Sonic 1 in English PAL: Sonic 1 in US NTSC: The difference is obvious and shows how screwed we were as kids playing the PAL versions of these games Worth noting the reason my NTSC picture is slightly to the right is because I'm using a cheap SCART cable. A better quality one would align the signal correctly.

Yes, but he's a striker so he needs to be scoring goals. The sooner he gets going the better.

Agree, but I'm sure that'll be the excuse if we draw or lose. Hopefully Gallagher opens his account tonight.

I'm pleased to report that after a quick five minutes of re-soldering the MD is now a fully functional multi-region machine To tell you the truth I'm impressed it's still working. I re-soldered the contacts about 7 or 8 times yesterday and took a real crash course in how to solder. I only realised after a couple of hours I'd been using the wrong soldering tip, it was too big for the job and that was causing me significant problems. Once I switched to a smaller tip things became much easier. I wish I'd known sooner but that's how you learn I guess! To be perfectly honest the worst part of the whole thing was filing the hole for the rocker switch to fit in. I really should have bought a small saw, as this took forever. I was literally filing for about an hour and a half and was aching like hell afterwards. The sense of relief when the switch finally fit into the hole I'd made was pretty huge. This was the donor MD I got on Monday, a bit yellowed but fully functional: The inside of a MD for anyone interested. The cartridge slot is towards the back, power supply and video out top left, power switch, volume switch and reset switch bottom left and the controller ports bottom right. The contacts that need to be modded are on the right, labelled JP1/JP2/JP3/JP4. The first step was to sever the connections between the JP2 & JP3 jumpers, as these are what lock the console into 50hz English PAL mode. The console will still work fine once this is done. As it no longer has any region settings it defaults to US NTSC, and runs as below at 60hz full screen. So if you just want to mod your console to run as US NTSC, this is literally all you need to do. Close up the console and you're good to go. Of course I was going a bit further so the next step was to solder wires to left JP2(Japanese)/JP3(English) and right JP1 (ground - US NTSC by default). This was my first attempt and franky it is embarrassing. I was using the wrong tip, hence the awful soldiering. There's so much wrong with this. Frayed wires in bad positions, solder touching across the JP2 to JP3 and JP3 to JP4 contacts and solder in general all over the place. Somewhat surprisingly the console did work despite this disaster. It didn't work as I intended though. I had standard English PAL, and also Japanese PAL - a format which has never even existed as Japan uses 60hz NTSC, but for some reason this option exists on the MD motherboard. You get it essentially by joining the JP3 and JP4 connections, which is what I have mistakenly done here. Japanese PAL looks like this: Basically the same as English PAL - 50hz and bars across the top and bottom of the screen - just in Japanese. Regardless I took the console back to the soldering table and tried again. Frankly my second attempt was not much better. JP1 has too much solder and the wire is begging to be shorted at that length. JP2 is okay, but JP3 has too much soldier and just look at that frayed wire. This actually worked initially, but once I put the console back together it reverted to the English PAL/Japanese PAL format. I was absolutely sure it was the black wire, as it was poorly soldered and likely still touching the JP4 contact with the heat shield on top of it. At this point I gave up on soldering for the night. Finally this afternoon I opened it up one more time. I desoldered both the JP1 and JP3 connections, then trimmed the JP1 wire and cut and trimmed the JP3 wire. I then resoldered both back to the contacts as below. Still far from perfect but a significant improvement on the last two attempts. JP1 still has way too much solder but it isn't touching JP2, so it's fine. The wire is cut a lot shorter too. JP3 is also looking much cleaner both in terms of the wire and the solder. For the record there should really be insulation over these wires, so do not take this as a "good" soldering job - it isn't - but the chances of the wires shorting on that area of the MD board are slim and I don't have any insulation material so this should do. Thankfully this time everything worked as expected and continued to work OK after closing up the console. Here's the rocker switch soldering: Honestly this is pretty terrible too. I soldered these with the tip that was too big, but the connections are solid enough so I left it as is. You can see that some of the plastic has melted where the soldering iron touched it. This is not the way to do it, but still OK. This is how the console looks when put together, with the switch added to the side. It's obviously a bit big for the position, but with the heat sink on top of the motherboard this is literally the only place it can comfortably go. In position I, English PAL - squashed screen with bars on the top and bottom, also game and music plays at slower speed: In position 0(ground) - US NTSC, which is 60hz, full screen, with normal speed gameplay and music: And finally position II - Japanese NTSC, the same as US NTSC just in Japanese: For the record this is all the same game, the original Streets of Rage. It's not a region locked cartridge so makes a good test game as you immediately get Japanese text in the intro in Japanese NTSC mode, full screen full speed in US NTSC and squashed screen slow speed in English PAL. Very quick to test the mod with this game. I do notice that both NTSC modes go a bit crazy when I initially turn the console on. The screen splits and tears for a while before finally settling and staying stable after that. No idea why this is but I know it isn't to do with the soldering as it was doing the same after I cut the jumper contacts, long before I soldered anything. Not really a big deal as the screen does stabilise after 10-20 seconds. Sometimes it doesn't do it at all. Finally some pics of the chips inside the MD: The Yamaha chip in the final pic is the sound chip, not sure about the others! Worth noting the chips change depending on the model, make and year of manufacture of the MD. The Mega Drive 2 also has different chips depending on the revision. Also as a side note Master System games all work fine with the mod as well. In Japanese mode you even get the "Sega Mark III" logo at the start which is nice. In Japan the Master System was known as the Sega Mark III, as they released two previous consoles as the Sega Mark I & II. Later on they released the console redesigned as the Master System we all know and love. I will upload some videos shortly to demonstrate the difference between PAL and NTSC. This post is long enough as it is.

