Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

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Tectoy is a Brazillian company that still manufactures SEGA consoles (they have the license back from the 90s).

They still use the original motherboard and whatnot...

Yet, somehow, they still manage to make it have issues, seemly they replaced several of the original chips with cheaper ones that don't have same algorithms, some games notoriously have issues (Sonic 3 for example has audio problems).

Also they removed the cartridge port from the mobo... but still left the holes and space on the mobo for it.

I find all this so confusing, why not just sell either the original hardware or an FPGA based one instead of stupid hacks?

Picture of the mobo with missing cartridge slot: https://i.imgur.com/tqOM56N.png?3

These use the DMC Redkid 2 "enhanced" Genesis/Mega Drive clone chips. These same chips were used in older AtGames clones as well (not the FlashbacK HD line though, those use emulation on an ARM SoC). In some sense, these are more "real hardware" than even an FPGA clone, but the clone has some flaws. It's also more configurable than the original hardware and the firmware configures it wrong, though at least this part is fixable with 3rd party firmware. The programmer of the 2018 Mega Drive game Tanglewood wrote an interesting blog post about his efforts to get his game to run well on these: https://blog.bigevilcorporation.co.uk/2018/04/18/taming-the-...

Are you certain the ICs were replaced for cost reduction, and not because the original parts were discontinued?

This seems extremely likely. From what I have seen on other products. If you are a small company, it’s almost impossible to make a device for more than 10 years before you have to redesign on new parts.

Tec Toy built systems with original ICs for as long as they could (even when the likes of AtGames had moved on to cheap-o reproductions), but they are discontinued so that's impossible. There is no way to get buy a new 68k nowadays, for starters. TecToy has used clone chips for a while now.

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