Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
From what I've read, the Majesco stuff was manufactured in Mexico, but it was produced for the US market (or at least a lot of it was) since Majesco is/was a US company. It's definitely possible that Majesco inadvertently produced PAL Game Gears and would thus require a PAL TV tuner, but this seems like a huge oversight on their part as well as those who have been tearing the systems down and determining what's inside, how everything works, etc.
Not having thought about/realized it before, the thread you provided is from 2011, 2 years after analog TV signals stopped being broadcast in the US. I wonder if the white screen + audio came from bleed over from a poorly tuned TV station (I can still occasionally get flashes of video and reasonable steady audio on my tubes from my poorest/brokest TV station on my CRT TV and matching analog stations on my HDTV). This leaves me wondering how anyone would be able to test out the TV tuner in this day & age. I know there were a handful of relatively low power electronic devices that could/would transmit TV signals over a short distance, but they were fairly expensive and rare and only briefly on the market. Outside of stumbling across one of those, how do you produce an NTSC video signal to send to the OTA tuner?
Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
From what I've read, the Majesco stuff was manufactured in Mexico, but it was produced for the US market (or at least a lot of it was) since Majesco is/was a US company. It's definitely possible that Majesco inadvertently produced PAL Game Gears and would thus require a PAL TV tuner, but this seems like a huge oversight on their part as well as those who have been tearing the systems down and determining what's inside, how everything works, etc.
Not having thought about/realized it before, the thread you provided is from 2011, 2 years after analog TV signals stopped being broadcast in the US. I wonder if the white screen + audio came from bleed over from a poorly tuned TV station (I can still occasionally get flashes of video and reasonable steady audio on my tubes from my poorest/brokest TV station on my CRT TV and matching analog stations on my HDTV). This leaves me wondering how anyone would be able to test out the TV tuner in this day & age. I know there were a handful of relatively low power electronic devices that could/would transmit TV signals over a short distance, but they were fairly expensive and rare and only briefly on the market. Outside of stumbling across one of those, how do you produce an NTSC video signal to send to the OTA tuner?
His tuner has a composite AV input jack.
Both the Master System and Game Gear were hugely popular in Brazil with a very late start. It's possible the manufacturing equipment acquired by Majesco is what had been used most recently to produce them for the Brazillian market. Brazil is a PAL region, but I don't know if they ever actually got the TV tuner. Even in Europe and other PAL regions, portables are typically 60Hz anyway; so I wonder if they ever bothered to take on the engineering challenges to make a PAL tuner at all...?
Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
The GG is region-free. There is a PAL and an NTSC version of the tuner though.
Originally posted by: unseenforce
Yeah weren't a lot of the early electronic arts genesis manuals black and white too?
EA made their own games. Unlike Accolade, EA figured out how to produce their own carts that circumvented SEGA's TMSS copyright screen. Because SEGA was still embroiled in a lawsuit with Accolade over unlicensed games, this terrified SEGA and they offered EA an extremely attractive licensing agreement to avoid setting a precedent. SEGA still had trouble proving their case and Accolade also got to be an official licensee (no doubt, another favorable agreement to avoid setting precedent).
Originally posted by: rlh
I don't believe Majesco was the only black and white manual printer and, in fact, I think even SEGA was doing that. I bought quite a few Game Gear games as a kid and about half of them had B&W manuals, and that was well beforw the Majesco era.
What I'm saying is that Majesco was handling a lot of the US region printing and packaging for both of the major first parties even before "the Majesco era."
Yes, a game publisher could chose whether or not they wanted a color manual when having a game produced. It affected how much of cut/profit they made. When Majesco later bought the rights to re-release many titles themselves, they had already been producing many of them at higher expense.
Only after buying the rights did they get to dictate to themselves how they wanted to produce them, hence, shells with no stickers, drastically cut-back page counts, black and white manuals, etc.
