Ahhhh, the Sega Mega Drive, that glorious piece of 16 bit hardware from Japan in 1989.
A treat for the senses.
A feat for the eyes.... what in the name of Atari Lynx's Mother is this thing?
Well, this, friends, is the Media Mega Drive.
That's right, I had no bloomin' clue either.
But I did take note of these iconic gaming images on the front.
We've got the Outrun car up there, Donatello in two differing art styles, the Silver Surfer
over there, him, that, all these people.
Suffice to say, it's familiar, although at least they haven't plonked Mario or Sonic
on the front.
The Mega Drive logo is also very familiar, as does the tessellated box design, although
the console looks like it's fallen from the back of Del Boy's van and bounced several
times down the road.
On the side we have a blurb...
"Now the Experience the Unknown" (quite literally) "the Power, the sound, the excitement.
Only on your MEDIA Mega Drive"
We'll get to the rest in just a second.
First lets delve into this box of incredulity.
I should also mention that I found this through a random eBay retro hardware search and paid
the sum of £25 for it.
So we have the Mega Mega Drive logo on the poly insert as well, nice attention to detail,
as well as a hand-written number - 176 - this could imply there was another 175 of these
boxes shipped beforehand.
Under that we have a plethora of wonder, and look there's that number again.
Here's the manual.
Apparently Models/Specifications subject to change WITHOUT notice.
Inside we get a blurb similar to the box blurb.
"The Media Mega Drive.
The most advanced that technology has to offer.
Built with components from SONY of Japan"...
I bet there's a single Sony Capacitor in there, and it's probably fake...
"The Complete system nobody has offered so far.
Games you MAY want in Combinations of 250x1, 100x1, 52x1, 21x, etc..."..
This is like some kind of floor plan...
"That take you to worlds unthinkable, unimaginable.
Now let's get set and read on because there's so much to do.
But remember Handle with Care... your Media Mega Drive could drive you to ecstasy".......
Good grief.
Your Media Mega Drive is the only system in the world with the TURBO DRIVE CORDLESS REMOTE
CONTROLS.
That must be this fat one here.
Your Media Mega Drive also provides you with a sleek sharpshooter Laser Gun.
Check.
Your 3 Speed Laser Gun is so accurate that you could shoot down from a distance of 6ft?...
Wait a minute...
3 speed?
Is this thing a Morris Minor or something??
Your Exciting World of fantasy comes in a Multi Game Cartridge.
Games that will keep you going on and on, You'd never like to stop.
Yep, here it is.
It appears I have a 64x1 model containing all these wonders.
We've got BROS II, BIG APES 1,2 and 3, WRESTLE and FAST BROS 2 among numerous others.
We've also got two wired controllers, an RF box, the power brick and the console itself,
with handy slots on the side for the wired controllers, just like the Famicom.... hmmm,
yes, this is feeling like a Famicom clone.
There's an eject button, the MEDIA Mega Drive logo, twice, and two reset buttons.
One to reset upwards and one to reset downwards?
I have no idea.
We've also got 2 15 pin control ports and an IR sensor on the front.
There are more connectors on the back than I'd imagined.
We have RF, DV, Composite connections, heardphones and the power switch.
The label on the bottom tells us the serial number, that it is indeed a PAL system and
that it consumes ABOUT 11W of power.
Media Video Ltd. is clearly a very nonchalant company.
Alrighty then, let's get this bad boy hooked up to a screen.
I'm going to follow the connection diagram and use the audio/video terminal rather than
RF.
My 64 in 1 cartridge works absolutely fine and straight away we can see its packed with
NES/Famicom games.....
You'd probably already guessed that.
There's nothing particularly special about the titles on offer here, although we do have
speeded up versions of some games, such as Fast Bros.
NES cartridges won't work in this machine, but Famicom carts will, and as you can see,
the Famicom version of Duck Hunt works absolutely fine.
Well apart from the screen corruption.
But with some light blowing all is well.
Despite my fine acting here, the light gun doesn't seem to work anymore, but I'll give
it the benefit of the doubt and presume it did when new.
That upper reset button does absolutely nothing either.
But the bottom one works an absolute treat.
The main controller features two turbo buttons in addition to the normal controls.
Player 2's controller is the same but lacking select and start, and we also have this infra-red
controller which can be assigned to either player one or two and works from a fair distance.
This would be pretty useful for playing on the sofa, squinting at your 21" CRT in the
corner... that is, until someone walks in front and breaks the connection.
So what is this?
Well, aesthetically it looks like a cross between a Mega Drive, Master system and Famicom....
and if you bash past the aesthetic, then yes, it is indeed a Famicom clone - or Famiclone
as they're known.
This type of machine is of course, nothing new.