Assuming Graham is probably being rested due to the short amount of time between games. I wouldn't have personally. Lol @ Armstrong being ahead of Rothwell in the pecking order but no surprise there. Am convinced Gallagher has to be picked so he'll be in the team no matter what.

Hah, they are 'affectionately' known as "those damn machines" here

Huh, yeah, I just looked and they are pretty expensive nowadays. I guess because they were a limited run which has ended. You could probably get a used one on eBay for under £70 I would have thought, but it's a question of whether you'd want to spend that much on a used product. You could get an actual SNES on eBay for cheaper than the SNES mini - you'd be restricted to AV and buying cartridges but it would be the real experience at least you can get Everdrive carts which have all the games on them, but the official ones are expensive. My MD Everdrive was about £30 but it's pretty much a chinese knock off and is really slow loading games (although once they are loaded they work perfectly!).

Might be worth looking at buying a SNES mini, they are pretty awesome (and easily hackable). I spent the whole evening on this project and forgot to eat (whoops) and ended up with mixed results. After a lot of trial and error with the soldering I did get the mod to work - US NTSC, English PAL and Japanese NTSC at the flick of a switch. Unfortunately after reassembling the MD the mod failed and I ended up with English PAL and Japanese PAL. Which is amusing because Japanese PAL doesn't even technically exist, but it's possible if you solder certain areas of the motherboard. I am pretty sure I know what the problem is and will hopefully fix it tomorrow. Shouldn't take the whole evening this time.

Good news, the first MD arrived and it is fully functional. I'll start the modding tonight but I'm still missing the wires so need to get those before I can go any further...

Mega Drives are surprisingly resilient, in fact most old consoles are. They're kind of hard to break unless you dump water on them or toss them down the stairs. Usually ones that have stopped working just need a new capacitor or fuse. I'm yet to start as I'm still waiting on delivery of the donor MD's from eBay. I'm hoping at least one of them will be here by tomorrow, then it'll be a case of finding out whether it's a working device (both were listed as "untested" which tends to mean broken, although in the case of old consoles it often does just mean untested as the person may have found it in a cupboard/loft without any of the wires). As long as at least one of the donors is working then I'll hopefully be able to get to work by Wednesday. The actual mod shouldn't take longer than an hour to do, but since it's my first time doing anything like this I won't be rushing it!

