Front of PCB of Blaze Handheld Sega Megadrive

Over on my main website I’ve just posted a short series of photos detailing the dismantling of a Blaze hand-held Sega Megadrive games console. There’s not much in them, and the potential for hacking these is probably non existent, but it was amusing seeing just how little is inside one of these things.

Visit my main website to see the full set of photos.

Blaze Sega Megadrive Handheld Console

It’s finally arrived After months of waiting for stock I came home yesterday to a note from the Post Office saying I had a parcel to collect. Since the PO shuts at half twelve on a Wednesday I had to wait until today to collect the package.

And it turned out to be this thing A handheld Sega Megadrive that plays various built in games. Most of the games are somewhat … lame … but it’s fun all the same and makes a GameGear look like crap. I think it’d be funny to take this thing back in time and show it people - “Look, this is a complete Sega Megadrive handheld console… it’s not a cut down console, it’s the entire thing on a single chip. Oh, did I mention it costs £30 too?”.

It has some inviting looking screws on the back, I might take it apart soon and see what’s in it.

Oh yeah, get yours from Game Gadget.

My god, what a haul of goodies we managed today! It was like someone knew we were going and got out the goodies ready for us. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a second XBox running XBMC in my bedroom, but never thought it worth the £40-odd for a second hand XBox.

Well… how does £10 grab you? No? Well after taking advantage of our technical knowledge and bamboozling the seller we got it for £8. People’s brains fuse if you start prodding their stuff and saying “ahh the labels are intact, it’s not been opened. This one would be ideal”. It also helps if you have a female counterpart

The XBox even works. I’ve had to order a video cable from eBay, and a Modchip is now in the post too. Looks like I’ll be spending a fun hour with my soldering iron again soon. I get to go cross-eyed soldering SMD components again.

I also bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for 20 quid, including two controllers and a light gun. The light gun won’t work on my TV, but this is OK since the NES itself doesn’t seem to work either. It flashes the power light at me. Yes, this means the cart isn’t connecting properly and I need to repair the contacts. I’ve added that to my list. I’ll swap the cartridge slot from a working NES just to make sure the main circuit board isn’t faulty though.

I then bought a couple of books (a Red Dwarf book and a William Gibson), a cheeseburger and managed to block the toilets. Amy bought several of those TV games units that contain an FPGA emulation of an old console and its ROMs. She’s got a Sega Megadrive one that has Sonic the Hedgehog, Columns and other games, and a bizarre Tetris game.

We very nearly bought an Amstrad PCW1512 word processor, but having no money and no desire to carry it across the field stopped us. We also successfully resisted buying another Sega Megadrive, but David did buy a Sega Saturn. There were also many Gameboys for sale and those amusingly illegal “52-in-1″ games carts.

We will return another day looking for games and junk. I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house too