The Mystery of the Scorpion 16 | Nostalgia Nerd

this is the scorpion 16 or xvi this is a console that i've been after for 27 years since i first saw it on the children's tv show bad influence in 1994. it looks like a console you'd expect from that era the jaguars brings to mind the packaging has a gold nasty looking scorpion on it we've got some interesting colors around here we've got the age of compatibility written on the bottom and we have a six button controller to either side now this console was sold in uk stores and other countries as well but it's not a very common console and there's good reason for that so the question is what exactly is this console and what is it for [Music] well let's address those two questions immediately it's a clone console and it's for sega mega drive or genesis cartridges but this isn't just your run-of-the-mill clone not in this incarnation at least and let's explore why the clone consoles we see on wish.com aliexpress down your local market aren't a new thing they've been about for donkeys years hailing from russia thailand china and anywhere else where the original manufacturers weren't prominent enough to cause any outrage the most common in the 90s were famicom clones or famiclones a few years back i investigated the mystery of the media mega drive and spoiler alert even that turned out to be a famiclone but the market wasn't just limited to cloning 8-bit machines this is the kw 500 manufactured by taiwan king wei electronics in or around 1991. as you can see it's a very close approximation of a sega mega drive and that's exactly what it is both outside and in obviously there's no sega branding here but other than that these machines are hardware clones of sega's 16-bit console the kw-501 then is a variation on this original clone hardware released around 1992 and due to lower pricing was highly successful penetrating markets which sega had neglected in those common areas of asia south america russia and poland where it was sold as the power pegasus distributed by bob mark international and actually given away as a prize on a tv game show different regions tended to have different distributors different names different control pads and different branding the magic 2 is my favorite branding it looks very japanese in styling wherever scorpion 16 is different then is the fact it actually penetrated some of sega's strongest territory and was even sold alongside it in high street retailers it would be like a company popping up called i don't know sunny who created hardware clones of the playstation 5 and started selling them out of argos which given the shortage of real playstation 5s would probably be quite lucrative at the moment and that's exactly what the company behind the scorpion 16 were hoping scorpion 16 is a registered trademark of interactive enterprises limited which sounds like a uk-based company and it is but it's not quite as simple as that and there are two reasons why the first is that the console itself is simply that kw 501 taiwanese clone with a new badge meaning interactive enterprises are acting as an importer and packager at most the second is that well there's absolutely no trace of interactive enterprises limited at all on the uk business registrar company's house the closest match for that time period is a company that was previously known as interactive commercial enterprises limited it's in the right business category and its subsequent change of name suggests being active in video games however this company wasn't officially registered until july 1996 almost two years too late and it's still not quite the right name which begs the question was this a uk company at all and if so was it legitimate more mega drive news except it's not a mega drive it's a scorpion it's the first non-sega sonic compatible console made by a british company it comes complete with two of these well people certainly seem to think it was a uk company and indeed the limited designation combined with where it was sold suggests it was so it's a bit of a mystery it could have been a sole trader or partnership masquerading as a limited company of course which would seem weird especially as a limited company is the very thing that would offer some kind of protection against being sued by sega which at the time would have been one of the first cases of its kind because this console was really sold on baha'i street in the uk there's reports of it being stocked in beaties in british home stores and even retailers such as tandy and of course it caused enough of a stir that itv's bad influence featured it on the 1st of december 94 in possibly one of the only mainstream tv shows to feature a promotional section on a rip-off console complete with two of these six button turbo joy pads it looks like a mega drive and it plays like a mega drive but it does have some extra features as well i'll just switch it off and turn it over to show you now on the back let's take a closer look and as we go maybe we'll see if we can separate legend from fact now this box is actually a later edition the original packaging is a much plainer homemade looking affair i've seen this version be referred to as a special edition and this is the packaging you would likely see in high street retailers selling