FNJ wrote:

yeah that might be it. the copy protection actually conflicted with a small amount of legit retail games. I think it had something to do with this: Quote: the Sega Genesis III incorporated a technical protection mechanism intended to facilitate trademark suits against companies producing pirate Genesis games. When a game cartridge was inserted, the console would check for the presence of the string "SEGA" at a particular point in the memory contained in the cartridge. If the string was present, the console would display the message: "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD." If not, the game wouldn't run. Accolade, a video game developer, was a legal but unlicensed third-party vendor of Genesis-compatible games. Maybe Accolade games wouldn't run? Apparently afterwards they reverse engineered licensed games and started using the code in their games to make them run, even though they weren't licensed themselves and there was some court bullshit.

If the story I heard is correct, Accolade games -did- run, and that was the problem. When reverse-engineering the Genesis, they found the code for the lockout, but it didn't match up to anything. So they included it in their games anyways. So the copyright screen popped up, and Sega sued them for the false representation of the copyright.

Sega won in court at first, but eventually, the appeals court ruled that not only was Accolade not in the wrong, but Sega was actually the one at fault for putting a copyright screen on something that wasn't theirs.