RE-HACKING A SEGA Mega drive / Genesis MINI FOR CONTINUED SELF-QUARANTINE PURPOSES
If you are one of the good folks who not only has signed up for The HI54 Monthly Sunday Mass Email newsletter at some point over the years + also aren’t one of those people who immediately unsubscribe whenever I send it out once a month — well, you possibly noticed that one of the ‘FIVE things FOR’ I mentioned this month was a blog post about how I hacked my Sega Mini to be able to add any Sega game I want AND how I also have since re-hacked my Sega Mini with a different hacking software since writing that original post. As promised, here’s the follow-up post about how/why.
First, let’s start off with the why/s.
#1 - I started off hacking my Sega Mini with the Project Lunar hack, and that went from working good enough to bump my Mini up from the original 42 games to 96… to something suddenly going wrong while trying to swap out some games and then all of the sudden I was back to only the original 42 games working. And every fix I would try got me nowhere. I’m not sure the exact specifics, but it seems like it was connected to the fact that I am a Mac user and in order to hack my Sega Mini I needed to use a virtual machine to pretend that I was a PC and the recommended option in The Project Lunar tutorial was to use Virtual Box (probably because it’s free) and Virtual Box ran EXTREMELY slow and choppy (at least on my 2009 iMac) and I think I just wasn’t able to make/maintain a good enough connection in order to sync my Mini anymore. Thankfully, Project Lunar was setup smart enough that I was able to restore my Mini back to its original factory settings. So, worst case scenario, I was back to where I started.
#2 - When trying to get some help in a Project Lunar chatroom, someone had suggested ditching Virtual Box and instead using Parallels as my PC virtual machine. Now, Parallels is not free like Virtual Box, but it does come with a 14-day free trial and Virtual Box worked so badly on my Mac I figured it was worth a go. This turned out to be an incredibly smart decision as my Parallels experience has been INFINITELY better on my Mac than what slogging thru Virtual Box was like (I still have 10 days left on my Parallels trial, but will probably upgrade when the time comes).
#3 - Since I had already put my Sega Mini back to its factory settings, and since Project Lunar had still not released an updated version with folder functionality (ie. without folder functionality, you’re limited to only adding about 50 new Sega games), I decided to take a look at the other Sega Mini hacking software I was always seeing being mentioned in all the Project Lunar tutorials I watched, either in the videos itself, or always in the comments — and that other hacking option is the appropriately titled Hakchi.
I originally had gone with Project Lunar because it had step-by-step instructions for hacking from a Mac and I was a noob who had no idea what I was doing, but now that I was already familiar with the hacking from a Mac process, I was immediately converted over to giving Hakchi a go after seeing that they not only had built-in folder functionality (aka: you can easily add way more games than the current Project Lunar status) BUT you could also add/play Nintendo and Super Nintendo games from the internal memory of the Sega Mini (ie. with Project Lunar I was under the impression that this was only possible if incorporating a USB into the hack + that process seemed way more complicated than what the Hakchi tutorials were showing).
Note: the video I embedded above includes instructions on uninstalling Project Lunar + talks about Hakchi 3.7 — so here is another tutorial video that shows installing the latest version of Hakchi (3.8) without any of the uninstalling steps for those of you who are starting the process from scratch.
Like with my previous post on hacking my Sega Mini, I won’t get into any of the hacking details as the available tutorials online already do a perfect job of giving you the step-by-steps. The only thing I will recommend from personal experience is that you should definitely use Parallels instead of Virtual Box if you don’t have a PC + don’t want to pull your hair out.
Also, having now tried both Sega Mini hacking options, I would highly recommend going the Hakchi route over Project Lunar, as the ability to be able to also play classic Nintendo games + great Super Nintendo titles that aren’t available on the Sega Genesis platform really ups the ante on how great of a self-quarantine distraction this little machine can be. I mean, things were great when I was rocking 96 Sega games, but now that I’ve got a Sega + Nintendo + Super Nintendo all in one device that hooks right up to the TV, things are at a whole new level.
As I said before, when it comes to platformers, I’m more of a Mario guy than a Sonic guy — so being able to now play all the Super Mario games + Super Mario Kart (which is my favourite racing title) on my Sega Mini is a huge win in the nostalgic department, and being able to start exploring the back catalogues of the NES + SNES, on top of already being able to explore Sega’s huge catalogue is a real self-isolating gift.
The only thing to note is that the 3-button controllers that come with the Sega Mini are not really suited for properly playing Super Nintendo games (as they had 4 buttons + the Left and Right pads on the top) — but I have already put in an order for the Retrobit 6-button controller, which you can then configure to properly play SNES games + also make for a better gaming experience when playing Sega titles (especially the Street Fighter / Mortal Kombat / fighting games). So once that arrives in the mail, I’ll really be setup to start diving into the SNES catalogue (fyi -the included 3-button Sega controllers work fine with the NES games).
So, as of right now, I have 118 Sega Genesis games loaded + 17 NES games + 17 SNES games — and I probably have enough internal storage on the Sega Mini left for adding another 50+ games. Which means the Hakchi hack has unlocked hours of distraction just in the finding/adding/testing of games alone, and if you start calculating the hours of distraction involved in actually playing all the games, it’s basically unlimited.
In other words, hacking a Sega Mini is a pretty perfect project for taking on if you’re an old millennial like me trying to get through a global pandemic that highly recommends you to stay at home & keep to yourself as much as possible for the next who know how many weeks/months.
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* For legal reasons, I suppose I should add that this post is entirely a work of fiction and I would never actually hack my Sega Mini with games I did not acquire in whatever the proper legal manner is for acquiring old 90s games in 2020 — in fact I would never even hack my Sega Mini, period, because hacking is bad, kids. "Follow the rules and always do things the way you were told to do them" — that's my motto. SEGA! (also NES! and SNES!)