They've been made - often in Taiwan, but also places like Russia and India - since the 80s.
But this machine stands out because on first glance of the branding alone, it appeared
to be some kind of Mega Drive hybrid made by an alternative manufacturer.
In any case, it still leaves me interested as to why this branding was adopted and how
was it distributed, especially in the UK?
A rapid Google search delivers only one real entry of intrigue.
A Planet Arbitrary post by Pat B on December 12th 2011.
It seems that Pat had acquired one of these machines and was intrigued enough to investigate.
Pat's clearly a man of my own heart.
Written here, Pat says he picked his up from a local thrift store.
I wanted more information than this, so I contacted him.
Lovely chap, and he informed he that it came from a Goodwill in Naperville, Illinois USA.
It doesn't appear that these machines were sold in North America, so it must have been
imported.
The machine was unboxed and in a slightly sorry state, lacking some of it's peripherals,
but Pat was as taken by the branding as me.
Like mine, Pat's controllers stated "Built with Sony components from Japan", and also
like me, Pat concluded that Sony clearly had no idea their logo was stamped on this machine.
Pat had one of the Media Original Cartridges containing various Famicom titles such as
Contra, Excite Bike, Galaza and DUCK, along with a Super Nintendo-esq 188 in 1 cart.
188 in 1?
That wasn't one of the combinations noted on my box.
What the hell is this?
A counterfeit of a counterfeit?
This is one deep rabbit hole.
Pat's Media Mega drive is also a PAL model, and it has the serial number 950711299, whereas
mine is 920816176.
Now I very much doubt they made some 30 odd million of these machines.
I mean, of course they didn't.
But if you look to the left it says B.No, which I presume stands for Batch and Number.
The number also has a very slight gap between the 81 and the 61.
So my first guess what that this is some kind of batch number 92,081 and this is machine
number 6,176.
But then of course, the box says 176 on it.
So maybe this is Batch - or whatever that means - 920,816 and simply machine number
176.
That's a pretty low number!
That would make Pat's machine number 299.
*But as one of my Patron's, Hikari, pointed out, maybe those batch numbers are dates.
So 16th August 1992 and 11th July 1995.
The plot thickens*
But anyway.
Pat's post is from December 2011, and it would appear that Media Video Ltd still had a running
website back then.
The logo on their website matches the logo on the Media Mega Drive, so it's almost certain
they're the right company.
Their website is now offline, but using the wonder of the Internet archive's Way Back
Machine, we can have a better look.
So we can see images have been collected since 2002, and it appears to have gone offline
sometime in 2014.
The interesting thing is that during it's entire lifetime, the site wasn't updated what-so-ever.
The June 13th 2013 capture is identical to the November 24th 2002 capture, including
some pages which remained Under Construction for that entire duration.
That's some slack web-mastering.
We can see they produced TV Games, Educational Computers, Rechargeable Lights, Fans and indeed
Torches.
You can even subscribe to the "Media Kids Club", which offered a surprise gift.
I imagine it was an animated GIF.
Anyway, I'm interested in their TV Games, and it seems they certainly weren't shy to
swiping the names of better known machines.
They've got the GAME BOY on offer here, and they've even had the cheek to throw in a Trade
Mark logo... but then, I'm not sure whether they're trying to claim it's their own trade
mark or just acknowledging it's a trade mark they're stealing.
The Game Boy promises to Razor sharpens your guts, speed and skills.
And you emerge a winner.... sounds pretty painful to me.
They're also offering the "Future Zone", which comes with two turbo joysticks, a laser gun
and a LEAD WIRE.
There's a WIZ-KID, the Little Master-1, the Little Master-2 (which requires Heavy Duty
AC Adaptors), and look!
There's also a 16 bit TV Games section, but even here, there's no mention of the Media
Mega Drive.
I'd love to know what an R.F.
Chord sounds like though.
But ultimately, I can't find any trace of these other consoles online either, so all
of these machines are pretty elusive.
A quick search of companies house reveals that Media Video Ltd was a UK company which
traded from 23rd November 2001 to 30th April 2013 - that ties in with the website's uptime.
It's directors were Mark Beales and Jonathan Collins, and it's largest profit was during
it's first year of trading at £3,616.
If you look on the website's contact page it lists Media Video Limited's contact address
and phone number as being in India.
In fact, despite appearing as an English site, it's directed at India mentioning Media's
Exclusive chain of retail showrooms in the region.
So maybe this UK company was just a localised face for this larger operation.
One which was based here, on this New Dehli industrial park.
If we have another look at the manual, there's a warranty card with the same address, so
that tallies.
But then... oh good god.
The date of purchase has been filled in as 25/8/92.
That doesn't tie in with this UK company what-so-ever.
