SMS cartridges on MegaDrive ????

[Djidjo]

SMS Adapter 1 and SMS Adapter 2 ??? Ok, I'm no SMS/Megadrive specialist, but I never heard of such an item ! Does it work ?

Djidjo

 

[Arakon]

oh geezus, have you lived under a rock? there's even an official SMS adapter sold by sega and all over the stores back when it came out.. of course it works.. the MD has a SMS mode.

 

[Quakester2000]

The megadrive was orginally designed to have SMS capability but sega decided to make some money off it so create a cartridge to let you play your SMS games. There is a SMS convertor for the game gear too.

 

[Arakon]

that doesn't have much to do with "making money off it", it's simply impossible to stick a SMS cart in without a slot adapter. adding a second slot for SMS games would've driven the price of the unit higher, which would've sucked for the people who didn't care about playing SMS games on the MD/Genesis.

 

[RitualOfTheTrout]

Back in the day the rental store had a couple SMS games and that adapter. They also had some import games that you needed to rent that Honey Bee thing to play.

I think thats what the Honey Bee was for.. I can't remember now..

 

[Xavier]

What funny is when people have a md to genesis adapter for sale (all you have to do is shave your system) same with famicom to super nintendo ...there adapters out there somwhere for those 2 .

 

[it290]

Well yeah, but the shave won't help you with territory lockout games. I don't think the Honeybee will either, but you can get around it with a game genie.

 

[RitualOfTheTrout]

What do you shave on the snes to be able to put nes games into it?

I never knew this was possible.

 

[it290]

I think he meant Super Famicom to SNES; you can't play NES games in an SNES.

 

[Kaneda]

yep

you can, with the Tristar8

you also have the tristar64 to play SNES&NES games on N64

 

[Alexvrb]

...and you can play NES/SNES/SMS etc on a Dreamcast, but I don't think that was his point. He's just saying you can't grab an unmodified SNES and shove NES carts into it and play away.

 

[RitualOfTheTrout]

How to these things work? IE this tristar thing..

Do these consoles have backward compatability built in that they just do not want people to use or what?

 

[Arakon]

the tristar for SNES has a complete NES on a single chip inside the unit.. it pretty much uses the SNES as a power supply.

 

[Link Hylia]

and input and output, too

as for NES/SNES on dreamcast, emulation.

 

[Arakon]

input yes, output no.. it has its own AV out.

 

[ExCyber]

Genesis was able to have an SMS mode because SMS was a pretty clean design in the first place, based on tried and true interfaces and methods <s>stolen from</s> inspired by Texas Instruments chips, which were then expanded for Genesis. This isn't true of NES, which has heavily custom chip designs that interact with each other and the cartridge in rather odd ways. To add "NES modes" to SNES's processors would likely have been more work than just creating an "NES chip".