Sound issues on a Genesis

[stuminator]

My model 1 Genesis finally died after a good life, so I picked up another model 1 system to replace it. The problem is, some games have problems with the sound/music. More specifically, on Hellfire, the music plays at about half speed. On various other games the music has lots of static.

My replacement system is one of the newer model 1s (it has the licensed by Sega message when you turn it on) and my dead one is one of the older ones that didn't display the message.

Is this some problem with the later batches of model 1 systems, or did I just get a bad system?

[spadgy]

I'd say it would be the individual console. I did once have some sound problems when I replace a Genesis (well, I'm in grey old England, so a Mega Drive), which were quite odd, but only loads of static. After loads of tinkering I realised it was simply (and rather curiously) that my new Mega Drive required a slightly different tuning setting on the TV. Really subtle so that all I had to do was tinker with the fine tune, and not even the main manual tune.

But that wouldn't explain music slowing down.

Or perhaps it's the game. Did it work fine on your old Genesis?

[stuminator]

Yeah, the game worked fine on the old console.

[Airfare]

possibly previous owner overheated the board from overuse.............

[renardqueenston]

my Model 3 plays hellfire's music half-speed, and my model 1 plays it normally. it seems as though this happens from machine to machine consistently.

it's probably a hardware change somewhere somewhere down the line that just doesn't play the game properly for some really weird reason!

[trunk]

The static is probably the capacitors going bad(leaking). On the sega-16.com and pcenginefx.com web boards there's lots of posts and pics about doing cap replacements to restore sound again. It appears that there was just bad capacitor designs in the late 80's early 90's that cause leaking.

The most common ones I read about are the Turbo Duo, Genesis, and Gamegear.