Apparently the dealer's name was Arow and the chasis number is 17892.
Armed with this knowledge, I went back to the outer packaging and found this label lurking
on the bottom.
Aside from the cool "Free Mega Offer" sticker, the label next to it certainly confirms the
176 serial number, and has a date of the 17th August 1992.
So that corroborates with the warranty card.
It seems evident that I'm going to have to crack this bad boy up to check the contents.
A straight forward task consisting of just 4 screws on the bottom.
Remember that handheld we looked at the other day.
Yeah, well this is what a Famiclone from the 90s looks like inside.
Quite a bit different.
Now I can't see any Sony components on first glass, but we do have some Hyundai silicon
here and a couple of Philips chips also.
This UMC UA6527P is a hybrid CPU used in the Dendy console; A popular Taiwanese famiclone
distributed in Russia from 1992 onwards.
These chips also have a date code of the 10th week of 1992, so that checks out with the
date on the box and warranty card.
In fact all of these chips date to around the same era.
Thinking about this, if we go back to Pat's website.
His machine has a Media Seal on with a year - I presume - of 1995.
So if my machine is from 1992, then we can presume these machines were made for at least
3 years.
I mentioned my machine number is 176 and Pat's is 299, *and if those batch numbers really
are dates, then all this tallies, but I still find it hard to imagine that they only made
a couple hundred of these over 3 years, although it's completely possible.*
So a bit more digging; this time on the Indian Registrar of Companies, and although there's
no Media Video Limited presently there is a company called Noesis Industries Limited.
Their website looks like it's been made by a high school student in 1997, but that's
not important.
What is important is that Noesis Industries Limited were known as MVL Industries Limited
up until 2014 and before that they were called...
YES.
Media Video Ltd.
Now this company was founded on the 11th December 1986 and took to task manufacturing pre-recorded
video cassettes, emerging as one of the main manufacturers of both pre-recorded and blank
video cassettes in Northern India in 1991, whilst also holding several hundred copyrights
for feature films.
Clearly they decided that they didn't want to have too many legitimate copyrights and
so decided around the same time to start manufacturing Famiclones, which is how our Media Mega Drive
came to pass, making it's way across Europe in the early to mid 90s.
I can then only speculate that then in 2002, they either decided to setup a legitimate
UK operation for distributing their wares into the UK, or our director friends decided
to set themselves up as importers of these goods under the same name.
Perhaps they just got hold of some surplus stock and decided to sell it.
That would explain why there was only really any turnover in the first year of operation.
It's also possible that this UK company has nothing to do with the Media Video Ltd of
India what-so-ever, despite sharing the same business nature and trading name.
Either way, it's existence doesn't really affect the story of our Media Mega Drive,
because by this point, these models were seemingly out of production, leaving only these other
systems and devices listed on the website.
So this then isn't a Famicom clone from the noughties.
It's a clone from the 90s, which rode on the Mega Drive name, but was apparently, not that
popular.
It's not like it was alone either, Famiclones like the MD-1 were also available in the 90s
and they went a step even further with the Mega Drive aesthetic.
It probably would have been pretty cool to fire up your "Mega Drive", only to have Mario
running around on screen.
But the novelty would have quickly worn thin, especially if you thought you were getting
a real Mega Drive for Christmas.
It feels like while "legitimate" clones like the Scorpion 16 - featured on Bad Influence
- tried to capitalise on the active game market through cloning current technology.
These frankenstein clones tried to simply penetrate - either through deception or blissful
ignorance - into the low cost end of market by simply riding on the branding.
The back alley distribution links these machines arrived through were simply a forerunner before
sellers cottoned onto websites like eBay and Aliexpress to sell knock off goods.
For me it's just a fascinating dip into recent history.
I don't know if Sega or Nintendo ever jumped onto these machines, but I suspect they slipped
under the radar landing in various homes and probably remain lurking in attics throughout
the world.
As for this beauty.
I'll probably stick it on a shelf for now and dream of a past full of clones.
If you have one of these yourself, please do let me know, and perhaps we can shed some
further light on this niche piece of gaming history.
As for Noesis Limited.
Well, they were involved with the manufacture of consumer electronics up until a number
of years ago but don't really do much of anything today, having operated at a loss for the past
number of years; it exists now essentially as a shell company.
That is, a non trading company retained for other reasons.
Those reasons could be it's various listed subsidiaries such as Kool Auto Ltd who manufacture
car solar screens and the like, who still seem to be operating.
As for the controllers.
Do they have Sony components?
Well actually...
No. Of course they don't.
Thank you for watching this strange video into an Indian Famiclone. Click for more, subscribe, or even sign up to my Patreon account. It means a great deal to me!
Anyway, have a great evening!