Numerous Sega Genesis clones have been floating around the last few years. Sega seems eager to license it's Genesis/Mega Drive platform, I guess since they don't make hardware anymore, they figure might as well make some money from it some way. Audio emulation of those system is often very bad.
Never really had Sega growing up. I was firmly in camp Mario during the Nintendo/Sega console wars of that generation. In recent years however, I've had the chance to play the older Sonic games. Even though they're are not on original hardware, I can see enough of the original that I've come to respect what Sega was able to do with the hardware.
It really is remarkable what they could do with just a CRT. NTSC vertical timing is 59.94 fields/29.97 frames per second, interlaced-apparently the engineers were concerned an even 60Hz would cause flickering in response to electrical anomalies coming in through house/structure wiring. The horizontal timing was 31. kHz IIRC. NTSC timings are basically 100% reliable from one CRT TV to the next-they pretty much have to be. Because of this, a game console could know exactly where it was in rendering a frame when an input from a controller is triggered. This is the basis for a light gun like the Zapper. I bet it also made it easier to accomplish split screen on a more primitive console like the NES.
These timings are not at all regular on an LCD-internal video processing in the TV can cause delays between when the console renders a frame, and the frame is actually displayed on screen. On an old school CRT, display on screen is almost immediate. It's highly likely one will encounter serious problems using a NES Zapper-based game with an LCD, if it works at all.
Only $60 so no biggie. I'll take the real machine everyday.
Well, $60 is to me a bit high for a closed "clone" system with one controller. On the other hand, it's $2/game, which is probably cheaper than the Virtual Console versions anyway. If you like all of those games. That said, I still think an official Super NES of this sort would be very exciting with the right games. I miss playing Super NES games on my TV.
You're right nothing can beat the original hardware, especially in the 2D era. It would be nice if cheap HDTV's had better picture scaling though. It would also be nice if the original Xbox could do at least 720p on all of it's games.
