The Master System Girl: A Console with Cooties?

Remember Julius Caesar and the Casio Loopy? Today we’re taking another look at a console designed for a market: this time, Brazilian girls. But I suspect that this one will be a lot more up-front appealing to the readers of this blog (there is actually a big push for the Loopy right now, thanks to the Puppy Love Story translation), because this console can play ALF. Casio Loopy can’t say that. (Homebrew authors, please don’t bother to prove me wrong, that sounds like a massive waste of your time)

Technological Toy

But first, let’s say a few words about TecToy. I suppose most people who would read this blog already know, but for those who don’t: Brazil had harsh tariffs on foreign electronics, in an attempt to promote domestic industry. When Sega decided to sell the Master System in Brazil, the strategy worked: they partnered with a local firm to produce the console domestically, and the firm was TecToy.

The deal with TecToy differed from the deal that Sega had with Tonka in the United States, or other foreign partners, in that TecToy had more domestic production as well as control over marketing. Nintendo, meanwhile, didn’t have any official partners in Brazil. One famous consequence of this? The Master System lived on for a long time. Like, a Master System-branded object is still listed on TecToy’s store, though it’s out of stock, so perhaps the era of the Master System has finally ended.

Of course, these later Master System-likes are more of emulator boxes, which allows them to have the pause button on the controllers and lets them include Game Gear games like Sonic Drift. But in the 1990’s, when the Master System was dead in America and Japan and on the decline in Europe, it was still thriving as an affordable console in Brazil.

Super, Compact

In 1993, TecToy refreshed the Master System hardware by releasing the Master System Super Compact, a variant console that was, as the name implied, super compact compared even to the standard Master System 2 hardware they were selling. (Note that in Brazil, what the rest of the world calls the Master System 2 is called the Master System 3.)

We are not here to talk about the Master System Super Compact. Because in 1994, TecToy took a daring step. They re-released the Super Compact, but this time, they made it pink. The Master System Girl. How could I resist?

This looks nothing like the Master System 2/3. The controller for player 1 is integrated into the console. (That’s one way to solve the “pause button not on the controller port” problem) There’s an antenna! So what’s the deal here?

No antenna for me

The first Master System with an antenna wasn’t a Master System at all– it was the Sega Mark III Telecon Pack, in Japan. As you might be able to guess, it broadcasted the console’s RF signal over the airwaves like a, well, antenna, so you didn’t need to plug in the console into your TV.

The Telecon Pack wasn’t as useful, though, because you were still tied to a console that required a power supply, and then had to have a separate wired controller. This is probably why they didn’t release similar accessories later on for the Mega Drive. And it would’ve only been for the Mega Drive– here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission is notoriously more strict on usages of licensed frequencies, especially the television range.

It’s not fear of the FCC that’s preventing me from using the Sega Master System Girl’s antenna functionality, though. It’s the fact that it’s 2025 and nothing in my house is set up to accept analog television signals. Especially not Brazilian analog television signals.

PAL Fusion

Back in my article on using PAL consoles in the United States, I noted that it’s common among enthusiasts to use “PAL” to mean the 50Hz 625-line television standard with PAL color encoding used in much of the world outside of North America, and “NTSC” to mean the 60Hz 525-line television standard paried with the NTSC color encoding. However, the color encoding and the signal frequency are actually entirely separate. My Monitor /// is monochrome and has no color encoding, but still can’t play back a 50Hz signal.

Still, PAL and 50Hz usually go together, as do NTSC and 60Hz. Brazil is the most prominent exception: the country uses a unique standard, PAL-M. “M” is the television industry term for the 60Hz American black-and-white television timing standard. My Monitor /// would have no problem with a composite signal from the Master System Girl… if it had a composite output.

You can switch it from the signal for broadcasting to a signal designed for a regular RF modulator setup, but you don’t get any signal output other than that. Unfortunately, this is also very common for later Master Systems worldwide (other than France and Switzerland), as it was a budget console.

PAL-M adds an extra complexity to using consoles from Brazil in other regions; it’s less common than 50Hz PAL and uses a different carrier frequency for the color, so it’s very possible to release hardware that supports both 60Hz NTSC and 50Hz PAL, but still will be monochrome when you try to run 60Hz PAL-M through it. Thankfully, I found while working on this post that the Koryuu transcoder can in fact handle a PAL-M signal.

Batteries

I mentioned that a benefit of the Master System Super Compact/Master System Girl was that it was portable, you could hold it in your hand without the need for wires. And it does have a battery pack, using 4 AA batteries.

What does the sticker on the battery compartment say?

ATENÇAO O use de fonte externa inadequada provocará danos ao produto. Recomendamos o uso do Adaptador AC original do produto. (Vendido Separadamente)

I don’t speak Portuguese, so I had to rely on a monopolistic search engine to translate.