For example, I have Japanese, Taiwanese, and Mexico-produced versions of Sonic the Hedgehog. The Mexico one has Majesco's oversaturated colors on the label and the case insert. These were made at the behest of SEGA and was many years before Majesco began their own production. Again, even if first party quality varied over time, they defined first-party quality because they were the main US producer for both major first parties well before they issues their own releases and re-releases. Though the Japanese copies clearly had better print quality and labels, that didn't always mean they were better. My Japanese Sonic doesn't even work and that's actually pretty common for that board/ROM combo to fail.
When Nintendo was using Majesco for their own 1st party releases (1995 onward) the boards were still produced in Japan. Again, Majesco was assembling, packing, and printing FOR Nintendo and doing what Nintendo was paying them to do. They were not in a position to dictate. Nintendo eventually allowed them to produce PCBs (with Nintendo's Japanese-made CIC lock-out chips, of course) for their self-published games and allowed them to do this for other publishers much like Acclaim/LJN on the NES (and Konami, Sunsoft, etc). This put Majesco in a prime position to license content their partners weren't using anymore to re-release as a publisher themselves (what we think of as "the Majesco era").
Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
From what I've read, the Majesco stuff was manufactured in Mexico, but it was produced for the US market (or at least a lot of it was) since Majesco is/was a US company. It's definitely possible that Majesco inadvertently produced PAL Game Gears and would thus require a PAL TV tuner, but this seems like a huge oversight on their part as well as those who have been tearing the systems down and determining what's inside, how everything works, etc.
Not having thought about/realized it before, the thread you provided is from 2011, 2 years after analog TV signals stopped being broadcast in the US. I wonder if the white screen + audio came from bleed over from a poorly tuned TV station (I can still occasionally get flashes of video and reasonable steady audio on my tubes from my poorest/brokest TV station on my CRT TV and matching analog stations on my HDTV). This leaves me wondering how anyone would be able to test out the TV tuner in this day & age. I know there were a handful of relatively low power electronic devices that could/would transmit TV signals over a short distance, but they were fairly expensive and rare and only briefly on the market. Outside of stumbling across one of those, how do you produce an NTSC video signal to send to the OTA tuner?
It was well-known that they were incompatible when they were still in the stores and analog stations were still functioning. That said, you can connect an RF source to an antenna. Heck, my Master System came with one of those RF antenna clips used by the previous owner. I think people used them to connect to the little portable TVs built into boom boxes and stuff as well as handhelds like the Sony Watchman and Game Gear TV Tuner/TurboTuner.
EA made their own games. Unlike Accolade, EA figured out how to produce their own carts that circumvented SEGA's TMSS copyright screen. Because SEGA was still embroiled in a lawsuit with Accolade over unlicensed games, this terrified SEGA and they offered EA an extremely attractive licensing agreement to avoid setting a precedent. SEGA still had trouble proving their case and Accolade also got to be an official licensee (no doubt, another favorable agreement to avoid setting precedent).
Actually, you're a little backwards on this one. The TMSS screen came after EA had been producing games for the Genesis/Mega Drive (introduced at CES in 91 then distributed in systems in 92-93, EA started releasing games in 90). EA didn't like the deal Sega gave them, so they reverse engineered the Genesis, made their own development kit, then went back to Sega and basically dictated terms, naming their own price at which they'd release licensed games. I've read a few accounts of that story, with some stating that EA made a "read between the lines" statement at that time to Sega that if they didn't go with their terms, they could always produce their own carts anyway and share the technology with others. Check out "Reverse Engineering the Genesis" (about halfway down) here. This article actually discusses the terms that EA presented.
Yeah. That's exactly what I'm talking about. EA was equivalent to Tengen on the Genesis before that.
SEGA's entire case against Accolade, at that point, hinged on it being possible to boot games on a TMSS-equipped Genesis without triggering the "Produced by or under license from SEGA Co Ltd" screen. They wouldn't let Accolade know how to bypass it but would sue them for inadvertently invoking it. Of course, they demonstrated to the courts that it could be bypassed while arguing that they were not compelled to share details of how it was done.