It's pretty common for victories to have less debate than defeats. There's only so many ways you can say "glad we won, decent performance". I think it's great that almost everyone is in agreement that the defence looked much better, Travis/Johnson works well as a midfield unit and Gally had a solid performance on the wing.

I do wonder if Del would be perceived completely differently by our fans if he'd just been used as a centre back the entire time. We know he's at best a functional left back and at worst not very good at all, but so far every time he's played at CB he's been solid. Although interestingly it was at Bristol City where he was converted to left wing back: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/34936324 Ha, ha, ha....

Judging by their start to the season probably not, but we definitely played them at a good time when their confidence is obviously low and there are probably doubts over Woodgate within the squad due to his inexperience as a manager. The biggest positive of yesterday was keeping a clean sheet, something we desperately needed having shipped two goals a game so far. Problem is that unless we improve defensively we aren't going to just be able to rely on set-pieces. A clean sheet yesterday was nice but it isn't the norm. We have a habit of shipping goals so we are going to need to score a decent amount from open play. We did it last season so there's no reason we can't do it this season - but I think it's going to rely on the Graham/Dack link-up being strong again as we don't have many other goalscorers in the team. As long as Tony sticks with the Graham/Dack pairing I think we'll start scoring goals from open play, so I'm not too concerned yet. I'm more worried about our defence than our attack at present, although if we stick with Lenihan, Williams/Tosin & Cunningham at CB/LB I think we'll see improvements there too. Just have to pray that we get some luck on the injury front as losing any of those would be a big setback.

Well, they got away with Brentford so why not try again?

I've said before I'll accept Gallagher on RW as long as we play Graham up front with Dack behind him. It's a shame that we've spent £12m on strikers and 34 year old Danny Graham is still by far our best option up top, but it is what it is. Dack brought down for the penalty, Graham converts. That'll do. Gallagher playing well on the right today is great as it will hopefully mean he stays out there and DG remains in the centre. It's obviously a shame that it will likely be at the expense of Rothwell but what can you do at this point? I get the feeling Gallagher has to play and Downing has probably been brought in under the impression he's a first teamer too, so it looks like Rothwell will have to wait for an injury to happen before he gets a run in the team.

You have to beat the poor teams at home to have any chance of staying up, but I don't think many of us were predicting relegation this season. Progress will be better than 15th, not just staying up. Obviously good to get a win and a clean sheet today though.

Other than the penalty did we have a lot of other opportunities from open play? Curious as to how we fared creatively.

Sounds like we had a good first half, which is a bit worrying as we normally only perform for one half.

That's why you play Dack and Graham in the same team ?

#LittleSkip

Also Rothwell should be instructing his agent to get him out of here asap.

I privately believe that a condition of releasing the money for SG was that he had to play if fit. After last year's Brereton fiasco you couldn't really blame the owners for stipulating this.

We've seen Nyambe play competently at RB before in this division so we know he's capable. He can't have much confidence after being stuck behind Bennett for so long, though. He's backup to a player who isn't even a natural right back and isn't even very good in that position. He's going to be rusty from lack of first team action anyway, and having a poor game against Oldham isn't going to have helped his confidence. It's all irrelevent really though. Bennett has just been named captain/little skip, so there's no way he's going to be dropped, and the only position he can go is right back... therefore Bennett will almost certainly be at right back. If Lenihan and Tosin are both injured then Nyambe will likely be put into central defence, as we essentially have no other options, but if either are fit then he'll be on the bench again.

And would strengthen my belief that Tony is under orders to play him no matter what.

Which suggests we have no decent RBs at the club, or at least none in form. At this point we might be better off trying JRC there.