Hardware
Rediscovering the Sega/JVC WonderMega
I’ve been gearing up to recap all my consoles lately, and that involves a lot of really annoying work making notes about what’s in each system. What’s even worse is the next step – ordering all the capacitors. It’s unbelievably time consuming.
Anyway, it was time to look at the WonderMega systems. I have both the Sega and JVC versions, and I was surprised to find some differences inside.
The system is very much a product of its time, a first iteration design from Sega and JVC, with a lot of patches and fix-wires and corrections to the original design. It very obviously didn’t get the sales or attention from management to justify a second revision with all the fixes baked in. It’s a lot nicer than the AIWA Mega-CD though, which – on the radio side – is a hand-made mess of copper wire and glue. It’s grim.
Things like the power from the MegaDrive side to the CD side – three lines originally had run through the two flat cables, but thicker gauge wires were later soldered into place, and the flat cable pins removed. It’s hard to imagine this was the original decision, it almost certainly happened after the fact.
There are places where components are soldered to each other and taped into place. These three components are the same on both the JVC and Sega boards. The fluff and fur are only in the Sega version though.
There are wires that are soldered into the same vias as other components: capacitor C11 shares one of its holes with a patch wire, for example. This was a surprise when I was removing the capacitor and “where did this stranded wire come from?”
There are some differences between the two, and I’d love to know which version came first. This double patch was present in the JVC version, but not the Sega system.
I love the WonderMega. Its auto-raising lid and oversized LEDs, the karaoke functionality and MIDI port and S-video output make it the HiSaturn Navi of the 16-bit age. It has a die-cast metal CD drive assembly!
Just ludicrous, honestly.
--NFG
[ Apr 7 2025 ]
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