The Sega Genesis Is Officially Back in Production | Hacker News Reader

The Sega Genesis Is Officially Back in Production

dailydot.com

87 pointsdouche25 comments

I wrote about the Brazilian company that created this system, TecToy, last year. As impressive as the Genesis returning to production is, even more notable is the fact that TecToy has had different versions of the Master System in continuous production since the '80s.

http://tedium.co/2015/07/16/sega-master-system-brazil/

There were a number of reasons for this, but the biggest is high import taxes. TecToy produced its consoles locally, and as a result, it was cheaper to buy a SMS than it was a NES.

I have read that huge import taxes on Japanese game consoles (in the SNES/Genesis era through Xbox1 and PS2) are the reason why x86/PC gaming is so popular in South Korea these days. Instead of producing a domestic console alternative, Korea went with the industry standard PC and wrote software...

I suspect they again went with a partially emulated build...

If you visit the site, there is a "*" next to "compatible with original cartridges"

When I went to read the footnote, it was written: "It is possible for it not be compatible with all cartridges."

I suspect like other past machines of TecToy, it will fail to run properly Sonic3&Knuckles for example (the megadrive version just before this one, had a sound chip that couldn't understand Sonic3 commands, and so just went nuts...)

Probably won't run Pier Solar either.

Some games on the SD card...

At least in the past, it looks like Tectoy made custom ASICs with all the Genesis hardware on a single chip. So maybe this isn't going to be like another NES Classic. http://www.sega-16.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-22277.html

A cursory search suggests Tectoy actually cares about making these ASICs well, unlike the grey market NES on a chip designs you find masquerading as Ybox 360s and Polystation 4s.

It's worth noting that this is in Brazil, which is notorious for having ludicrous import tariffs for technology, including gaming tech. I was there a few years ago and you still saw PS2 games on the shelf at major electronic retailers, because it was still the most affordable console on the market by far. Note that the company producing this, TecToy, is a Brazilian company and thus presumably has an easier time with the tariffs.

When I interviewed some important people for a personal blog about game development, one guy claimed, half on record, and half off the record, that the import tariffs exist because of TecToy lobbying in first place.

Also, TecToy has very strong ties to the government, for example I saw once the government organize an event to advertise their publicy funded loans for new companies, and everyone that spoke something there had some tie to TecToy and Workers Party at the same time, including some actual TecToy employees.

Having no knowledge of Brazilian politics, I wonder which is the chicken and which is the egg? Does TecToy initially come about because of the tariffs, which it then has an incentive to perpetuate, or is TecToy politically connected from the start?

Seems like a difficult problem to get out of, once you start down the path of protectionism. The tariffs likely slow growth overall, but remove them and you risk killing a homegrown industry if it can't compete.

The tariffs have existed for more than 30 years. Companies like TecToy exist because of the tariff, initially created to encourage the creation of brazilian tech companies. All these years later, and the best the companies can do is to copy foreign technology.

Really interesting what high import taxes will do.

Craziest of all - Tectoy ported Street Fighter 2 for the 8-bit Master System... in 1997. It's predictably terrible but really, it's amazing it happened at all.

Makes you wonder what those people would have accomplished if they'd been free to work on anything they wanted, rather than artificially incentivized to do busywork.

Is this 60hz or 50hz?

(U.S. gamers might not have experience with crappy 50hz PAL ports of games which ran annoyingly slower...)

Edit: Looks like PAL.

This is one of those things I'm so glad I didn't know about as a 10 year old because it would have driven me nuts, but now that I do know... old consoles are forever ruined.

Problable Pal-n machine.

If your interested sugest searche for a tube tv in good will that accepts the 3 standarts. PAL-M/N and NTSC.

PAL-M (as used in Brazil), appears to by a hybrid system, using 525 lines / 59.94 Hz, buts with the PAL colour encoding system. [1]

I don't know if this is reflected in the games consoles, but it always seemed like an interesting peculiarity to me and made me want to acquire a Brazilian Master System to find out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-M

It's probably PAL-M, which no color on NTSC TVs ("black and white"), but fine otherwise.

No eight player Micro Machines? :(

(It used to have a special cartridge with 2 extra controller ports and each player could use half a controller)

Good times! Just imagine sharing a controller with someone now to play a game

I played split-screen Serious Sam coop with my brother using one keyboard and one mouse...

I remember some Chinese company was making $35 Megadrive units with cartridge slots. A friend of mine was going to buy a few and send one to me as he wanted to make Megadrive games.

$125 is a bit much can get a used verson for cheap on eBay.

Sega needs to bring it back via Nintendo new classic preloaded with certain games.

Was hoping article was about this...

Is there anything more annoying than autoplay videos?

Browsing without NoScript?

But are there any new games made for the console?

Don't $&@~ it up this time Sega.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com