ATTENTION Using an inappropriate external power source may damage the product. We recommend using the product’s original AC adapter. (Sold Separately)

It was exceedingly hard for me to find these specs online, so I’ll report here: the power supply is 5V center-negative; I used a Triad 5.9V power supply with 1.25A without issues. Four AA batteries, of course, provide 5V. As TecToy warns us, though, use at your own risk. (Also, the Triad power supply doesn’t really fit in the deeply-inset power jack)

Also on the rear, we get to see the console’s specs! Note that “cores” is Portuguese for “Colors”. All of the specs that deal with memory size are given in bits rather than bytes, presumably to have bigger numbers.

Interestingly, they possibly could have inflated the numbers a bit higher: the resolution of 256x192 refers to the original Master System. However, the Master System 2 chipset, which fixed sprite zooming, also added a 256x224 height mode. (The 256x256 mode it added doesn’t work in 60Hz mode, as there aren’t enough lines for the blanking interval.) However, none of the games that used the 256x224 mode were released outside Europe, so 256x192 is all most of these consoles would ever play anyway.

What’s inside?

Let’s take a look at that chipset. The console is very easy to take apart.

The left third of the console is taken up by the analog circuitry. Let’s take a quick look at the video encoder, the Sony CXA1145M. This is an incredibly common part used in many consoles to convert RGB video to composite and S-Video, as well as buffering and amplifying the original RGB signal.

What’s interesting here is that TecToy isn’t using the composite video functionality of the chip; instead, the video signal is derived from the S-Video luma and chroma signals. My guess would be that this is because the Sony part isn’t designed to output a PAL-M signal; as noted, the color encoding frequency is different from European PAL.

This does mean that as long as we have something that can decode European PAL at 60Hz, a composite mod for this console might be extremely easy, without disrupting the rest of the circuit. (The RGB lines are wide-open for use too)

To the right of the square surface mount Z80, we see two chips, both with Sega branding.

• Sega 315-5216. This is the Master System “chipset” IO chip, it handles IO (obviously), clock division, signaling, and that sort of thing. It’s also in my French Master System II.
• Sega MPR-16615. This is a mask ROM chip, likely the BIOS and built-in game. The IO chip handles access to the BIOS, so them being colocated here makes sense. Sega ROM chips for the Master System generally include the mapper built-in.

The third major chip is above the cartridge slot, with only a flimsy piece of plastic to protect it from the cartridge. Better than nothing– this is the Sega 315-5246, the Sega Master System II VDP. It includes both the video display circuitry and the SN76489A clone that provides three-channel audio. So yes, this should have the 256x224 mode I mentioned above.

Play the game

The back of this console promises 2 megabits of ROM, so we can assume this thing isn’t for playing Snail Maze. (You’ll need a cartridge for that– it’s just 8kiB, 64 kilobits!) But every Master System other than the Japanese one has a built-in game. So what’s built-in here?

The built-in game on this particular Master System Girl is Mônica No Castelo Do Dragao. This is Wonder Boy in Monster Land, but with characters from the Brazilian comic book series Turma da Mônica, localized as Monica’s Gang or Monica and Friends in Anglophone regions.

Wonder Boy in Monster Land is a really good game, so it stands to reason that Mônica No Castelo Do Dragao is just as good. It might even be the best 8-bit game based on a comics license, definitely beats A Week of Garfield, if it wasn’t for the other Turma da Mônica game for the Master System.

It’s kind of funny that they did this to Wonder Boy in Monster Land, though. This game has an interesting story; the character “Wonder Boy” is the property of Sega, but Westone, the developer, could resell the game to other companies as long as they removed Wonder Boy himself. So it made its way to the Famicom as a Journey to the West-themed game called Saiyuuki World and to the PC Engine with Bikkuriman characters as Bikkuriman World. TecToy presumably could have used Wonder Boy as part of their Sega license, but decided not to, adding another character to the pile.

At some point later on, the Master System Girl is reported to have switched to Sonic the Hedgehog as the built-in game, with Turma da Mônica em O Resgate in the box. That latter title is a Turma da Mônica reskin of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, and is the game I was referring to above. Dragon’s Trap is a legend, if you haven’t played it you’re missing out.

If Turma da Mônica isn’t your thing, don’t worry, it’s a Sega Master System, with a Master System cartridge slot. You have plenty of other titles worth playing, and ALF is there too. Since this is a Master System 2 chipset, it should lack the collision detection bug that impacts ALF when played with the Power Base Converter. I know you were worried.

Where to?

So, that’s the Master System Girl. And I’m a bit conflicted here; I’d really like to do some mods to this thing to get a better video signal. This could replace my French Master System 2 as my go-to Master System. And if I replaced the RCA jack for RF with a MiniDIN jack, I could maybe install a Genesis 2 jack. I have plenty of SCART cables for that.

The downside of that, though, is that I’d lose the ability to use the antenna. Which I can’t use, but was a big selling point, so I’d also be kind of sad to see it go. But this is a pretty compact system; there isn’t any place to have convenient tails sticking out like the SG-1000 II. What do you think? Discuss in the comments.