DIY Sega Genesis and Master System AV Cables: Redo!
A few years back I made a vain attempt at making Sega Genesis and SMS AV cables. Although they did work, they didn’t last long because the connectors I used were harvested from MIDI cables and never properly adhered back to the plug. A few good uses later and both sets of cables were rendered dysfunctional or completely useless.
As I hinted at, in the original article, 5 pin DIN connectors are often sold online, and after a short search on Amazon I found a pack of 6 for less than $4 shipped. It took a while to arrive but finally it’s time to make yet another attempt at creating these AV cables.
First thing to note is you get what you pay for. These connectors aren’t of the greatest quality; the part holding the 5 pins melts slightly under even normal soldering conditions and the pins can move forward or backwards slightly. The metal parts and connector seems sturdy enough but the plastic shroud is soft plastic with absolutely no grip whatsoever, which is why I will strongly advise using the strain relief provided on the metal part.
These connectors easily disassemble into four parts, allowing for quick and easy soldering while also making the finished product far more secure than the harvested connectors I haphazardly used originally. At first I wasn’t entirely sure how well these would go together, but after the first one they started going together quite well. Something else to note is that I’m just now making them, so I can’t speak on terms of how long these things will last, but assuming you’ve properly soldered all the joints, used good quality AV cables and only hook your console up and leave it in place, these should last for a long time.
Genesis AV Cable Pinout
With the color coded pinout above you should be able to make your own Sega Master System or Genesis model 1 AV cables. Even with my soldering skills being average I managed to put together two sets fairly quickly. I would highly suggest using AV cables with a shielded video cable though. Only one of my sets of AV donor cables had the shielded video side and it makes a big difference.
You can make them as long or as short as you need. Sadly, to my knowledge, there is no way to get stereo sound from the back output of the Genesis model 1, but if you want to make video only cables and use a 3.5mm to stereo cable in the headphone port on the front of the Genesis model 1, that is differently possible with these plugs as well.
And here is the finished product
Retro Games and Passwords, why!?
Passwords, the bane of many retro gamers. After a long week of writing things down at school the last thing you wanted was having to write down something from a video game you just rented or bought. No, video games were suppose to be a refreshing exit to your week and made looking forward to the next week a little more sweet.
Before the luxury of memory cards or even battery backups, many gamers had to sit next to a pad of paper with their choice of pen or pencil to write down codes to log their hours of hard work. But to some writing down passwords seemed more like the modern day achievement, rather than a common nuisance. Passwords were, for many great retro games, the only way to ensure your hard work was there the next time you fired up the game, but many retro gamers quickly learned that passwords simply weren’t going to work.
Passwords were comprised of a given combination of letters, numbers or even symbols given to the player after what in many other games would be the game over screen. Many game developers just tossed out a grid of all 26 letters in the alphabet, sometimes in lower case and capitals, alone side numbers; sometimes things got rather confusing. Lower case Q’s could have been confused for P’s or G’s, Zeros looked like a capital O, and more often than not gamers simply had to start the game all over!
One good thing about passwords was that they were exclusive to the programming within the game, so you didn’t have to worry about renting the exact same cartridge twice to enjoy a correctly transcribed password. But still many retro gamers will have as many fond memories of mistaken passwords as they will of actually enjoying the games they were trying to write down the password for.
Even after battery backup was commonplace, the 16-bit era still rolled out games requiring passwords. For the most part though, the 16-bit era learned from the guinea pig that was the 8-bit era. Passwords were much shorter and less confusing, for the most part, to write down, making games that required passwords more enjoyable to play.
Today I keep a notepad on my laptop containing the passwords for games, and no I don’t mean through emulation, simply because notepad’s font is light years ahead of my own handwriting. I also take the time to scrutinize each line of the password to make sure I have it written down correctly. Sure I could easily go online and seek out a password pertaining to my current status on some retro games, but it isn’t my hard work, now is it?
One particular game sticks out from my childhood that frustrated me to no end with it’s completely, and utterly, useless and pointless password system, River City Ransom. River City Ransom is without question an NES classic, but that password system left a lot, and I mean heaps, to be desired. Partly because the password system required you to start a new game, press start and then select the password option; but most because River City Ransom required a whopping 66 characters per password!
Passwords could be fun also, sometimes you could mash in a nonsensical combination and have the game start up with things you didn’t earn yourself, other times the password wasn’t acceptable or it just started fresh anyway. Many retro gamers would give passwords to their friends to show off their progress, or to help them out a little. I’ve found many slips of paper covered in passwords within retro game cases, or even hand written inside the manual.
Today they are but a distant memory, but many retro gamers still retain the memories of frustration when a good password went bad. Love them or hate them, passwords were a part of retro gaming culture. I liken the retro gaming password to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, something to be remembered so we aren’t doomed to repeat our past.
Great Baseball
One of the very first articles I wrote here on TVG was Baseball and NES, because I love many baseball games for the NES. I haven’t played them all but one of my absolute favorites is MLB (yes it is made by LJN), but an extremely close second would be Jaleco’s Bases Loaded. I still remember the commercials for Bases Loaded, even as a kid who had yet to own an NES, and when I finally got my hands on both an NES and a copy of that game I could hardly part with it.
