Accessories Overview

Sega had a wide variety of accessories, some of them highly original. Below is and image and brief description of each of the most common SMS accessories. Further information on these are located in our hardware database. The Sega Control Pad The standard control pad that came with the Master System. Early versions of the pad had a removable thumbscrew and the connector cable came from the right side of the pad. Sega later revised the pad and took away the thumbscrew option and placed the connector wire at the top of the pad where it should have been to begin with. The fatal flaw in the pad is the lack of pause button!

The Sega Control Stick Sega's version of an "arcade control stick", supposed to give a more precise control when using arcade games like Outrun or Afterburner. The controller is quite strange in the fact that it has the two buttons on the left hand side of the controller, allot of people were put off the controller by this as it could be hard to get used to. Great for Sinistrals though.

The Sega Light Phaser The Sega light Phaser was much sturdier feeling than Nintendo's NES zapper gun, supposedly modeled on a gun from a Japanese anime series that is also a Master System game "Zillion". The gun is lightweight and makes a satisfying "click" sound when the trigger is pressed. The phaser came with pack-in Master Systems called "Master System Plus" but was also available separately.

The Sega 3D Glasses The Sega 3D glasses are in my opinion the most interesting accessory for the Master System, its worth noting that unlike other video games/computers of the time which supplied you with red/green paper 3D glasses these actually do work! The glasses plug into the Master System Power base 3D glasses adapter then into the Master System's card slot. Unfortunately very few titles make use of this accessory.

The Sega Rapid Fire Unit The Sega rapid fire unit plugs into your Master System first then you plug your control pad into the Rapid fire unit, this will have the effect of you being able to choose what buttons on the control pad you wish to enable "rapid fire mode" for. This was a great accessory, but perhaps a bit cheeky given that rapid fire was already available on most 3rd party control pads.

The Sega Sports Pad The Sports Pad was only released in USA and Japan. it requires special software to work properly such as Great Ice Hockey, Great Football(US) and Sports Pad Soccer(JAP). But the accessory has very limited usage.

The Sega Handle Controller Sega's Handle controller was only released in Europe and was designed to be used for driving or shooting games, I have never had one so I cant tell you how good/bad it was.

The Sega SG Commander Pad The SG Commander Pad was again, only released in Europe. Its basically the same as the original pad except it has two switches which can enable rapid fire for each button. This should have been the original SMS pad from the beginning.



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