Of course, appeals decided that invoking the screen/message wasn't infringement anyway, so SEGA ultimately settled with Accolade and we got several officially licensed Accolade games (Accolade getting a sweetheart license agreement was part of the settlement).
EA threatening to go independent and produce carts for or share the tech with anyone who wishes to circumvent SEGA's licensing, while in the middle of appeals, made SEGA desperate to give EA a sweetheart deal (keeps it away from Accolade and others). Understandably. Even with the sweetheart deal EA still made their own carts (under license) to reduce costs but even they eventually turned production over to Majesco (like so many others). That's why my Road Rash dupes come in completely different cartridge shells.
It's all very much like what Mattel did with the Intellivision II, which looks for an undocumented bit to be set before allowing the boot and, if not set, will check the copyright date, only allowing the boot if it is less than or equal to 1982 and after 1978. That date was displayed on a boot screen with a Mattel logo. It was roundly thought to be an illegal anti-competitive maneuver, so the SEGA v Accolade case finally set that precedent.
Comments
... I've never heard anything about TV tuner compatibility before CZroe mentioned that--would love some additional details/corroboration on that ...
Looks like this guy confirmed his TV tuner outputs video signals just fine, but the Majesco GG simply does nothing with it:
http://www.smspower.org/forums/13285-GameGearTVTuner
Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
From what I've read, the Majesco stuff was manufactured in Mexico, but it was produced for the US market (or at least a lot of it was) since Majesco is/was a US company. It's definitely possible that Majesco inadvertently produced PAL Game Gears and would thus require a PAL TV tuner, but this seems like a huge oversight on their part as well as those who have been tearing the systems down and determining what's inside, how everything works, etc.
Not having thought about/realized it before, the thread you provided is from 2011, 2 years after analog TV signals stopped being broadcast in the US. I wonder if the white screen + audio came from bleed over from a poorly tuned TV station (I can still occasionally get flashes of video and reasonable steady audio on my tubes from my poorest/brokest TV station on my CRT TV and matching analog stations on my HDTV). This leaves me wondering how anyone would be able to test out the TV tuner in this day & age. I know there were a handful of relatively low power electronic devices that could/would transmit TV signals over a short distance, but they were fairly expensive and rare and only briefly on the market. Outside of stumbling across one of those, how do you produce an NTSC video signal to send to the OTA tuner?
... I've never heard anything about TV tuner compatibility before CZroe mentioned that--would love some additional details/corroboration on that ...
Looks like this guy confirmed his TV tuner outputs video signals just fine, but the Majesco GG simply does nothing with it:
http://www.smspower.org/forums/13285-GameGearTVTuner
Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
From what I've read, the Majesco stuff was manufactured in Mexico, but it was produced for the US market (or at least a lot of it was) since Majesco is/was a US company. It's definitely possible that Majesco inadvertently produced PAL Game Gears and would thus require a PAL TV tuner, but this seems like a huge oversight on their part as well as those who have been tearing the systems down and determining what's inside, how everything works, etc.
Not having thought about/realized it before, the thread you provided is from 2011, 2 years after analog TV signals stopped being broadcast in the US. I wonder if the white screen + audio came from bleed over from a poorly tuned TV station (I can still occasionally get flashes of video and reasonable steady audio on my tubes from my poorest/brokest TV station on my CRT TV and matching analog stations on my HDTV). This leaves me wondering how anyone would be able to test out the TV tuner in this day & age. I know there were a handful of relatively low power electronic devices that could/would transmit TV signals over a short distance, but they were fairly expensive and rare and only briefly on the market. Outside of stumbling across one of those, how do you produce an NTSC video signal to send to the OTA tuner?
His tuner has a composite AV input jack.
