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Mega Drive Mini, and now... Mega Drive Mini 2!

MW_Jimmy

By MW_Jimmy
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  • 3 weeks later...
Popo

Popo

Posted
Posted

Is this guy a legit Youtuber? I have never seen someone express surprise at finding out that, yes, Sega have re-released Altered Beast yet again. 

 

Anyway, I’ve still got my first class ticket booked for the hype train. Too bad it’s not actually coming out in September anymore, but I can’t wait to find out how the emulation on the different games fares. 

 

Do you think the 8bitdo M30 pad would work with this with a wireless USB adapter?

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Popo

Popo

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Posted
7 hours ago, Lyrical Donut said:

 

It seems he can't spell 'your' or 'average' properly, so.... probably.

 

Anyway - here's another review from someone who's probably already quite busy trying to hack the absolute shit out of it:

 

 

 

“I’m not really sure if the volume slider does anything.”

 

Yea man, if only there was some way to know...

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Paulando

Paulando

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On 14/08/2019 at 22:09, Goemon said:

Hopefully the delay is to fix the 11 frames of lag on the sound!

 

 


This is a very decent video, but despite pre-ordering this and looking forward to it, I fear it might have put me off it completely :lol:

 

The thing looks great, and they’ve clearly done a good job of it (the pointless sliding flap is a lovely touch). There’s a huge selection of games, but when he went through them there’s actually a lot of shit in there, or games I won’t play, or games I’ve played to death already. And speaking as a huge Sega fan here, nothing quite reaches the heights of A Link to the Past or Super Mario World.

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spanky debrest

spanky debrest

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The audio lag seems as bad is it was on the stock NES Classic - which is appalling but I'm optimistic that they'll have been tweaking the software until the very last moment. It cannot ship with a flaw like that.

 

I do really want to play the new Tetris and Darius ports though as the rare cartridge version of the former was pretty lame and the arrival of a 32Mb Darius with a Zuntata-supervised score feels like a genuine video game event - more so for me than Star Fox 2 or, say, the official European releases of Earthbound & Super Mario RPG that came with the SNES Mini.

 

And as far as nothing on the MD mini touching the magic of LTTP or SMW - I'd chose the Asian MD Mini's Alien Soldier and MUSHA over these two myself - or indeed a hefty chunk of the PC Engine Mini's line up. Zelda games aren't for me and vanilla SMW isn't something I can see myself ever going back to.

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Mr. Gerbik

Mr. Gerbik

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6 hours ago, Paulando said:

There’s a huge selection of games, but when he went through them there’s actually a lot of shit in there, or games I won’t play, or games I’ve played to death already.

I would be very surprised if you aren't able to add every single mega drive game (and Link to the Past for that matter) within the first week of release 

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Let us measure

Let us measure

Posted
Posted
21 minutes ago, ulala said:

That lag in sound, I thought this was m2?

 

I've got a feeling they might be being stretched a little bit thin, what with everyone and their grandma wanting them to handle their emulation jobs. Aren't they a tiny studio?

 

It's a shame though. I remember when they were regularly interviewed over their Sega 3D Classic releases; the amount of effort that went into each conversion was incredible.

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strider

strider

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We’ve been using the machine for a month and it sounds absolutely fine to me. It’s currently the best mini on the market as far as I’m concerned. 

I do want the alien soldier version, though.

 

tetris is interesting as it has lots of extras that aren't in the mega drive port.

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strider

strider

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17 hours ago, Keyboard Koala said:

 

High praise indeed. Seeing as the SNES mini, once hacked, nailed it for me. You reckon the emulation's better than that one?

Nick, who is our resident emulation fiend feels it's on par with the quality seen on the SNES Mini. All the Sonic noises are correct, so that's normally his first test whenever he's looking at anything Mega Drive related.

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Rex Grossman

Rex Grossman

Posted
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1 hour ago, strider said:

Nick, who is our resident emulation fiend feels it's on par with the quality seen on the SNES Mini. All the Sonic noises are correct, so that's normally his first test whenever he's looking at anything Mega Drive related.

 

If it's on a par, what makes it's the best on the market?

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HKT3030

HKT3030

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To preface all of this: The MD Mini we were sent was not a review unit, and these shouldn't be taken as final impressions.

 

To elaborate a little on the quality of the emulation, I think it's certainly very good. I didn't particularly like the recent Mega Drive collection that Sega put out on PS4 etc., which had input lag issues and sound problems, and have largely avoided playing it because of them. I often find myself dropping in for a go on the MD Mini when I get a spare moment, and I never did that with that collection.

 

As compared to the SNES Mini? I think it's a tie, based on the unit we were sent. Both have their own odd differences compared to real hardware - the SNES Mini doesn't handle Mode 7 strictly accurately, the MD Mini exhibits horizontal shimmering in 256x224 games, and so on. I can't test audio lag at present as I don't have real hardware to hand, but even if I could that wouldn't necessarily invalidate the results seen elsewhere, as we're using a unit with different firmware than what was sent out to US-based YouTubas (we've got European menus and all that, and couldn't find a way to make Genesis ones show up). If you're happy with one, you'll probably be happy with the other.

 

Honestly, I think if you're the kind of consumer that demands 100% perfection, you shouldn't even be considering one of these machines in the first place. They use cheap SoCs that ultimately don't have the horsepower for cycle-accurate emulation of the kind that authors such as byuu strive for, and changes have to be made to how the games run anyway (for example, the flashing colours on Contra's bosses are massively toned down on the MD Mini). People who want that will prefer things like the Mega SG, or real hardware through crazy expensive professional CRTs or scaler set-ups. That's fine of course, I'm an OSSC owner and I mod my own machines, so I get it. But when I'm paying less than £1.70 per game before you even factor in the hardware, I'm expecting "very good" rather than perfection.

As far as it being the best mini console goes, my £0.02: Same price as the SNES Mini, emulation's of similar quality, more games (even if you fully ignore the crap ones like Virtua Fighter 2), you get all the regional versions, and you don't have to get up to press the reset button every time you want to switch games. I could go into more detail, but quite frankly I've waffled on long enough.

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Rex Grossman

Rex Grossman

Posted
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59 minutes ago, moosegrinder said:

It's got Strider on it.

Also probably the fact it's had lots of tweaks making some of the games better than the originals. And games that haven't been released before.

 

Maybe.

Although I doubt any of the unreleased games have as much mystique as Starfox 2 did.

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SqueakyG

SqueakyG

Posted
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27 minutes ago, HKT3030 said:

(we've got European menus and all that, and couldn't find a way to make Genesis ones show up).

 

you get all the regional versions

 

All the regional versions?  I was assuming that the Euro Mega Drive Mini would have all the US 60hz versions of games by default (otherwise it would be a Playstation Classic debacle). But does your Euro unit come with the US Castlevania Bloodines or the European New Generation? How would you switch between different US/Euro versions if the way of switching ROMs is to change the system language?

 

I know you switch to Japanese versions by setting the whole thing to Japanese language -- which seems a very inelegant way of doing it. I'd rather just be able to choose a regional ROM when I click on a game.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, moosegrinder said:

the fact it's had lots of tweaks making some of the games better than the originals. 

 

I know they've made changes to Tetris, and I think made the Mega Man games run at 60hz, but what other improvements have you heard about? 

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