Analogue Mega Sg - Review - Game Sack -

 (Game Sack theme) - Hello and welcome to Game Sack. It's time to check out the Analogue Mega Sg. It's a fake Genesis and as you may or may not know there a lot of different types of fake Genesises out there but Analogue is a little bit different. They pride themselves on accuracy, on compatibility and just all around kicking ass. So, is this as good as real Genesis, or better?  (sweet Thunder Force IV music)  The Mega Sg, from Analogue. This console comes in four different color varieties and it's available from Analogue's website for $190. You get a console, a Master System cartridge adapter, a spacer mat for the Sega CD, an HDMI cable, a USB cable for power as well as an AC adapter for that USB cable. The console itself has to Atari style controller ports so that you can use any Genesis controller that you want. And because it's a Genesis, it futures a headphone jack. On the side, there's an SD card slot which will allow you to jail break the system and play pirated games in the very near future. But for now it's just how you do your firmware updates. Inside of the Mega Sg, you'll find an Altera Cyclone V FPGA powering everything and not much else. You can also get a wireless 8BitDo or 8BitDo, six button controller when you buy the system if you want for an extra $25, more on this later. Powering on the Mega Sg, you're greeted with a menu that should be somewhat familiar if you've ever used any of the other consoles from Analogue. You can run your cartridge, play Ultracore, which is an unreleased game until now, adjust your various settings, and tools, which allow you to enter Game Genie style cheat codes and test your controller if you're seriously that bored. Like Analogue's other consoles this one offers resolutions of 480p, 720p and 1080p. And as always there are a ton of options for you to mess around with in order to customize your picture and sound presentation, especially when you enable the advanced mode. If you prefer a 4:3 for 16:9 mode, which you should, you'll wanna go into the scaler's option to make sure H Interpolation is enabled and V Interpolation is disabled. This will greatly reduce the shimmering during scrolling on games that have a resolution of 256 pixels wides compared to the more common 320 pixels wide. If you choose 4.5X height, then you'll wanna make sure V Interpolation is enabled as well. Just be careful because these check boxes are kinda backwards, you actually check them if you want to disable the Interpolation. There are just so many options and it's all up to you. And of course you have other stuff like the stupid X-Ray filter that Analogue keeps including in their consoles because they think it's funny. Seriously, there should be speed runs of games using only this filter. And yes, there are plenty of scanline options as well and they look pretty good. There's also a few extra features. First is the buffer mode. Fully Buffered mode duplicates the timing of the original Sega Genesis but it will cause about one frame of lag and no screen tearing. The Zero Delay mode actually speeds up the Genesis a tiny bit so that it runs at the standard speed of 59.94 frames per second instead of the 59.92275 frames per second that the real console runs at. But that means for every 10 minutes that you play, you'll be ahead by one second compared to if you played on a real console. I don't know, can you handle that extra Blast Processing™? Single Buffer mode runs at the same speed of the original Genesis but with less lag and you'll get some minor screen tearing here and there. Personally I say just leave it on Zero lag mode. Nobody's gonna notice the difference and I don't believe anyone who says that they do. One nice thing is that you can turn off the stupid colored borders around the screen that plague a lot of Genesis games. Usually these weren't seen back in the day on a CRT, not sure why they even existed. I guess just maybe they're a byproduct of the way the system was originally designed? Anyway, turn them off and keep them off, unless you're a weirdo. You can't turn off the colored borders  in Master System games though unless you use the cropping function. Then, there's the Dither Blending feature. If you turn this on and adjust it, you can affect what the console does when it detects dithering. Here's how Castle of Illusion normally is. Look at the Jello, that actually is created with dithering so you can kind of see through it. but it actually has like a checkerboard pattern, which is, I don't know some people don't like it. But if you turn on the Dither Blending, you can see right through it as if it was a real transparency. I don't know, it kind of works okay, but it depends on the game. It is kinda fun to play with and it's cool here and there but over the years I've just learned to appreciate the dithering for what it is and sometimes I kinda like it. There's even some audio settings. You can probably get away with leaving most of this stuff alone, but there are a few things here worth noting. First is swap left and right. Who wants backwards stereo? Well maybe if you put on your headphones backwards and you're just too lazy to flip them around. You can adjust the Ladder Effect Depth which should help the system sound more like a good model one Genesis instead of a model two which use the Yamaha of 3438 instead of a Yamaha 2612. A setting of four is more like the YM2612 and the model one and that's what you want. (shots firing and cool music) Then there's the YM2612 high quality mode which supposedly helps the audio sound a touch better by keeping it at 14 bits instead of truncating it to nine. So, no need to turn that off. The PSG sounds are too loud compared to a real Genesis so be sure to go into the channel levels and set the three squares and the noise to about 32. I also recommend enabling the Lowpass Filter and setting the Cutoff to about 6900 with a Rolloff of about 12. It's not perfect but it sounds pretty good. Then there's the YM3438 Busy Behavior Toggle. When it's unchecked it behaves like a model one Genesis and the music in Hellfire plays back at the proper speed. (properly timed space music) But