The Sega Genesis Is Officially Back In Production (dailydot.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Daily Dot: Sega may be done making the Genesis (known as the Mega Drive outside of the U.S.), but that doesn't mean people aren't still buying them. In Brazil, the 16-bit system is still hugely popular, and now it's being brought back into production. TecToy, which produces all manner of gadgets and toys, has launched preorders for all-new Sega Mega Drive stock, complete with support for the original game library and controllers. But what's even more astounding about the announcement is that it's all being done with Sega's blessing, making these official, brand new, Sega-branded consoles. The new consoles are spitting images of the originals, aside from the addition of an SD card slot, which makes it great for emulation. They're even complete with support for A/V cables, though there's no HDMI or other bells or whistles. That might seem like a bad move, but for the Brazilian market, it's a perfect fit, not to mention that you can easily pick up an A/V-to-HDMI converter for fairly cheap. The system costs roughly $125 (BRL399) and includes a SD card with 22 games.

Comments

Complete?

[freeze128]

Not providing HDMI is indeed a mistake, but what's unforgivable is the lack of even COMPONENT outputs, or even VGA. It would have been easier to convert the output to RGB than to convert it to composite, and you would have way better clarity on today's televisions.

Re:Complete?

[mwvdlee]

This is a $125 decades old 16-bit games console being sold in a market of $50 Android TV boxes.
I think the lack of HDMI is just about the least strange thing about it.

Re:Complete?

[TuringTest]

It would have been easier to convert the output to RGB than to convert it to composite, and you would have way better clarity on today's televisions.

Why would you want better clarity? The art in those games was designed to be shown in blurry screens. Showing them with increased clarity distorts the original game looks, as if they were processed by a sharpen filter.

Re:Complete?

[geekmux]

This is a $125 decades old 16-bit games console being sold in a market of $50 Android TV boxes. I think the lack of HDMI is just about the least strange thing about it.

This is a $125 product being touted as "new" when we all know that Genesis consoles (along with Atari 2600 consoles) have been sold for years now, and one can easily find them at less than half this advertised price, and with three times as many built in games.

The largest unexplained oddity is why the retro-game-loving people of Brazil are completely unaware of this.

Re:Complete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because these are not sold in Brazil, are likely illegal anyway [standard Brazilian outlook on this kind of stuff], and after you factor in the need for an international credit card, US$->BRL conversion and shipping, cost just as much (but have no warranty at all -- shipping makes it prohibitive to use any internationally valid warranty in Brazil that requires shipping overseas).

Oh, and TecToy stuff usually ends up being sold on toy stores across the country, with discounted prices and 10x in your credit card/store credit plan. They are selling (completely legal) Master System + 125 games small boxes to lower income people that want to gift their children with a videogame, but would never be able to afford either the CAPEX or OPEX of a PS3/PS4/X-Box. If the Sega sells well and doesn't break down, it will get the same treatment.

That enough?

Re:Complete?

[KozmoStevnNaut]

SCART was pretty much exclusively a European thing, dreamed up by the French to protect their own TV manufacturers. Japan has/had the JP21 standard which uses the same connectors with a different pin assignment.

99% of consoles hooked up using SCART connectors output Composite video, RGB was either not available or required an expensive add-on cable. All TVs with SCART plugs support Composite over SCART, some support S-Video, and the best TVs support RGB and sometimes even Component (YPbPr). Some consoles (most notably the N64) only had Composite output, you have to do hardware mods to get anything else. More info here: http://retrorgb.com/systems.ht...

So no, the Master System, SNES, Mega Drive and so on definitely supported Composite, and that's what most people used. NES was Composite-only.

I'd wager most people have never seen a console hooked up with a proper set of SCART RGB or Component cables, and the massive increase in quality it gives.

Re:Complete?

[tepples]

modern console [...] Power consumption is negligible.

You'd be surprised. "Hardcore" consoles from the past decade (PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbox One) can burn 100 W or more if made before the process shrinks incorporated in "slim" redesigns.

You probably have the internet connection anyway at a fixed monthly rate.

Unless you live in a rural area, where the monthly data allowance under the "fixed monthly rate" often isn't enough to download modern games. I know nothing about the home Internet market in Brazil, but wireless (satellite or cellular) home Internet plans in the United States tend to run $5 per GB or more.

Buying new games is CAPEX.

Until the game's publisher expressly discontinues online play in favor of its sequels, which is standard practice with league-licensed sport simulations. Then renewing your entitlement to play by buying the sequel becomes OPEX. And with current-generation games well into the double digit GB, CAPEX for new games becomes prohibitive.

Xbox Live/PSN isn't mandatory.

It is if the majority of new multiplayer games support neither split-screen nor LAN play, or for people who don't live near other people who play the same multiplayer game.

Re:Great

[OrangeTide]

The NES Classic Edition is in stores right now for $60. It has the games built-in but it does have an HDMI output.

"Fairly cheap" A/V-to-HDMI converters

[PercentSevenC]

Any A/V-to-HDMI converter you could reasonably call "fairly cheap" is going to have horrendous amounts of input lag and be total crap for playing games on. There's a reason people spend several hundreds of dollars importing Micomsoft's XRGB-series upscalers from Japan.

Re:$125 seems like a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to Brazilian import tariffs on electronics, a Pi might cost $100-$150.

Brazil might be able to manufacture its own version of the the Pi, but then it's a question of scale and market viability.

Re:Great

[CyanDisaster]

It comes with a limited and non-expandable games library. It would have been nice if it had the built-in library as well as the capability to load the original game catridges.

Re:wake me up when

[aliquis]

Shadow warrior 2 may lack multiplayer arena combat (I'm not sure) but supposedly it's free from copy protection(?)

If you want the multiplayer aspect there's Quake3-like games released as open-source and so on which you could run.

Re: $125 seems like a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to think about the distorted/inflated prices found in anything electronic in Brazil.

A RPi3 or Odroid c2 plus controllers is about US$ 125 here. Even then they are better alternatives of course but I understand the Genesys appeal for the layman.

Re:Been around for years, this is not new.

[tepples]

For some odd reason the people of Brazil representing the target market are unaware that this product already exists and for less than half the cost? What the hell am I missing here? Are they really charging a 400% markup on the new(er) console because of the addition of an SD card slot?

They're charging 400 percent markup because the manufacturer got it past Brazilian customs and into toy stores.