Another fun wrinkle is that as part of that suit, Sega engineer Takeshi Nagashima also produced two cartridges with different methods of bypassing the screen "u

Another fun wrinkle is that as part of that suit, Sega engineer Takeshi Nagashima also produced two cartridges with different methods of bypassing the screen "using standard components, at a total extra cost of approximately fifty cents". They offered to let Accolade's counsel examine the cartridges, but only on the condition that Accolade's engineers couldn't see them. This convinced the district court that the code triggering the screen was "nonfunctional", but the Ninth Circuit disagreed. My guess is that these methods involved some modchip-style tomfoolery like reset glitching or forcing values onto the bus, and could have been defeated by Sega in a future revision of the console.