for 69.99 it was likely glammed up to make it look like a decent product for shops to buy but i think the special edition name might also relate to that gold scorpion on the front now you might notice that i'm wearing a bit of uh bling in the form of a a gold scorpion rather like the one on the front the reason for that is because there are reports but this necklace came new with scorpion consoles now my version didn't have it but i managed to track down the exact same necklace but they're still selling in china for about three quid and you can see why they would have put something like this in the console i mean getting a clone console isn't the most exciting things but imagine in the playground you could have sold it to your friends but this was actually a superior machine after all it can play multi-region cartridges and you got a solid gold scorpion with it that you can wear around the school and show off that would have been quite a good sales point combined with its cheaper price i can see how this could quite have easily slipped into this package it's worth noting that there is also a necklace looking thing on the box but i've never seen one that looks like that anyway aside from the jewelry that may or may not have come with the system it's nice to see everything housed in styrofoam each accessory has its own compartment you know it looks like a decent package originally this would have come with two control pads but only one is present here there's a composite lead an rf lead a telegames power supply and a plastic bagged console i genuinely like the look of this thing it's very clearly modeled on the original mega drive but it's still managing to do its own thing the 16-bit logo is large and proud naturally on the rear we have rf composite and power connections the front has a headphone out and two controller ports and underneath reveals a tv game sticker and a seemingly low serial number three five nine i believe the highest number discovered is around 700 so we can assume at least that that many were sold we also get a single sheet of setup instructions and a page entitled universal cartridge system this sheet tells us about the asymbis console's sleeve how to configure the dip switches to allow cartridges from any region to play interestingly the base of the page says instructions by gary smoke sounds like some sort of computer repairman from the wild west now the name gary smoke has been tossed around the internet for years as the possible creator of this entire package and indeed the man behind interactive enterprise is limited but it's a difficult story to corroborate there are various gary smokes on various social media platforms but none that stand out as a possible suspect he's also purported to be behind the apparent predecessor to the scorpion 16 the scorpion 8 a famiclone that also came in scorpion-like packaging reminiscent of the original 16 box information in publications is pretty limited but i did find this letter in february 1995's edition of mean machine sega it's a guy named dave yeedon in west yorkshire and along with four other questions he writes the other day i was in a computer shop and i saw two consoles which i had never heard of before they were called the scorpion8 and the scorpion 16 and the guy in the shop said the scorpion 16 was a system which could run any mega drive game from any country it cost 69 pounds 99 and i was wondering if you had heard of such a console and whether it was a licensed sega product confirming that the scorpion 8 amber 16 were indeed sold alongside each other mean machine sega responded it's obviously an illegal import and don't you think it would have a sega logo on it if it were a genuine machine of theirs talking of magazines i'd like to introduce you to the sponsor for this video readly i seem to spend half my life researching through old magazines and they're great but trust me they take up a lot of space really is like the netflix of magazines you can share five profiles from one account meaning you and the people around you can access a buttload of magazines both brand new and back editions you can bookmark you can read offline you can get personal recommendations you can access it on desktop or your phone and tablet so you don't have to lug 10 kilograms of failed trees about plus the selection is extensive we're talking over 5 000 titles to choose from we can delve into the video games hardware handbook in its various revisions or the retro gaming magazine fusion now look there's larry bundy jr now look there's trista bites oh look there's nostalgia in there yeah he didn't want to read about him there's even retro gamer magazine the crash annuals of the nintendo archives and i'm not even talking about other topics yet here we go look you can also get magazines on history like the ultimate 90s collection yeah i'll be back later i've got some reading to do click the link below to receive two months of read leave for free with a low cost of seven pounds 99 a month thereafter you can cancel at any time as well okay let's get this set up so we haven't got the rgb out of the original mega drive but we do have composite out which would have actually been beneficial for most owners in that era the most common connection was rf at the time but