EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Remembering the games of yesteryear.

EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby MrKite » Thu Apr 27, '17, 4:06 am

Nowadays Electronic Arts gets a lot of flack, and I don't blame them since nowadays they mainly follow in the footsteps of companies like LJN, Acclaim and THQ. But during the 16-bit age, they made some pretty damn good titles on the Sega's legendary console. I remember the first time I saw one of their cartridges and I was intrigued by how it looked different from most of the system's cartridges, and how they all had thag big yellow thing on the left that bared their logo which always puzzled me and made me wonder if it was for anything special.

Imagescreen shot on windowscertificity.com

They also seemed to function differently from most of the system's other games too, like the one second freeze frame delay from when you would hit reset on the console. I was for some reason very fascinated by this back then. Most of their releases from this time that people remember are mostly those damn sports games I don't care for, but they also produced classics like The Immortal, Road Rash, the ______ Strike series, plus some other gems most may not be familiar with like

Haunting Starring Polterguy (very original concept for this game too!)
General Chaos
Techno Clash
F22 Interceptor (pictured above)

and a couple of others I can't think of right now.
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby Wing Eye » Thu Apr 27, '17, 6:57 am

I heard somewhere that yellow tab was marketed as a special chip that was put in all of their games, making it more powerful than other games at the time. I managed to get the tab off once and there is nothing under it, not even the inside of the cartridge, the side just kinda indents a little and the tab goes over that.

I agree that EA had some fantastic games for the Genesis, especially their ports of PC RPGs like Might & Magic and King's Bounty.
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby myau56 » Thu Apr 27, '17, 12:37 pm

Yes indeed, very strange cartridges, those EA catridges !
Like Wing Eye was saying, Might & Magic and King's Bounty were great ! And so was the Immortal ! :)
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby Snorb » Thu Apr 27, '17, 4:16 pm

EA put out a great version of Starflight, but it had a bugged sidequest that would have been very helpful if it worked as intended.

They also did the only version of Where In Time is Carmen Sandiego that I'm familiar with, and they did ports of The Immortal to the NES and Genesis-- the Genesis version had all the violence from the PC version intact, as well as the infamous spider level, as well as one boss fight that was cut from the NES version, but I like the NES version better anyway. =p
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby R-90-2 » Thu Apr 27, '17, 10:42 pm

Basically, the EA cartridges looked different different because in order to force Sega to allow its games on the Genesis without having to deal with Sega's then-restrictive licensing practices, EA reverse-engineered the Sega Genesis and built their own Genesis development platforms, and then went into producing their own cartridges in-house not only for themselves, but also planned to produce cartridges for other developers and publishers at a lower cost than Sega unless Sega loosened up on their licensing program.

The yellow clip cover is there to cover up a part of the assembly procedure and to protect the PCB from the elements that it might otherwise be exposed to due to a hole in the case.
Last edited by R-90-2 on Thu Apr 27, '17, 10:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby myau56 » Fri Apr 28, '17, 12:05 pm

SNORB and R-90-2 : thanks for all the explanations !
And about the different cartridge, I aheve heard about it before but wasn't totally sure about it (and didn't know all the details ! ;) )
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby tilinelson2 » Fri Apr 28, '17, 11:06 pm

All I know about EA cartridges on Genesis is that the games used to freeze much more often than the rest. Maybe because my Genesis is in fact a MegaDrive, but it was a given. When it happened, my brother and me used to say "of course it would freeze, it is EA".
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby myau56 » Sat Apr 29, '17, 11:55 am

With true cartridges, I don't think I've played many EA games ! Only NHLPA 93 in my memories ! And I never had a freezing problem at all ! :)
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby Wing Eye » Sun Apr 30, '17, 12:27 am

Yeah EA cartridges had some weird problems, my brother had a Populous cartridge that would only work if we started different game first, took it out while the Genesis was still on, put in Populous then hit reset.
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Re: EA's MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges

Postby myau56 » Sun Apr 30, '17, 1:13 pm

Strange thing about this populous problem ! :)
Never had any problems with NHLPA...
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