Sega Consoles

Sega used to have a console Line untill stiff competition form sony and poor internal desisions killed the console line up off.

The 8 Bit Machine:

During the 1980s, Nintendo had a monopoly on the video game market. With the highly popular NES, it was difficult for sega to compete. But they did. Introducing Master System!!!!

The Sega Master System ( Shown Above) was technologically superior to The NES, It had more RAM, a Faster CPU,More Colors, and more storage.  Here We Compare The MS to The NES:

Master System

CPU: 8-bit Z80 (3.58MHz)
RAM: 64K (8Kb)
Colors: 256 (52 on screen)
Resolution: 256x226
Sound: 6-channel mono

And The NES:

CPU: 8-bit 6502 NMOS (1.79MHz)
RAM: 2KB (16Kb), 2KB Video RAM
Colors: 52 (24 on screen)
Sprites: 64
Sprite Size: 8x16 pixels
Resolution: 256x240 pixels
Sound: PSG audio

Obvisley, we can see witch one was better from a technological point of view.  The sega was vastly more powerful. But Nintendo had more games and a strong market foothold. But sega would Strike Back.

The 16 Bit Era

Sega needed a cutting edge console to compete with future systems.  They though ahead by adding an expansion slot to there new 16 bit console. But they did more than that. They made a new mascot, a new arcitecture and a new brand.

 

And The Brains Behind It:

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The Motorla 68000!  This CPU was a popular choice in High End workstations and fast personal computers. With a powerful 32 bit chip like this sega could do anything. With all that Immense Speed they were able to create Sonic the Hedgehog, and with the new mascot, controll the early 90s computer game market. But the SNES, Nintendo's answer, would cause close competition.  The two are similar hardware wise, but the genesis has a very strong cpu, which the SNES lacks.

Geneisis:

CPU: 16-bit Motorolla 68000 (7.68MHz)
Co-processor: Z80 Zilog (4MHz)
RAM: 64KB
Graphics: Dedicated graphics processor
Colors: 128 (64 on screen)
Sprites: 80
Resolution: 320x224 pixels
Sound: 8 channel stereo.  TI 76489 PSG, Yamaha YM 2612 FM chips

SNES:

CPU: 16-bit 65816 (3.58MHz)
RAM: 28KB , 64KB (0.5Mb) Video RAM
Graphics: Dedicated graphics processor
Colors: 512 (256 on screen)
Sprites: 128
Resolution: 512x448 pixels
Sound: 8-channel 8-bit Sony SPC700 digitized sound

 

The SNES is more power full in everything besides Expandability  and CPU strength.

This is the system wich put sega on the map.

Sega Saturn:

The most powerful 32 bit console, the Sega Saturn blew away the competition technology wise. But segas failure to finish Sonic-X-treme, along with a high price ,killed the console.  It had a couple of brilliant games, and lived on as the most powerful 32 bit system.

Specs:

CPU: Two 32-bit SH-2 (28.6MHz) RISC processors
RAM: 2MB, Video RAM: 1.5MB
Colors: 16.7 million
Polygons: 200,000 texture-mapped, 500,000 flat-shaded per second
Game Media: CD-ROM
Resolution: 704x480
Sound: 32-channel PCM, 8-channel FM stereo

The Saturn had dual 32bit cpus! The Playstation was inferior compared with this monster. And the Nintendo's N64, inst even 64bit! A 32bit CPU and a 32bit VDP makes it sudo64bit. The Saturn is really faster than the competition, but the difficulty of programing made it a non choice for newbies to programing.  It lost, and sega had to come up with a new console to recover.

Sega dream cast

Segas last stand, killed by the evil Sony  PS2. The Dreamcast was a great console, true 64bit, but was killed by sony's PS2, a more attractive console due to features.

Specs:

SH-4 at 233mhz

24mb of RAM

GD Rom Gigabyte Disk

PowerVR 2 Video Processor at 7million polygons a millisecond.

 

Sadly, sega almost died,but have recovered somehow.