What Bases Loaded did differently from any other NES baseball game I had seen at the time was give you lanky players, as opposed to short, chubby, Babe Ruth inspired sprites. Another thing that it did differently that I hadn’t seen anywhere else was setting the view point from behind the pitching mound, as where most of the others were set from behind home plate. Needless to say, I loved Bases Loaded for the NES.
Fast forward many, many years to 2012 when I acquired my Sega Master System, accompanied with a game by the name of Great Baseball. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from Great Baseball, but I knew it had to be baseball and it had to be better than Nintendo’s game, simply titled, Baseball. Great Baseball’s title screen says it all, starting with it’s use of more eye catching colors than the NES could ever hope, and finishing up with a pseudo-action sequence of a player sliding into home.
After you slowly come back down to Earth from that intro, and you manage to hit the start button, you’re greeted with six game options.. six! In reality there are only 3 modes; single player, two player and home run contest, yet there are two difficulty levels for each. After you’ve chosen which mode you wish to play you are then presented with a good variety of teams, with a map that will show exactly where each selection hails from.
After you and player two, or the CPU, have your teams chosen, you have to choose your pitcher, their special pitch and how much stamina they will have for the game. After that you’ll be shown the lineup screen, which shows the batting order for the team up to bat. Once the game starts the first thing you will notice is how bright and vibrant the game’s colors are, as well as how the player sprites don’t look as sickly as it’s NES counterparts.
Most of the time you will start off pitching, though sometimes I have found myself at bat, pitching is fairly straight forward as you can control the ball’s speed and direction with the D-pad. If the batter happens to hit the ball the game will switch to the diamond screen which shows the whole field of play, where you will then see players scramble to their positions and you now control an outfielder, which gives you a chance to make a play. If you’ve played an NES baseball game, this is pretty standard.
Overall there isn’t much difference in the way the game handles in comparison to it’s NES counterpart, so there isn’t any long awkward learning curve with Great Baseball. The replay value on this game is phenomenal, even for an old cartridge based baseball game. Due to it’s brilliant color palette and the smooth game play Great Baseball has become one of my favorite baseball video games, as well as one of my favorite Master System games.
(not so) Great Basketball
While the Sega Master System’s library was rife with worthwhile titles, it was also plagued by a whole bunch of stinkers! Sega developed and published a series of sports titles for the Master System, all with the prefix Great boldly starting off the titles, followed by the actual sport that was supposedly so, well.. great! I happen to own two of these games and I can say without a doubt I enjoy Great Baseball quite a bit, dare I even say more so than any of my NES baseball titles.
But Such is the story of Great Basketball, perhaps more of a wishful title than a literal one. As you can tell by the title this is a basketball game, naturally. But sadly the only thing great about this game seems to be it’s atrocious, and often times mind-numbing flaws!
From the title screen you’re greeted with a pretty standard screen which allows you to choose one or two players. This screen is pretty opaque and doesn’t show the horrors that await you next, which is the team select screen. You are then presented with 8 choices of countries, rather than actual teams.
The game can’t even get choosing a team done right as the controls are sluggish. Even once you’ve made your choice, you’re forced to sit through a short rendition of that country’s national anthem, which I’ve only managed to skip, on accident, once! Then you have to finish up by picking the CPU’s team, or allowing player 2 to choose their team.
Now the action starts and the graphics look pretty good for an 8-bit basketball game; the court looks nicely decorated, the cheerleaders are standard yet interesting sprites, the referee is the tallest sprite on the screen and perhaps should be the one playing basketball, and the teams are comprised of Amish style, faceless sprites. The goals look like goals and the basketball looks like a basketball. Graphically this game could have delivered a little more in some areas, but truthfully not by much!
So here is where the true horror begins, by now you’ve forgiven the sluggish selection screen and being forced to learn a new national anthem and you’re ready to play ball, but again the game can’t even get that done right! You can pass the ball around quite swiftly but to shoot a basket you must first jump, wait for the peak of the jump, then hit the jump button yet again to throw the ball. From there fate and chance take over as to whether or not you’ll drain that bank shot, more often than not you’ll end up missing.
So lets say you, or the other team most likely, were fortunate enough to sink that basket, now you have to wait as the game makes a sound to let you know that someone scored, the ball drops to the floor and the crowd starts to cheer. This event will burn up an additional couple of seconds off your playing enjoyment. Why can’t I just pick up the ball and inbound it right away, instead of waiting for it to tell me someone scored and hearing the crowd cheer!?
So the ball is now inbounded to a teammate, or perhaps you chose to become a ball hog and rush over to the shadow and inbound to yourself, now you have to go by what I call the “2 pixel foul rule”. The 2 pixel foul rule is just that, if you or the other team possess the ball and YOU walk within 2 pixels of the other team, you foul them by default. This merely changes possession as I’ve never seen any free throws being offered, and although it is harder to do, you can get them to foul you as well.
I will give the game credit for having fairly clear voice samples, the referee will call “Jump Ball”, “Jump Shot” and “Three point shot”, regardless if it were you or the CPU who made the shot. Again the graphics are pretty good, although the crowd looks like Bob Ross’s palette after a long day of painting happy trees. Perhaps there is too much orange off the court and anywhere else there isn’t substance, but that is my favorite color so I may be bias there.
Countless times I’ve tried to give this game a shot, but game up short. Great Basketball never made it to the draft, and there are quite a few reasons why. Had Sega given this game a little more time, and just a few tweaks here and there, this game could have been good, but even so this game simply couldn’t live up to it’s prefix of great.
