A friend of mine asked me if I could try to fix two Geneses for him, saying that they simply did not work at all. I took them home, plugged them in and tried to play Aladdin on them, but he was right - there was just a flash when I turned the system on, then nothing. So I cleaned out the cartridge slots and sure enough the game worked on both systems, revealing new problems.

On the model 2 Genesis, the picture is fine but the sound is distorted. I used the same power supply and AV cables on another model 2 Genesis of mine with no problems, so I eliminated the concern of a bad power supply or crappy cables. Basically, there is a buzzing sound that begins after the "Produced by or under license from..." screen and then persists for about 99% of the time after and gets louder when there is more bass.

The other Genesis, a model 1, works just fine with the RF output, but there is no sound at all from the AV port. I haven't tried the headphone jack yet, but hopefully someone here can tell me if there's a way to correct these or what to try next.