reviews Analogue Super Sg
The drive of your life
INFORMATION
Released: Out NOW Price: $189.99 Manufacturer: Analogue Interactive We’ve had high hopes for Analogue’s modernised Mega Drive for some time now. The company’s last console, the Super Nt, was a highly accurate recreation of the SNES hardware in a small form factor, designed to work with modern displays and offer all the options you could ever dream of – and unlike its predecessors, the cost was not astronomical. On the surface, the Mega Sg is just as impressive an achievement, but we actually think that the latest machine is even better than its forerunner.
Like the Super Nt, the Mega Sg uses FPGA technology – rather than software emulation that interprets a program for the hardware you’re running, the FPGA is configurable to recreate a machine at the hardware level. Once again, the machine uses an Altera Cyclone V, with a core engineered by Kevin ‘Kevtris’ Horton. The new console comes in a similarly small form factor, smaller than both the Mega Drive and Mega Drive 2, and comes in four designs – one resembling each of the major regional designs of the Mega Drive, and a white model. The console features a cartridge port, two control ports, Micro USB power port, HDMI video output and a SD card slot for updating firmware. Like the original Mega Drive, the Mega Sg features a 3.5mm headphone port on the front, which is nice for those that want it.
Game compatibility is basically flawless, with all regions supported. We chucked every Mega Drive oddity we could find at the Mega Sg, from Titan’s infamously demanding scene demo Overdrive 2 to odd hardware like Sonic & Knuckles’ lock-on cartridge and
Micro Machines 96’s J-cart. Everything worked perfectly, with the corner case exception of Sonic 2’s split-screen multiplayer mode – this is down to its use of the Mega Drive’s interlaced video mode, which was very rarely used. As a nice bonus, the console includes the previously unreleased
This month we put the Mega Sg to the test, get down and dirty with the latest Mortal Kombat and play a bunch of Konami classics
game Ultracore, which you can read more about on page 54.
The video quality is excellent. The Mega Sg outputs at 480p/576p, 720p and 1080p at 50Hz or 60Hz, with fine scaling control and filter options. If you’re nostalgic for your CRT TV, you’ll find an option for scanlines with adjustable strength, as well as ‘hybrid scanlines’ that vary in brightness depending on the image content.
Mega Drive developers commonly used dithering patterns to simulate extra colours or transparency, and the Mega Sg offers an option to blend these while maintaining image quality elsewhere. It’s not perfect, and has the tendency to strip out details in small text, but you may find it useful on a game by game basis. But sound is always the biggest problem for Mega Drive clones, not helped by the fact that sound quality on original machines was variable. The Mega Sg sounded mostly correct to us when we first booted it up, but certain sounds felt more prominent than on real hardware. Thankfully, the audio is configurable with a low-pass filter, per-channel volume settings and even a setting to simulate the real hardware’s ‘ladder effect’ distortion. With a little tinkering, we were able to achieve a close match to the sound of our real hardware, with the added benefit of digital clarity.
Another way in which the Mega Sg shines is in its support for additional hardware. The unit comes bundled with a Master System cartridge convertor, which opens up an additional library of hundreds of games. The Master System engineering is as impressive as the Mega Drive’s engineering, with full support for the console’s enhanced FM sound function and separately saved settings for the 8-bit machine. The Mega Sg hides an expansion connector under a cover on the right of the console, which allows the machine to be connected to the Mega-cd. It’s not an ideal fit – a spacing mat comes with the machine, which fits underneath the Mega Sg when used with a CD unit, and it’s such a small console that it looks awkward connected to such bulky devices. The good news is that compatibility is once again great, so you won’t have to abandon Sonic CD or Night Trap if you choose to upgrade. However, you’ll notice that Mega-cd FMV really suffers when viewed via HDMI, and the console’s video options can only do so much to remedy that. It’s also worth noting that you’ll need your own way to bypass Mega-cd region locking, be that an internal mod or a cartridge-based solution.
As good as it is, the Mega Sg isn’t quite a perfect replacement for your existing hardware just yet. The Light Phaser and Menacer obviously don’t work, and neither do the Master System’s 3D glasses. But the biggest thing missing right now is support for the 32X library, due to the odd way the system mixed analogue video signals. Analogue states that it is “exploring solutions” to the 32X issue and the manual mentions that the Analogue DAC will provide solutions for analogue and Crt-only accessories, so keep an eye out if these issues are a dealbreaker for you.
Analogue says that further adaptors for Sega Cards, Game Gear cartridges and SG-1000 cartridges are on the way, so there’s every chance that the Mega Sg gets better in the future. But as it stands, it’s already an awesome piece of kit, supporting two great consoles for the price of one. It’s not cheap, but if you’re willing to splash the cash you’ll get a truly premium experience.
In a nutshell
Analogue has gone all-out to create the ultimate Mega Drive with the Mega Sg, and it shows – and the Master System is in as a bonus. If you’re a collector for either machine, you should really consider buying it.