a lot of tvs still had a composite rca jack so this would have elevated the picture quality for most people all right let's try a modern game xeno crisis to begin with well that seems to work just fine now i've always thought this console popped up a weird time by 94 the lower cost mega drive 2 had been out for over a year and it had been steadily reducing in price from 147 pounds in christmas 93 to 129 pounds in the summer of 94 and then 119 pounds for christmas 94 but that particular offer from argos included mega games one aladdin and two controllers you could grab a base mega drive 2 with sonic and one pad for just 89 pounds and this was the market the scorpion was heading into at 69 pounds 99 it was certainly cheaper and you've got two controllers as standard two six button pads i should add as standard although those are actually turbo buttons so it's not an actual six button pad you can use with street fighter 2 for example see although it does have a slow switch on the back which gives some buttons a a weird slower rapid-fire ability it's all a bit strange although whilst hunting around i did find an almost matching pad from presumably a different clone so that's nice i've got a pair now but although two control pads is nice it still didn't come bundled with a game after all it's unofficial i have some extra features as well i'll just switch it off and turn it over to show you now on the back there's a hidden panel and the idea is when you buy a scorpion you'll get a free game built in what will happen is the shop owner will remove this panel as we've done already break open a normal mega drive cartridge and that's what the inside of a mega drive cartridge looks like and then just plug it into your scorpion like that and then when you switch the machine on you'll get the free game if you want to play another game though you plug it in the top as normal and it'll bypass the free game clever yes you see the scorpion 16 does have a slot that you can plug a naked cartridge into this would typically have held a multi-game cart for the kw 501's main selling regions which is pretty typical for clone machines and somewhat of a hangover from famiclones you could also warp an everdrive in there now if you wanted and it would be a pretty neat package but then again you may not be able to like i said this was a hangover it wasn't really a feature and so some consoles will have a cartridge connector some will just have a trapdoor in the case but no connector and others like mine won't have either and actually i've never seen a scorpion that does have the connector in fact if you look at the model on bad influence even that one doesn't have the actual connector despite andy showing us it plugs in near the controller ports it would actually plug in upside down the opposite way you can see the solder points at the top just below the solder joints for the main cartridge port but there's no cartridge port on this side at all which makes it even weirder that bad influence mentioned it i asked andy's co-host violet berlin if she could shed any light and her response was i remember it happening but can't remember much about it which honestly sounds like my entire life but violet being such an amazing person did some digging and after a few messages to former production staff and researchers it was steve keane who you might remember from presenting the spin-off show bad level 10 with violet on the children's channel who had the answer at the time he was researching for bad influence and i had a chat with him about it i remember we got the scorpion from an importer who ran a lot of ads in the video games magazines i used to write for we used to get early releases of import japanese games from him and we bought the first playstation one that was in the country from him for the show for one thousand pounds he was based in leeds so he used to go over to his place and look around and he said he was happy to bring any new stuff over to the studio and get us anything interesting we needed i got this nest telly from him a tv that had a built-in super famicom with a card slot at the top we also got the ufo that could copy any super nintendo game to a floppy disk from him too so that's where we got the scorpion from his name was chris i think which explains how and why it actually got on the show as to why andy mentioned the underside cartridge slot steve thinks at the time they had plans to develop the bottom slot to hold a game but i don't think they ever did that it's hard to tell what the underlying story was here this was likely something passed on to the importer chris which filtered down so maybe possibly we would have seen scorpions with this feature added back in had bad influence not shown an incredibly bright spotlight on the machine thwarting the possibility of a quiet and pain-free sales run in the end we just got a load of models that had skipped that stage of assembly presumably because knockoff multi-card pirating didn't fit with the uk market and to save costs pushed out for rapid sale also take a look at the serial number on that bad influence machine it looks like five seven eight six or something i've even digitally enhanced it just like the movies look how much clearer that is look definitely four digits so we