SEGA
The Dreamcast Karaoke is probably the most useless Sega add-on. It serves no other purpose than to accompany the Sega Kara software, which is useless as well.
Back in the days you were able to download and sing thousands of songs, then in 2006 the servers were shut down for good.
Without the servers there are no songs – you can still connect microphones to the Dreamcast and listen to your voice with Sega Kara, change the volume and add effects, but that’s about it.
Last year I replaced the broken GD-ROM of my Sega Dreamcast with a GDEMU. While it works great and does everything as it is supposed to do, there is a large open space where SD cards tend to get lost:
Found two more donor carts for use in a Sega Pico flash cart:
The Lion King: Adventures at Pride Rock and Magic Crayons, both “Assembled in Mexico”.
An unusual SegaSaturn accessory: The 3RADD – A sound enhancer with SRS psychoacoustic technology. Read a review on this japanese blog. Here is a scan of the manual.
The effect with audio sources is quite nice, it boosts the sound and positions it around your head. The technology is used in all kinds of devices and software, e.g. the Windows Media Player (SRS WOW).
Now that I have an extra backup of my Mega-CD save files on the Sega CD Ultra Backup RAM cart, I can replace the battery of my old CD BackUp RAM Cart without worrying about data loss.
It is possible to do an open-heart surgery to prevent the memory from being erased and replace the battery while the Mega-CD is turned on. I went for that procedure to avoid having to copy all files from one cart to another again.
The second cart from Canada is the Power Base FM, also known as Power Base Mini FM. It is an attempt to enable FM sound for selected Master System games on a Mega Drive without modifying the console. This cart is somewhat hard to obtain, it’s now sold out in all stores.
On the next pictures you can see why it is called “mini”: It is much smaller than the official Sega Power Base Converters. It fits in a regular Mega Drive cart, but you have to cut holes in the top for the connector and the front right for the Pause button. The JTAG connector isn’t necessary and was added just for fun. Sonic is still looking at you because there is no label available – the only one I’ve found is from Stone Age Gamer and kind of ugly.
Continue reading Power Base FMTwo carts from Canada: Sega CD Ultra Backup RAM and Power Base FM
The cart on the right-hand side is a new backup RAM cart for Mega-CD with 8189 blocks of memory. That’s four times as much memory as the original Sega Backup RAM Cart has available for storage (2045 blocks). I’ve bought a used Sega cart in 2003 and am glad that the battery is still good – it’s only a matter of time until it loses its charge and my save files.
Continue reading Sega CD Ultra Backup RAMToday, I’m finally testing the Sega Pri Fun printer that I bought 4-5 years ago. Back then, it was still sealed.
The printer was marketed by Sega in 1995 as an add-on for the Pico and Saturn game consoles. You won’t find much information about it on the WWW except a small article at Sega Retro and a commercial on YouTube.
Just recently my GD-ROM drive stopped reading Discs. It’s time to try something new: GDEMU
Continue reading Sega Dreamcast repair With GDEMU, PSU and Battery Mod
This has been figured out and posted by TeamEurope in 2012 (link, link via link). Unfortunately, the original document has vanished from the WWW. I’ll try to recreate this tutorial here:
The original document suggested to use Sesame Street: Alphabet Avenue as donor cart and pointed out to use an „Assembled in Mexico“ cartridge. As you can see, a regular US cartridge won’t do the trick.
Continue reading Sega Pico Flash Cart Tutorial
