This is the story of a project that was doomed from the offset …. or was it?
I spotted a Sega Mega-Tech pop up on my local ‘buy sell swap’ groups, and immediately commented, jumped in the van and drove (quite fast and very excited) to pick up my new purchase for a great price. When I arrived at the home of the purchase, there was a look of glum, the machine had powered up (as seen in the photos) after being stood in the garage for 10 years, but no longer worked after about 20 minutes of play time, this was not good, and with lots of tinkering and such we decided to call it a day, it was time to leave.
As I got into the van, the people popped their heads out of their front door and asked if I could make use of it broken and “maybe pay to get it fixed” , we agreed a price and I put the broken unit into the van.
About the Sega Mega-Tech (source segaretro.org)
The Mega-Tech System was an arcade cabinet released by Sega in 1989. It was based on the Sega Mega Drive home console, and was designed similarly to Nintendo’s PlayChoice-10: players chose games from a menu of eight titles, with credits buying more play time (usually 1 minute per credit) rather than extra lives or continues; reaching a game over screen does not end the play session, and players can start over or choose a different game as long as there was some play time remaining. The Mega-Tech was not released in North America, though did see use in Asia and the PAL regions. <read more…>
Lets get it working
I cleaned the boards, checked the battery spillages and all types of ‘googlable’ repair work but to no avail, a very good friend of mine (Well known in the industry) Ash Evans offered to take a look at the boards, I sent them to Ash and awaited his inspection.
It wasnt good news, Ash had found a few faults, had replaced bits and bobs and we even ended up ordering a Japanese Megadrive (or Genesis) to borrow some parts from – but everything to no avail, the board was well and truly dead.
We decided to stop throwing money at it and buy a replacement board – also we discovered how to enable Megadrive cartridges to play in the machine instead of the Megatech cartridges so I decided to eBay the games off – raising over £160 in total (£100 profit already!). At the time of looking there were no replacement working boards available.
Gallery
Some of these images were taking for myself, so I could see where wires went back to and some for Ash so he could see where things went off too, you can also see how dirty/webby/dusty the cabinet and boards are.