Both the Master System and Game Gear were hugely popular in Brazil with a very late start. It's possible the manufacturing equipment acquired by Majesco is what had been used most recently to produce them for the Brazillian market. Brazil is a PAL region, but I don't know if they ever actually got the TV tuner. Even in Europe and other PAL regions, portables are typically 60Hz anyway; so I wonder if they ever bothered to take on the engineering challenges to make a PAL tuner at all...?
... I've never heard anything about TV tuner compatibility before CZroe mentioned that--would love some additional details/corroboration on that ...
Looks like this guy confirmed his TV tuner outputs video signals just fine, but the Majesco GG simply does nothing with it:
http://www.smspower.org/forums/13285-GameGearTVTuner
Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
The GG is region-free. There is a PAL and an NTSC version of the tuner though.
Yeah weren't a lot of the early electronic arts genesis manuals black and white too?
EA made their own games. Unlike Accolade, EA figured out how to produce their own carts that circumvented SEGA's TMSS copyright screen. Because SEGA was still embroiled in a lawsuit with Accolade over unlicensed games, this terrified SEGA and they offered EA an extremely attractive licensing agreement to avoid setting a precedent. SEGA still had trouble proving their case and Accolade also got to be an official licensee (no doubt, another favorable agreement to avoid setting precedent).
I don't believe Majesco was the only black and white manual printer and, in fact, I think even SEGA was doing that. I bought quite a few Game Gear games as a kid and about half of them had B&W manuals, and that was well beforw the Majesco era.
What I'm saying is that Majesco was handling a lot of the US region printing and packaging for both of the major first parties even before "the Majesco era."
Yes, a game publisher could chose whether or not they wanted a color manual when having a game produced. It affected how much of cut/profit they made. When Majesco later bought the rights to re-release many titles themselves, they had already been producing many of them at higher expense.
Only after buying the rights did they get to dictate to themselves how they wanted to produce them, hence, shells with no stickers, drastically cut-back page counts, black and white manuals, etc.
For example, I have Japanese, Taiwanese, and Mexico-produced versions of Sonic the Hedgehog. The Mexico one has Majesco's oversaturated colors on the label and the case insert. These were made at the behest of SEGA and was many years before Majesco began their own production. Again, even if first party quality varied over time, they defined first-party quality because they were the main US producer for both major first parties well before they issues their own releases and re-releases. Though the Japanese copies clearly had better print quality and labels, that didn't always mean they were better. My Japanese Sonic doesn't even work and that's actually pretty common for that board/ROM combo to fail.
When Nintendo was using Majesco for their own 1st party releases (1995 onward) the boards were still produced in Japan. Again, Majesco was assembling, packing, and printing FOR Nintendo and doing what Nintendo was paying them to do. They were not in a position to dictate. Nintendo eventually allowed them to produce PCBs (with Nintendo's Japanese-made CIC lock-out chips, of course) for their self-published games and allowed them to do this for other publishers much like Acclaim/LJN on the NES (and Konami, Sunsoft, etc). This put Majesco in a prime position to license content their partners weren't using anymore to re-release as a publisher themselves (what we think of as "the Majesco era").
... I've never heard anything about TV tuner compatibility before CZroe mentioned that--would love some additional details/corroboration on that ...
Looks like this guy confirmed his TV tuner outputs video signals just fine, but the Majesco GG simply does nothing with it:
http://www.smspower.org/forums/13285-GameGearTVTuner
Interesting. Reading up on the FAQ/wiki link that's provided in that thread, it turns out that Majesco Game Gears (at least the one that guy tested) are only partially incompatible. The FAQ/wiki says that the screen doesn't update with video input, but the system does still push the audio input from the tuner. Where Majesco was making these a decent while after Sega had ceased their own production of new units, I wonder if the partial incompatibility comes down to something silly that got overlooked, like a component that at first glance should be a 1:1 replacement for something used in the originals but actually outputs a slightly different voltage or at a frequency that's just far enough off to cause the issue.
Or maybe that region had a tuner with a different video standard, like PAL.
