoy ones but living in the US most people wouldn't know about the other Tectoy models unless they were into Sega or video games as much as we are here on Retro. This unit is way too overpriced for what comes in the box. Tectoy has produced better clones of the Mega Drive than Atgames did, but they're still shit. I keep telling people just to buy a Mega Drive, and invest in a flash cart from Aliexpress. It'll be around the same price as one of these Tectoy units, or may be even cheaper if they're lucky enough to find a Mega Drive for cheap at a garage sale or local buy,sell,trade group. And that way they can play whatever game they like, including homebrew titles and hacks. Not to mention that they can play Master System games as well, so it opens up a completely new library of games for people to play.
Not gonna lie, I may well pick one of these up eventually. I'm not spending over a hundred quid to do so, mind.
And there's no expansion support. They confirmed it. So no 32X, no Sega CD, no everything and probably no Virtua Racing. Knowing Tec Toy as I know, there's a large possibility of this to happen. But the difference is that this time they produced the chips while their previous consoles (except the first ones distributed in the 90's) had emulated the gaming experience.
It's in the FAQ, no Virtua Racing. But the notable thing this time is that they actually improved things from the ATGames clones. The thing we need to know is: by how much.
It's not the AtGames products you want to compare it to - it's Tectoy's less-new Mega Drive revisions from the mid-to-late 2000s. The white ones with a bazillion built-in games, which amazingly still had cartridge slots.
I feel like they're trying to ride of the success of the NES Mini. That thing's really hyped up right now for some reason.
The real thing that concerns me here, is the hardware specification list: Notably there are two resolutions mentioned here, the main list suggests 256x224, yet the Q&A answered 320x240. The system should be able to handle either one of the two horizontal resolutions, and either one of the vertical resolutions, and both separately, some games may switch between each possible four. This difference in vertical resolution may make a difference, though I'm not entirely sure that many games (if any) used the vertical resolution of 240, most of them used 224 to allow them to be played on 60hz TVs. Do Brazilian TVs run at 50hz & 60hz? The audio also has me intrigued, it says there are 2 PSG channels (each with 3 squarewave + pink noise), does this mean there's no periodic noise? And does this also mean that what we'll have in total here are 6 squarewaves and 2 pink noise? Does the pink noise have its own variable frequency including the 3 stock/clock frequencies? Does it share a variable frequency with another channel? Furthermore, the 1 8-bit analogue channel is written separately in that list, does this mean that it's going to be a completely separate component altogether? And if so, wouldn't this likely mean that all 6 FM channels can playback in conjunction with the analogue channel? So, if they do it wrong enough, what we'll have are, 6 FM channels, 6 PSG squarewave channels, 2 pink noise channels, and a DAC channel, all running at the same time. While current games on the system may run as expected unbeknown to the player, anyone creating a ROM for this system may be able to abuse these inaccuracies for some interesting results.
Pal-M is almost like NTSC so I bet the just threw the technical specs on that page they had without thinking. Probably the unit will run at 60Hz with the 256x224 resolution. Actually it says 'white noise' on that site, dunno if was my fault when translating or if they changed the specs. I already corrected that. And nah, that means that you can play any of the 4 PSG channels on the L or R channels, it was probably translated to portuguese by someone who didn't know what these data meant. So what they actually meant (IMO): 6FM channels, 4 stereo PSG channels (3 square+ 1 white noise) + a DAC channel. And I also bet if you use the DAC channel the 6th FM will be disabled/converted into the DAC somehow.
AFAIK The SILVER ones with 'bazilion games' and a cart slot had real hardware without an expansion port. Here's the video of one working with audio: (The white ones didn't have a cart slot in either form factor horizontal or vertical)
So what are the basic pros and cons of this "New" Genesis and how inferior is it to the original or even Tectoy's earlier releases?
The PSG is way too loud on the silver unit. Other than that the FM parts sound decent, from what I can hear. The guitar unit sounds pretty much as bad as the Atgames units. (I've listened to this video a few weeks ago, since someone on Reddit was asking about the upcoming Tectoy unit.) In this video you can hear how the guitar idol unit sounds, though the guy is talking over it... The silver unit definitely sounds better than the Atgames units and this guitar idol unit as well. http://youtu.be/DGUQDQJMkIs?t=6m55s I have a bad feeling that this up coming model might sound like this, since I think this one is newer than the silver unit. :\
I've seen some Genesis 3 units here, but none of them had built-in games as long as I remember. However, the Genesis 3 I remember is the smaller unit, that one that the cartdiges barely fitted on them. Isn't that silver one a G4?
Nope. The Mega Drive 4 had no cart slot and never used 'real' hardware. It apprently used a JAVA-based emulator to run 16-bit games. They said they won't use emulation this time. So the result will be definitely different. This 'Guitar Idol' and the other 'Mega Drive 4' editions used emulation. There are pics of the boards, they didn't use the M68k architecture at all. It was an ARM processor and a JAVA/J2ME-based OS. Now they're saying it is, IMO.
