The Mega Drive is Powerful

I have just discovered how powerful the Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) is. It is quite surprising I suggest you read on.



First a little history but if you want you can skip this bit coz it's boring. Scroll down to the RED TEXT below to get to the end of it.

During World War 2 the US was testing their nuclear weapons in an army base just outside Las Vegas.

People flocked to Las Vegas to watch the spectacular explosions which got Las Vegas its nickname "The Up And Atom Town".

Sega or as they were known then 'Service Games' was happy to manufacture and build slot machines for the tourists and that is how they began.

In the 70s the Odyssey pretty much ruled the video game market.

Sega did compete with their own machine but the controller was stupidly complicated and the games were equally confusing.

Atari took over at the start of the 80s but Sega again tried to compete with the Master System.

But the MS was too expensive for developers to make games on and for people to buy games for.

This meant that roughly 90-95% of all the games ever made for it were never released in the US.

Subsequently most of the world never got them either since they all get what America hands out anyway.

Apple were the first to combine the technology of various computer companies to build the Apple PC.

They were all bought by one company and Apple used their wealth to build the Apple II which sold like crazy to businesses and made Apple very wealthy.

Then IBM which were the biggest computer manufacturer of the day bought all the technology and commissioned Microsoft (an upstart failure of a company at this time) to build the software (intentionally a complete copy of Apple's Macintosh OS).

It worked though but not as IBM planned because Microsoft outsourced their code to other hardware and left IBM behind them taking all the profits.

Now at this time Sega and Nintendo were in a fierce battle trying to take over the arcades and boy were there some good games out at this time.

Pretty much every Atari, Sega and Nintendo classic came out within the space of 2 or three years.

Sega had their own development companies and so did Nintendo as well as a few independent companies and massively rich businesses selling to all machines.

However it was Atari who really ruled the game market at this time.

Having the cheapest machine to develop games for and buy games on / pay per use the Atari was easily the best choice.

This is despite the fact that the games were of very poor quality compared to the competition.

But Nintendo cleverly partnered with Microsoft and made their development software compatible with Windows.

This made it much easier and cheaper for businesses to make games for Nintendo.

And then they took it one step further by developing their own machine to run the games on known as The Family Computer (Famicon for short).

It's also known as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES for short) to most of the English speaking world.

However by the time the Famicon was built, the arcades and most PC manufacturers had developed 16-bit technology.

Only the consoles (Atari & Famicon) were 8-bit at this point and difference in quality is shocking.

Most people started playing on the consoles exclusively and gained the false belief that the Famicon was as good as gets.

This was all thanks to highly popular games like Donkey Kong and Duck Hunt.

There were plenty of 64-color-GIF-quality 16-bit games released in the arcades but they were ignored.

The mysterious thing about this whole thing was that Sega was claiming that their arcade games were cartridges for the Master System and they just glued them into the drive.

This would mean that the Master System which was built soon after the Atari was as powerful as the latest 16-bit arcade machines.

Now that's the equivalent of building an Xbox in 1997 to battle the PS1.

The hardware and software would be too complex for most to understand or be able to afford at the time.

So if it was true it's understandable why it would fail.

It sounds far fetched but there were PCs that could run Xbox graphics in 1997 so it's not impossible.

Likewise there were machines that could run as powerful as a 16-bit machine when the Atari was made.

So it's not impossible, just very very expensive and a total waste of money.

It is still quite impressive that they could have packed it into such a small device but the technology did exist ~just~.

Atari battled Nintendo for the top console with Atari teaming up with independent companies and Nintendo teaming up with the big faceless organizations.

Nintendo managed to buy a popular PC game title of the day (Tetris) and use it to aid the sales of their handheld games machine, the Gameboy.

Gameboy's fame was short-lived but it lasted just long enough to cripple Atari and force them to retire.

Nintendo thought they owned the world but for a few years now Sega had been developing their latest machine, The Mega Drive.

I'm calling it the Mega Drive here because that's what it is called in Japan, where it was made and first sold.

The Genesis as it happens is not quite the same machine but that's another story.

When the MD arrived it had a craze or two as it was clearly much more powerful than the Famicon (NES).

But then Nintendo released the Super Famicon (AKA the Super NES or SNES) and at first it seemed its technological equal.

Even today people still claim that the Super Famicon was more powerful than the Mega Drive but it is sadly not true.

Like with the Master System and their other machine before it the Mega Drive was too advanced, too complex and too expensive for both developer and gamer alike.

They clearly had not learned their lesson at all after all this time.

I was a gamer about this point in time and I saw the Super Famicon storm the market and obliterate their competition.

True, the SF had the best games by far but that was mainly because it was cheap to make games on.

The same tactic is what made the Atari so popular for so many years despite the more advanced competition.

!!!HISTORY OVER!!!

boring technical bit begins skip to RED TEXT again.

Unlike the others before it the Mega Drive didn't really bomb and it put up a fight but it was always the underdog.

What confused me was how it could compete with other machines by adding a CD drive to it or a fancy cartridge.

I always thought that the machine itself must be pretty good to produce that quality with just an extra drive stuck to it.

And now that I'm older I've learned alot more about computers and you'd think the answer got simpler but it doesn't.

As far as I can tell the machine would have to be as powerful as a 32-bit machine to do what it does.

The drives can't make the machine itself any faster or more powerful at processing so the power is all the Mega Drive and not the fancy drives.

There's some theories that the CD drive is a console in itself or that the 32X cartridge adds extra ram but it's all crap.

I've looked at the hardware components and all there is is the reader/writer and a compressor/decompressor chip.

There's no way that would give any more power to the processing at all.

What it does do however is quite interesting.

What it does is compress the data before passing it through the processor.

And from what I've heard this 'Blast Processing' is simply a method of processing data in its compressed form.

Most devices decompress the data, process it and then recompress the data again.

The Mega Drive DOES NOT DECOMPRESS THE DATA.

It runs the data, while it is compressed.

That explains how a few meg processor can process hundreds of megs at once.

But wait it gets better.

!!TECHNICAL BIT OVER!!

so what does this mean in terms of power.

There are many theories about the MD's true power but few have been proven.

Essentially the MD is a 32-bit machine.

It's less powerful than the Play Station One, I'd say it's about the power level of the Sega Saturn, slightly less.

How do I know this?

I have heard tons of accounts that the Mega Drive can run the Sega Saturn versions of many of the Virtua series games.

I've heard it can even run Sonic Jam.

And all these have come from reliable sources and have been confirmed by other reliable sources as well.

Of course it's impossible for me to prove it to you without first getting a Mega Drive & CD Drive, rewiring and reprogramming it, putting the game in and running it for you.

If I showed you footage of it you'd say it was faked so this is the only way.

I don't know how to rewire and program custom built 1989 blast-processing technology and most of the kit is specific to that machine anyway.

If you have any footage please send me it so I can make this sound more plausible.

Right now it sounds like the ravings of a madman.