if you check it, then it behaves like the newer chip sets in many model two Genesises and Hellfire plays the music too slow, which is the wrong speed. (really slow space music) Reversely, if it's checked then the original Earthworm Jim sounds like it should. So, decide if Earthworm Jim or Hellfire is more important to you and leave it that way. Or just change it depending on whichever of those two games you happen to be playing. It really doesn't matter in any other game as far as I've ever noticed. There's also plenty of options like the look of the menu and what happens when you first turn the system on and things like that. Lastly, there's a bunch of settings for the LED and I guess people really love this I don't know why but they do. But hey, more power to you. And don't forget to save your settings after you changed them. Unfortunately, Analogue provides no method of writing your setting to an SD card so each time you upgrade the firmware, everything will be reset. So instead of writing the settings to an SD card, you'll need to write them to a piece of paper and then put everything back in one by one which is almost as fun as testing your controller in the tools menu. Analogue says that they will fix this in a future update though. So that's good! And of course you can enter Game Genie codes as mentioned before, or you can use a real Game Genie if you want. Save states are not supported on consoles made by Analogue but you could get around that by using one of the top end Everdrives. And there's a whole new menu for the Master System stuff that you can only get to while playing a Master System game and calling up the in-game menu. You'll have to set everything up one by one all over again here as the other settings don't carry over and be sure to save these too. (not-exactly-great music) Okay those menus can be pretty overwhelming. There's a lot of different things that you can adjust to your liking and honestly I love it. I mean the more options, the better. But, how does it play the games, how compatible is it and the big question, does it work with Altered Beast? This console comes with a built-in game called Ultracore made by Dice and Psygnosis that never got a release back in the day but was finally finished up recently. Analogue describes it as a holy grail. It is pretty good actually, from the very brief time I've spent with it so far. It's a cool single player running gun and you can tell right away that it's European which means there's likely to be some deadly drops of water in here somewhere. It's not as linear as Contra and what not, and so far it seems like it would be well worth a play through. It's too bad that this didn't get released back in the day. Who knows, maybe I'll have a full review of this one in the future. (holy grail music and holy grail shots firing) We were instructed to clean our cartridges well before we reviewed the Mega Sg. But I'm not gonna do that. Reason being is that if it works in a real 30 year old Sega Genesis, it should work just fine in the Mega Sg. Granted, if you come across a cartridge that doesn't work, of course we're gonna recommend cleaning it. Check out my video to learn the best ways to clean your stupid games. But so far every cartridge that I've tried has worked perfectly fine. U.S. and European games and Japanese Mega Drive games all fit into the cartridge slot. Even some Sunsoft games fit, no problem. And they even survive the wiggle test, which the Analogue Nt Mini did not. The games all look, sound and play great once you get the settings dialed in. Even the two player mode of Sonic 2 works, but it looks pretty nasty thanks to all the interlace combing. Same goes with the dumb INT mode in Ys 3. I don't even understand why this mode is in the game. If you choose to get the 8BitDo Do M30 wireless game pad, you'll be getting a pretty damn good controller. It feels fantastic and it's very responsive. In fact, the D pad feels exactly like the one Sega used in the official Genesis six button controllers and also the Saturn model two controllers. And there's no additional lag here that my slow-ass brain can detect. And since it comes with a dongle you can even use it on a real Sega Genesis or an Atari 2600. Pretty much everything that works with the real Genesis is gonna work here, even Virtua Racing which uses the SVP chip in the cartridge. This is one of the few games that actually kind of benefits from the Dither Blending. Homebrew cards like Pier Solar work great and games that save and load work great too. You can't back-up or load save files to an SD card or anything though. Also, things like the Everdrive work fine. However if you have Master System games on your Genesis Everdrive, they're not gonna run here. Shadow and Highlight mode seem to be working fine as seen here in the Japanese version of Batman. The shadows seems to be maybe a touch brighter here than they are in the real Genesis but that's barely even worth pointing out and honestly I could be mistaken on this. Slow down as here and there are no options for over clocking the speed of the game nor are there any for increasing the sprites per scanline. The Genesis audio is always the biggest flaw with any kind of emulator or FPGA and the Mega Sg here gets it mostly right it's generally close enough that I don't think that 99% of people will notice or care. There is some light squealing noise that you can hear when the game isn't generating any audio. (squealing effect) And when I was playing Sonic 2, something definitely didn't sound right. Sonic's jumping sound was coming more from the left when it should be absolutely centered.