A Concert, Some Laser Discs and Game Hardware

Last night I went to a concert on with my wife and her parents, it was a salsa music festival on the beach. The sky looked awesome and I got some nice pictures.

I got a awesome gyro thing while I was there too.

Today I went to Hard Off and Book Eco once again, at Hard Off I found a Model 1 Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) which was missing the cables and there were no controllers. Not to mention it was really dirty but hey only $3.

I also found a bin of Laser Discs they were all only $1 each. They had a bunch of copies of Aliens and Jurassic Park, they also had a bunch of Disney movies. I ended up getting some anime movies that sell for pretty decent prices. First up I got Evagelion 01 and 05 then I found Gun Smith Cats Vol.1.

When I went to Book Eco I made my way to the display case and right away saw that they had two (TWO!) of the Mini Hori N64 controllers, one yellow and the other green. I went right back to the front to get a clerk to take them out for me and leave them at the front while I looked around. I didnt want to risk someone asking for them while I was looking around. After making my rounds I came up with nothing, no games what so ever. It was okay because the controllers were the buy of the day, each was $14. The last time I got one of those controllers I paid $20 so it was a little better.

When I got home I looked at the Mega Drive and decided that I just had to start cleaning it. Here are some before shots.

This thing was really dirty, it had some crazy black/green grime on it too.  I tried for awhile using just some paper towels and magic erasers but that was clearly not going to cut it. I also tried using a toothbrush but I was getting no where so I decided to take the whole thing apart, in which I found some black goo along the edge where the two pieces connect. With the two pieces apart I could give it a proper bath.

I took the shell to the sink and soaped it up and let it sit for awhile.

While it was sitting I cleaned the motherboard and decided to look into what I would need to do to install a region switch to allow me to play Japanese and US games. Here is the section I will be working with in the future to trick this out, I will also need to cut the bridge on the underside of the board for it to work right.

Then I went back to the shell, rinsed it and let it dry then put everything back together. I really love how the Japanese version has a super pronounced "16-BIT" on the top. Here are some after shots.