From what I've read, the Majesco stuff was manufactured in Mexico, but it was produced for the US market (or at least a lot of it was) since Majesco is/was a US company. It's definitely possible that Majesco inadvertently produced PAL Game Gears and would thus require a PAL TV tuner, but this seems like a huge oversight on their part as well as those who have been tearing the systems down and determining what's inside, how everything works, etc.
Not having thought about/realized it before, the thread you provided is from 2011, 2 years after analog TV signals stopped being broadcast in the US. I wonder if the white screen + audio came from bleed over from a poorly tuned TV station (I can still occasionally get flashes of video and reasonable steady audio on my tubes from my poorest/brokest TV station on my CRT TV and matching analog stations on my HDTV). This leaves me wondering how anyone would be able to test out the TV tuner in this day & age. I know there were a handful of relatively low power electronic devices that could/would transmit TV signals over a short distance, but they were fairly expensive and rare and only briefly on the market. Outside of stumbling across one of those, how do you produce an NTSC video signal to send to the OTA tuner?
It was well-known that they were incompatible when they were still in the stores and analog stations were still functioning. That said, you can connect an RF source to an antenna. Heck, my Master System came with one of those RF antenna clips used by the previous owner. I think people used them to connect to the little portable TVs built into boom boxes and stuff as well as handhelds like the Sony Watchman and Game Gear TV Tuner/TurboTuner.
In the DC-area (as late as 2015), there were 5 or so Spanish-language TV stations broadcasting.
EA made their own games. Unlike Accolade, EA figured out how to produce their own carts that circumvented SEGA's TMSS copyright screen. Because SEGA was still embroiled in a lawsuit with Accolade over unlicensed games, this terrified SEGA and they offered EA an extremely attractive licensing agreement to avoid setting a precedent. SEGA still had trouble proving their case and Accolade also got to be an official licensee (no doubt, another favorable agreement to avoid setting precedent).
Actually, you're a little backwards on this one. The TMSS screen came after EA had been producing games for the Genesis/Mega Drive (introduced at CES in 91 then distributed in systems in 92-93, EA started releasing games in 90). EA didn't like the deal Sega gave them, so they reverse engineered the Genesis, made their own development kit, then went back to Sega and basically dictated terms, naming their own price at which they'd release licensed games. I've read a few accounts of that story, with some stating that EA made a "read between the lines" statement at that time to Sega that if they didn't go with their terms, they could always produce their own carts anyway and share the technology with others. Check out "Reverse Engineering the Genesis" (about halfway down) here. This article actually discusses the terms that EA presented.
SEGA's entire case against Accolade, at that point, hinged on it being possible to boot games on a TMSS-equipped Genesis without triggering the "Produced by or under license from SEGA Co Ltd" screen. They wouldn't let Accolade know how to bypass it but would sue them for inadvertently invoking it. Of course, they demonstrated to the courts that it could be bypassed while arguing that they were not compelled to share details of how it was done.
Of course, appeals decided that invoking the screen/message wasn't infringement anyway, so SEGA ultimately settled with Accolade and we got several officially licensed Accolade games (Accolade getting a sweetheart license agreement was part of the settlement).
EA threatening to go independent and produce carts for or share the tech with anyone who wishes to circumvent SEGA's licensing, while in the middle of appeals, made SEGA desperate to give EA a sweetheart deal (keeps it away from Accolade and others). Understandably. Even with the sweetheart deal EA still made their own carts (under license) to reduce costs but even they eventually turned production over to Majesco (like so many others). That's why my Road Rash dupes come in completely different cartridge shells.
It's all very much like what Mattel did with the Intellivision II, which looks for an undocumented bit to be set before allowing the boot and, if not set, will check the copyright date, only allowing the boot if it is less than or equal to 1982 and after 1978. That date was displayed on a boot screen with a Mattel logo. It was roundly thought to be an illegal anti-competitive maneuver, so the SEGA v Accolade case finally set that precedent.