can take a guess that these just varied depending on the batch of kw machines used and are probably completely insignificant when talking about the scorpion package as a product itself a package designed to undercut sega then by about 20 pounds which is around 40 pounds in today's money not too shabby but remember this machine is more akin to an original mega drive than a cost reduced mega drive 2. so we get the headphone output a dedicated volume control and if you listen to the streets of rage 2 music we get a pretty decent sound circuit unlike the somewhat iffy sounding configuration of some mega drive 2s it's not up there with the best but comparable to a pal va6 machine to test it let's crack out a bad influence style tv the philips your tv 2 which they routinely featured on the show and we'll compare it to a va4 high definition graphics mega drive you might notice that the mega drive image is a lot sharper and that's due to it being connected by rgb scart rather than composite i'm capturing audio from the stereo headphone jack direct to camera as the rear outputs are only mono on both the mega drive and the scorpion [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] compared to the va4 high definition graphics mega drive the base is more raspy and distorted and everything is a little less controlled than the mega drive but despite the hot amplification the scorpion definitely doesn't have the worst sound you can get [Music] and that's because this isn't some crap console on a chip in here it's an actual hardware copy of the mega drive that means under this slot we also get the edge connector for the mega cd with those dip switches to either side which we'll come back to and being a hardware clone it means chipped games like virtual racing work fine the super magic drive works fine the master system converter fits and works fine almost every accessory you can think of works fine even the infrared controller accessory given the port spacing is identical to an actual mega drive the only thing that really has issues is the 32x and that's due to the lack of standard rgb video connector we decided to give the scorpion the ultimate compatibility test so we plugged 32x into the scorpion like so oh and then we came across well quite a major problem as you can see the video connector clearly won't fit so we had a special lead made up and it still didn't work so whatever else is good about the scorpion it won't be compatible with the 32x unfortunately a special lead isn't going to cut it but back in 2013 the youtube channel retro game tech did actually manage to get a 32x to blend with the scorpion's video output with some synchronization issues and the channel megacom performed a mod that allowed the systems to work perfectly with each other so we're only really limited by that composite output which was implemented before the 32x was even on the scene [Music] before i open these up just take a look at the styling similarities here i think they did an impressive job of making it resemble a mega drive without just being a carbon copy the vents controls 16-bit dish it's all subtle and tasteful if this had been a direct rip-off i don't think it would have received the same traction and exposure especially not in the uk this styling makes it feel somehow genuine so only three screws and we're in no shielding here either so starting in the lower right we've got some sram mounted on a daughter board next to that is a chip that's actually a clone of the yamaha 2612 sound chip and above those is a toshiba z80 to the left there are another couple of cloned chips which replace the sega developed ones from the actual mega drive which clearly are more tricky to get hold of when you're not you know sega nestled among them is the board's oscillator at 53.203 megahertz then above those is the motherlode a genuine motorola 68000 for all that blast processing delight that sony cx8 chip actually converts the analog rgb signals you'd get on a mega drive to a composite signal then we've got some ram chips nearby it actually looks very well put together if you look under the cartridge slot you can also see the connection points for where the underside extra cartridge slot would have been soldered had it been attached to this version comparing that to a first edition pal mega drive well we've got a lot more screws to remove on the case and on the shielding my electronic teacher used to tell me that you can tell the quality of a product by the amount of screws now that's a lie he didn't say that but it does kind of apply we've got a 315 i o chip found on these early boards with some ram sitting above a genuine zylog z80 bear solded straight into the board there are usually socketed versions of these on later models that sanyo chip holds the 64 kilobytes of ram and we can see the oscillator clocked at the same speed as the one in the scorpion to the right we've got some proprietary sega controller and bus management chips to the right there as well there's the ym2612 sound chip the motorola 68000 is actually nestled behind the cartridge port on this board but what this mega drive lacks is those dip switches for regions you can install a mod yourself but it's nice to have something out of the box and here they are those critical