USB-powered Sega Nomad gives you near-endless game time
Sega’s Genesis Nomad was always something of a compromise (it was running 16-bit console games on mid-1990s handheld tech), but the battery life was a particularly sore point: it took six AA batteries just to get 3 hours of play time. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use modern hardware to play without constant (and sometimes expensive) battery swaps? The Sega Holic (aka Catch22 on NeoGAF) thinks so. He just teased a homebrew Nomad modification that lets the portable system run on USB power. You could play for hours on end with the same external battery you use for your phone, or rely on your laptop’s power to keep playing in between meetings.
This isn’t about to enter mass production, so you’ll have to wait for a walkthrough from The Sega Holic if you’re determined to mod your own Nomad. However, he hints that even more is possible. There’s nothing stopping you from outputting the system’s audio and video over USB-C, so you could create a Nintendo Switch-style dock or breakout box that returns Genesis games to your TV screen. Is this overkill? You bet — but this still shows how a little engineering can improve on a classic handheld, and maybe even give it a second life.
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