Sega Card Catcher

Summary

The Sega consoles Mark III and Master System (both the third generation of game consoles) were able to receive games either as a module or on Sega Card or Sega My Card. The advantage of these memory in credit card format was lower production costs, but this was offset by lower storage space (usually 32 KiB). However, the predecessors of the Mark III, the consoles SG-1000 and SG-1000 II (also called Mark II) did not have a card reader, but only a cartridge slot. The same applies to Sega’s only home computer SC-3000 based on the SG-1000 console and the successor to the SMS, the Sega Master System II; both do not have a card slot. To use the small cards for the systems, Sega launched the Card Catcher in 1985. Internally, not much happens with the Card Catcher, because basically only the 35 pins are redirected from the card format to the 44 pins from the module format – just like with the Power Base Converter. The Card Catcher was sold only in Japan. There are 29 official games, 24 of them exclusively on cards. So the converter disappeared after a short time, because the games became bigger and the limited memory on the card was not enough.