(slightly-left jumping sound effect) You can fix this by going into the audio panning, setting the square one and square two to zero as they should be. (centered jumping sound effect) Then, be sure to save your settings. And who knows, they may fix this in an update. I sure hope they do. And yes, it works with my copy of Altered Beast which came with my Genesis when the console was launched. - [Zeus] Power up! - [Joe] Of course the ultimate test for accuracy may be the Titan Overdrive 2 demo, and it runs mostly very well. I made sure to force my region to PAL and also change the Mega Sg's output to 1080p 50Hz since the demo is designed to take advantage of the PAL hardware. I also made sure to uncheck the masking of the top, bottom, left and right borders. With that said, it messes up in this scene here where the borders get actual graphics on them. The top and bottom borders are mostly there, but the left border is extremely clipped and the right border is completely gone. So the accuracy with this aspect isn't quite there yet. Still, when it comes to playing actual Genesis games, the Mega Sg isn't gonna let you down. (shots firing and kick-ass music) Alright, so the compatibility is absolutely fantastic. So is the accuracy, in fact it's played everything that I've thrown at it so far. However, playing Genesis games isn't the only thing that the Mega Sg can do. (cool re-imagined 8-bit music) You can also play Master System games with the included adapter. If you're playing using a Genesis controller, then buttons A and C act as button 2 and B as button 1 and Start as Pause. This is great, especially for those pesky games that have the jump and action button backwards like Zillion here. And having the pause on the actual controller is really nice as well. You can use a regular Master System controller but you loose the pause button unless you modify the adapter. Light Phaser games don't work of course, and neither do 3D games. Analogue says that they'll offer a DAC later this year to allow people to play on a CRT which will enable these features. The games default to FM sound if the title supports it, unless you change it to PSG in the core settings. The FM sound is mostly accurate but I noticed a difference in Rastan. In real life, Rastan sounds like this in FM. (suspenseful music) But on the Mega Sg, the FM sounds like this. (less-accurate and therefore less-suspenseful music) Otherwise, I had no issues playing Master System games. In fact, it's all quite pleasant. The Master System Everdrive also works. You can even load up SG-1000 roms from your Master Everdrive and play them. Though they're supposed to be coming out with a cartridge converter so you can use your real SG-1000 carts. And if you wanna play Master System card games, well screw you because you can't. Unless you use the Hyperkin Master System adapter, then it'll work and if you do that you can even play F-16 Fighting Falcon which won't even run on a real Genesis since it uses a video mode from the SG-1000 which just happens to be supported on the Mega Sg. (energetic music by Yuzo Koshiro) If you have a Sega CD, the Mega Sg works with that too! It comes with a little rubber spacer mat, that's kinda cool. Also, be sure to enable external audio in the settings and just leave it that way. This ends up being a weird hybrid of real hardware working with faked hardware but mostly it's just fine. It works just like it would connecting to a real Genesis. The Backup RAM cartridge is recognized. You can move files to and from it as well as load and save games directly to the cartridge. Both video and audio is output over HDMI and you won't need any weird mixing cable set-ups. The audio level mix between the Genesis sounds and the Sega CD sounds seems to be about right. Like a model one connected with a mixing cable and the volume slider set to 9 or 10. (car roaring) This can all be adjusted in the menu of course. Even the Homebrew Pier Solar works in tandem with its own weird Sega CD disk. (calm music that reminds you that Parprium will never be) You'd think that the FMV games would benefit a little bit from the Dither Blending option but on or off they're still really grainy. Sadly, the Mega Sg can't bypass the region setting that's in the Sega CD hardware itself so you'll need another solution to play import CD games. And there are games that have issues like Willy Beamish. As the opening cut scene finishes up, the graphics go to crap and then as it begins to load the actual game, it completely crashes. Not like anyone wants to or should play this game anyway. And unfortunately if you have the Sega CD hooked up, it breaks compatibility with a lot of Master System games. Some still work, but most that I'm trying don't. They definitely need to fix this. And it goes without saying that the 32X doesn't work,

though I'd just said it anyway. Interesting though, the Sega CD game Fahrenheit sees the 32X if it's attached and asks you to put in the 32X disc. Nothing happens after that of course. The Mega Sg is also supposedly compatible with Game Gear games, but a cartridge adaptor has not been offered on their store so we can't report on the quality or compatibility in that regard. (shots firing and cool orchestral music) Well, there you have it, the Analogue Mega Sg. So is it worth it for $189.99? Well honestly that depends. Do you have a Genesis that's set up for RGB with an upscaler like the Framemeister or the OSSC? If so, probably not unless you're just really enthusiastic about video game hardware like I am. If you don't have any of that stuff and you just wanna play your Genesis games on an HDTV without any lag, then hell yeah this is worth it. This is the best fake Genesis there is, and it's only gonna get better with future firmware updates. It's not perfect, but it's gonna get really really close, especially soon. So let me know what you guys think about your Analogue Mega Sg, it's out today and I'll be interested in reading your comments about it. And in the meantime thank you for watching Game Sack. (Game Sack end theme) - [Director] Game Sack commercial for the Analogue Mega Sg, take one. - Introducing the Megas G from Analogoo. With the Megas G you can... - [Director] Cut! Mega S-G Joe. Analogue. Mega. S. G. - Introducing the Mega Sg from ANALog with the... - [Director] Cut! Analogue, not anal. Never anal! - Introducing the Mega Sg from Analog. With the Mega Sg you... - [Director] Aww Joe, that's the Super Nt not the Mega Sg. That's the Super Nintendo version idiot! - Introducing the Mega Nt from Analog. With the Mega Nt you can... - [Director] Mega Sg, not the Nt. - What does Sg stand for? - [Director] Sega! Genesis!! - You sure it's not Se-Ga?