Clone consoles are everywhere. Ace has had real Genesis boards open on his bench for fifteen years and built MiSTer arcade cores at the chip level. He knows exactly where the copies fall short.
Clone consoles are the easiest way to play old games on a new TV, and most of them are wrong in ways you will not notice until somebody points it out. This week that somebody is Ace. He designed the Mega Amp, the audio mod that fixes the sound on a Sega Genesis and Mega Drive, and he wrote the Sega-16 guide on Genesis hardware revisions that people still use to sort the good Model 1s from the bad ones. He also spent years building arcade cores for MiSTer at the chip level: Arkanoid, Time Pilot ‘84, Iron Horse, Jackal, Nemesis. Mostly Konami.
What a clone gets wrong
Ace’s take is that audio is the giveaway. Everyone compares video. Scanlines, resolution, lag. Almost nobody listens, and the sound chip is where most clones fall apart first. The Mega Amp exists because even real Genesis hardware got this wrong across revisions, so a clone that was never trying to match the original chip has no chance.
We get into which companies get singled out and why, who is making the best clone hardware right now, the worst thing he has ever had on the bench, and whether the Chinese handhelds belong in the same conversation at all.
Who should buy one
Not everyone needs the real thing. Ace is clear on that. If you have a hundred bucks and want to play Genesis tonight, there is an answer, and it is not “hunt down a Model 1 and recap it.” The question is who the clone is for and what they are giving up. We also cover why there is so little interest in modding clones, what you can fix with a soldering iron and an afternoon, and whether the Mega Amp will even go in one.
Is FPGA a clone?
The big one. Ace builds hardware recreations in FPGA, which means he is both a critic of clones and a maker of something that looks a lot like one from the outside. His answer comes down to what accuracy means at the chip level and why it matters to a player who just wants to play Jackal. We also talk about where FPGA still falls short of real hardware and what real preservation should look like ten years from now.
Ace puts tips toward future arcade cores. Support him at ko-fi.com/ace9921.
