Sega Mega Drive 2 / Mega CD 2

Photos coming soon!

In the world of console gaming, after the North American video game crash the Japanese manufacturers came in and took over dominance. In North America, that name would certainly be Nintendo. In Australasia though? Sega absolutely cleaned up!

The Mega Drive 2 is the cost-reduced version of Sega's third major console release, featuring sleeker lines and simplification over the original Mega Drive including removal of the headphone jack and a significant reduction in size.

The Mega Drive itself is a derived from Sega's System 16 arcade hardware with Motorola's legendary 68000 CPU (a fixture around here!) at its core and Zilog's Z80 as a sound controller as well as custom Sega silicon for the video system. The beauty of this design is the console's internal innate support for running the earlier Master System's software too.

The beauty of the Mega Drive's design is a practical exposed bus allowing console expansion - the first of which being the Mega CD addon, in this case represented by the matching Mega CD 2. The other addons which I don't have are the 32X and Power Base... although I'd like one of each in due course!

The console did reasonably well overall with some 30 million units built and was a fixture in Australasian homes for many years... in some homes, it still is!

Specifications

Motorola MC68000 7.6MHz main CPU

Zilog Z80 3.58MHz sound controller/processor

64KB RAM, 64KB VRAM, 8KB audio RAM

Yamaha YM2612 and TI SN76489 audio hardware

Personal history

I first got to spend time with the Mega Drive when my uncle bought one when I was all of five years old. Over the next several years, friends had them too and I bemoaned not having one myself - even though I had an Amiga at home! Things finally conspired in about 2013 and I've gathered a few since, including my current example with the Mega CD, a thrifting find.