French Sega Megadrive

Im looking to buy a Megadrive, and found one on ebay, but its from france. Im in "PAL" country, so does anybody know if that console is different than normal european consoles? I tried google first, but found conflicting information. Better ask the experts

 

I don't have the answer yet. But I have several French units. We can try to compare the Serial number from the French ones with a serial number of a system is your country (which country ?).

Megadrive 1 or 2 ?

 

I had a French Megadrive 1 - the most noticeable changes from the standard PAL version was that it didn't have an RF modulator and the composite output on the AV socket was disabled, so a composite A/V cable won't work, but a RGB wired SCART does. They originally came with a "French SECAM RGB" specific SCART cable that seems to only work on the French machines.

 

French and their SECAM thing back to the days....

 

French home Sega Systems usually don't have a video encoder at all (that's the reason they don't do composite video) the video signals come directly from the VDP chips and they are usually amplified in the peritel/scart RGB cables.

 

I live in Norway. It is a system one. Seems like I cannot use it on a modern TV, then. Too bad, it looked like a nice deal.

 

Somebody ask my avatar to stop smiling, im a bit sad at the moment.

 

I got a french mega drive only once, unfortunately it was broken and couldn't manage to fix it, but I remember well it had a sony cxa1145 on the inside like other md's