I found.. Help?

[Doku_san]

I found a copy of a Mega-Drive game Populous, in the original box. Okay, so I pulled it out and it looks nothing like my other mega-drive games. It has a yellow thing on the side of the Cart and on the label of the cart says For use with the Sega Genesis system 16-BIT CARTRIDGE. Does this mean it is a Genesis game? It works fine on my Mega-Drive. It is much taller than my other Mega-Drive cart's.
Sorry if this seems like an obvious answer to you guys, but I'm kinda in the dark here. A Sega Virgin if you will.
Thanks.

[Melf]

It's an Electronic Arts game, which is why it looks so funky. All of their games are taller than the standard Genny carts, and have that useless yellow tag on the right side. Their boxes are thicker than normal too.

EA= the original attention whores. :P

[j_factor]

Is the box European looking or American?

Either way, I think EA carts are universal.

[winona]

about 90-95% of all genesis games will work on a Eu system without a converter.

Its an EA cart for sure. I hate them. They are hard to open when cleaning the connectors and the boxes are not interchangable with normal Genesis ones. So if you get a broken EA box u have to replace it with an other EA box.

Plus they are ugly.

[Parker619]

yea i have quite a few of the old ea big carts, some for example.. road rash,, populous... risky woods,, kings bounty.. i dont mind em its the gameplay that i look at most,, not the carts :P:P

[KnightWarrior]

What is inside of a EA cart to make it big

[Zebbe]

Plastic design.

[Elusive]

All EA cartridges use a standard design, including the 'Genesis' text - and as EA games are not region-locked, there's no real reason to change them.

You can usually tell when a game is region-locked by the manual - Altered Beast mentions the 'Sega Mega Drive / Genesis' system, whereas Comix Zone will just mention the 'Sega Mega Drive', for example.

[djcrazymonkey]

I've only ever experience 1 locked game: A PAL Sonic 3 on a NTSC console. Gave me some black screen error I don't remember.

[sonic417]

Is there a reason for the yellow tab on the EA cartridges?

[VinnyT]

I think it was just to be diffrent from anyone else at the time. If it wasn't for discs we'd have these giant gold-plated turd shaped cartridges to showcase this years Madden.

[sonic417]

I remember the first time I encountered that was renting Mike Ditka football. I though the yellow tab was a cover. And you were supposed to pinch it to remove it--as if to access something. Battery or whatnot.

Sure seemed that way, of course it never came off. Its even more hilarious that it serves no purpose.

[Joe Redifer]

Mike Ditka Football was not made by EA. It was made by Accolade. Accolade did not have yellow tabs in their carts.

[sonic417]

Yep, I meant John Madden

[knicksfan89]

Mike Ditka was made by accolade, and populous was made by EA which meant the cart was the same the world over

[Ash]

http://magnumash.servehttp.com/misc2/games/genesis_risky_woods.htm
http://magnumash.servehttp.com/misc2/games/genesis_roadrash.htm
http://magnumash.servehttp.com/misc2/games/genesis_lotus2.htm
http://magnumash.servehttp.com/misc2/games/genesis_roadrash_3.htm

The above links are shots of the actual boards of the games, they are tiny compared to all the plastic that surrounds them. In some cases, these boards are smaller than what were in the regular genesis carts. Big advertising waste.

[Zebbe]

You'd be amazed if you open a NES cart.

[KnightWarrior]

Holy crap that's a waste..Can the EA chips fit in a Normal Genesis Cart

[Genesis Knight]

I had no clue there was so much space in the EA carts. I can understand - they wanted to make their carts special. What I don't get is why NES would have massive carts for such tiny chips...what did that gain?