switches which really added the value for the astute game collector and importer who would have jumped at the chance to get a cheap multi-region mega drive out of the box a lot of mega drive games are region 3 already although some act a bit weird this genesis version of super monaco grand prix will turn black and white but only after the title screens and only on certain tvs but it seems fine in this setup but if you do get a region locked game that refuses to load at all you can use the switch to be right of the edge connector to switch between japanese and english languages which allow streets of rage 2 to boot up as bare knuckle the japanese name for the game and you can use the other switch the swap between ntsc and pal modes combinations of these switches therefore allow you to select japanese ntsc english ntsc english pal or japanese pal if you're feeling wild however quite cunningly really the scorpion will regardless convert the output to pal 50 hertz mode that means that even ntsc games are sandwiched between pal borders and play at 50 hertz which in the 90s would have been a bonus because it allowed you to play games from any region on a standard 50 hertz pal television nowadays most tvs will switch between ntsc and pal 50 and 60 hertz anyways so it's not as great but it also means that some games will act a little weird if you run the pal streets of rage 2 on ntsc mode in japanese for example the music runs dog slow we're talking a lot slower than 50 hertz [Music] although the game itself is still running at 50 hertz so for good or worse we're stuck with the chilled out vibes of sonic's starlight zone [Music] so we can see how the scorpion 16 was a tempting proposition for many buyers especially if you could get one from a trustworthy high street retailer like tandy who you know would offer a returns policy scorpion will cost you about 70 pounds but you might have trouble getting hold of it because shots that normally sell mega drives perhaps won't stock it you might find one in bts but beware it's an unlicensed product that means if anything goes wrong you might have problems putting it right interestingly a lot of previous owners claim to have got their scorpion from independent game shops pete's computer store and the like this makes complete sense imported and somewhat dodgy consoles like this one relied on specialist independent stores to get them into homes we all had one in our local cities or towns and after all if you can sell a customer a multi-region console they might soon come back asking you to import cartridges it's just on this occasion by steve picking it up through his elusive magazine advertising importer chris gary smoke had perhaps bitten off more than he could chew i think perhaps it was his intention to fly a bit more under the radar avoiding sega's watchful eye in the process [Music] we'll have dominion over all life on this earth bad influence ironically was probably the fly in his ointment that being said i have found various stories which back up the scorpion being stocked in larger chain stores but i mentioned earlier and the british packaging seems to back up the audacity of this whole operation for whatever reason the scorpion very quickly vanished soon after the mid 90s saw various legal cases involving sega and although i can't find any specific records of a lawsuit being filed against the scorpion there were rumors that sega perhaps had a polite word with interactive enterprises limited and gary slipped off into the shadows presumably to live another day selling fake gold scorpions on the high street whether gary smoke was the head honcho or just the guy who translated documents for this importing operation will go down as one of the greatest mysteries of our time the name smoke and his chaotic influence will echo through back alleys arcade foyers and supermarket crisp isles for years to come but ultimately it made little difference by 1995 the mega drive could be picked up for about 60 pounds if he knew where to go dipping lower than the scorpion itself and for most people the scorpion was a forgotten blink of the eye forgotten except for those of us who saw this single episode of bad influence and have been intrigued ever since so this console now holds a very special place in my collection but not just because of that it's also because as a console it's actually rather good well and because it cost me about 500 pounds as well oh the joys of running a retro youtube channel until next time i've been nostalgia nerd totally [Music] i better take this off before it makes my neck go green i can't get it off oh god i'm stuck with the scorpion emblem on me forever still everyone will know that i own a scorpion 16. it's not a bad thing please god please no release me from this pain maybe once you get into the necklace you you're stuck for life it's like it's actually an anti copy copy device by sega so that they can identify all scorpion owners and eliminate and punish appropriately good work take it you

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 466,548

Keywords: scorpion 16, sega scorpion, sega clone, clone consoles, sega genesis, bad influence, violet berlin

Id: Bpfwj11mN0I

Length: 33min 26sec (2006 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021