Craigslist Finds - A Glitchy, Broken SNES w/ 5 games

These would have cost much more at a game shop. Still, ugh.

Just off the high from buying a $30 SNES and selling it for $50, I set out to replicate my success with another SNES, this time purchased for $25 from a nice family on Craigslist.  The set included Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Donkey Kong Country 3, Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat 2.  Not bad for the price, and selling the SNES with Mario World and my existing Player's Choice copy of Mario All-Stars should have made it a very, very sweet deal.

But this SNES hides a terrible, dark secret.  It hates Mode 7.

When presented with a Mode 7 effect to process, it responds with "LOL I DUNNO LIKE THIS MAYBE" and spits out some garbage vaguely similar to what's supposed to be on the screen.

Yoshi has a segmented tongue!

The opening is the obvious glitch, but watch Yoshi's tongue, too.  Weird, but not as weird as this:

Yikes.

As you can see, it's a much harder game when Mode 7 goes nuts.  Eventually I learned to drive from the bottom half of the screen rather than the top for demo purposes.

So, can we fix it?  No, probably not.  I've checked over and thoroughly cleaned the cartridge connector and can't find any issues.  The games work just fine in my SNES.  From what I've read, this issue is caused by a bad PPU - meaning it'd either need a donor PPU or a whole new board, and I don't have the right kind of equipment to swap the chip anyway.

Of course, I just purchased a pretty decent stack of games for $25 and got an entertainingly glitchy SNES to go with it.  What's to complain about?

A Journey Through Project Mars: Sega's 32X

It occurs to me that many of you may not know exactly what the 32X is.  Let's get that cleared up, shall we?  I'll let Sega's advertising team tell you about it.

Wait, what?  Let's try that again:

...what the fuck was that?  Sign of the times, or ad executives on cocaine?  I'll let you decide.

What the above videos were trying to say is that the 32X was a 32-bit expansion for the 16-bit Sega Genesis.  In January of 1994, the aging Sega Genesis and SegaCD needed a boost.  Nintendo's Super Nintendo was stomping them, and it was time to begin work on a 32-bit console to crush the competition.

This new 32-bit console was targeted for the holiday season in 1994, less than 11 months development time.

Codenamed "Jupiter", it was to be a cartridge-based replacement for the Genesis.  In development, it was decided that CD technology was cheaper, so the project was modified, and Project "Saturn" was born.

The decision was then made to extend the existing Genesis console with a higher color depth and a 32-bit processor.  This new console was to be codenamed Project "Mars" and was released in November of 1994 as the 32X.

Holy crap, Sega.

The 32X was an absolute failure, despite Sega's best attempts to push it as the next big thing.  There were several reasons - the price was far too high for an add-on ($170), some launch titles were rushed so badly they were either awful or not much of an improvement over the Genesis - but Sega's largest detractor was Sega themselves.

The Sega Saturn was slated for release in September of 1995, positioned as Sega's "true" 32-bit console.  Why buy an expansion for your Genesis when the real next big thing is just around the corner?  The final nail in the coffin was the Saturn's surprise release in May of 1995, rendering the 32X obsolete in just 6 months.

The 32X is considered one of a string of bad decisions leading up to Sega's demise in the console market.