Hopefully he's including himself in that. We aren't far away but the manager is still making some unnecessary team selections which are making things harder than they need to be.

Although we won I wouldn't say he got everything right. Gallagher out wide and Arma up top was a mistake that hindered us until Gallagher came off and Arma went out wide. Armstrong also could easily have cost us our goal with his positioning, although it's possible he's been told to do that. Bennett at right back is also wrong and repeatedly put us on the back foot when we didn't need to be. Travis/Johnson partnership is looking good. Del/Lenihan/Tosin as CB options look solid. Downing has started strong, hopefully his legs will hold out for the whole season because he's a difference maker. Cunningham at LB is superb but if he gets injured we're screwed. Better teams will take advantage of our inability to score from open play and very weak right hand side, but Hull weren't that team tonight. Still plenty of work to be done.

Great result, another clean sheet too. Walton - 8/10 - very important penalty save and looked solid throughout Bennett - 3/10 - poor performance again. Needs to be dropped and/or replaced as soon as possible. Lenihan - 7/10 - solid enough. Williams - 10/10 - scored the goal and made a superb tackle at the end. Brilliant performance. Cunningham - 9/10 - great player, huge, huge upgrade on Bell. Gallagher - 5/10 - struggled on the wing, no real impact. Needs to be played centrally if he's on the pitch. Johnson - 7/10 - silly tackle to give away the penalty and wasn't always tracking back, but was all over the pitch and made a lot of interceptions. Travis - 8/10 - tracked back well to deal with threats and used his engine well in the centre. Downing - 10/10 - rolled back the years with an incredible performance, our biggest threat by far. Dack - 7/10 - some good play but not yet at his best. Hopefully the injury isn't too serious. Armstrong - 4/10 - caught offside repeatedly and was offside and fouling the Hull goalie for our goal, lucky to get away with it. Was better when shifted out wide. Graham - 6/10 - did fine, no major impact Rothwell - 7/10 - looked good when he came on Buckley - N/A We're still struggling with scoring from open play but that's largely down to the manager not putting our best personnel in their correct positions. We had a few scares at the back but overall look much more solid defensively with the Lenihan/Williams partnership and Cunningham on the left. Bennett is a massive problem and now that he's been named captain I don't see that going away. Nonetheless, a superb result and especially pleasing as we don't tend to do well in midweek matches. Fingers crossed we can keep building this momentum on Saturday, although the LB position is going to be a concern. Hopefully Tosin is back and we'll see Lenihan/Tosin with Williams at LB. Obviously not Del's best position but he's confident at the moment and Bell is simply not Championship standard.

The customary gifting the opposition a golden chance right at the end. Thank goodness they fluffed it... this time.

Have to admit Downing looks like he still has plenty to offer.

Should be trying to sign him up now. The lad has more talent in his little finger than Bell has in his entire body.

Superb player is Cunningham. Bell surely has no hope of getting back into the team as long as Cunningham is fit.

At least Armstrong's been moved out to the wing now. Hopefully after today Mowbray keeps him out wide and puts Gallagher back in the centre going forward. This experiment did not work.

The resurrection of Derrick Williams continues!

Assume we'll get Graham & Rothwell on between 65-70 mins as per usual.

Oh, also the second MD I ordered off eBay arrived. Pleased to say it's in perfect working condition despite being listed as spares & repairs, and looks really nice too. It's a non-TMSS version of the console as well which is a bonus. I will probably mod this one too, but only after I have better cutting tools as I am not spending another two hours filing a bloody hole in the side of the machine.

Armstrong's poor shot at the GK when he was put through.

Entertaining half but once again the manager has severely handicapped us with Bennett at right back, Gallagher on the wing and Armstrong up top. The rest of the team are playing fairly well (Johnson's mad tackle aside) but we need to switch around some personnel if we're going to score. Gallagher either needs to go to the centre or be replaced by Graham. Armstrong needs to go back out wide or be replaced by Rothwell (with Graham or Gallagher going up top). Bennett should be taken off for Nyambe but obviously won't be. Downing has been the only proper threat for us so far. Armstrong ineffective up front and fluffed his one chance pretty tamely. Easy to see why we have the lowest shot conversion rate & shots on target in the league.

We've paid £5m for a 6'4" striker to play on the wing whilst we cross balls into the box for Armstrong, Dack and Johnson. It's ridiculous.

Sky just showed a stat saying we have the lowest shot conversion rate in the Championship so far this season. Hardly a surprise.

Harsh on Cunningham, is at least 360.

We're putting cross after cross into the box, but Gallagher is on the wing and Graham is on the bench. Baffling.

Stupid challenge by Johnson, fantastic save by Walton.

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!).