Sega announced the release of a miniature Sega MegaDrive

Sega is not dead at all, as some gamers believe. She is very much alive, continues to participate in the life of the game world, launches new products, acts as a partner of other companies in various new projects. You can judge how active the company is by its new project - the release of an updated version of Sega MegaDrive.



This is a miniature copy of a veteran of the game world, which is called MegaDrive Mini. So far, the announcement has been made only in Japanese and it is unclear whether the prefix will be released in other countries except Japan. But it may well be that, yes, it will also appear in the United States and Europe.





The announcement of the new version is timed to the 30th anniversary of the Sega platform. This, if I may say so, is the "rendered" version of the classic 16-bit console. Unfortunately, the technical specifications of the system are not reported. But the prefix will support the normal cartridges with a high degree of probability.



The prefix will be sold in Japan until the end of 2018, but its value is unknown.



The original version of the Sega MegaDrive (Genesis in the USA and some other countries) first appeared in 1988. The console was developed by a team of engineers led by Hideki Sato and Masami Ishikawa. The platform is based on the hardware of the Sega System 16 gaming machine. The primary processor was decided to make the Motorola 680000, the secondary processor - the Zilog Z80. For the console has been released in a total of about 900 games. Both the main company and partners took part in their creation. Genesis is backward compatible with the Sega Master System, this compatibility is achieved with the help of Power Base Converter, a device sold separately.



MegaDrive is a fourth-generation console; it managed to achieve commercial success in both Europe and North America. The main popularity of the console brought a large number of games, among which were a lot of hits. By the way, the last licensed game was released in 2002 in Brazil. As far as can be judged, Mega Drive / Genesis is the most successful prefix of Sega.



By 1994, when 32-bit gaming consoles began to appear in the world, Genesis sold around the world in a total of 29 million devices. At the time of the end of the life cycle of the console, sales reached 40 million. Many games are still very popular, the reception is not only among geeks. The result - the games continue to be developed, albeit informally.



SEGA is not the first company to decide to release an updated version of its classic gaming console. The first was probably Nintendo. First, she released the Nintendo Classic Mini , which almost immediately disappeared from the sale because it was bought up by grateful fans.





Then the SNES Classic Mini appeared on the market. The set of games will include 21 retro games (20 of which everyone knows about + Star Fox 2). 14 of them are published by Nintendo itself, while the rest are created by Capcom, Konami, Square Enix.





The consoles themselves do not work with cartridges, this is a relatively modern "iron" with internal memory, in which default games are written. There is also an opportunity to replace / add to the base of games, for which you should use specialized software from ClusterM .



The console uses the Allwinner R16 single-crystal platform with four ARM Cortex A7 microprocessors and the ARM Mali 400 MP2 graphics accelerator. RAM is 256 MB (DDR3), flash memory - 512 MB. The software platform here is the Linux OS. This software emulates not only SNES, but also additional processors that were used in games such as the SA1 CPU for Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Star, not to mention Star Fox. Plus, the NEC DSP-1 add-on devices are also emulated, which were installed in the Super Mario Kart cartridges.



As for Sega, then most likely, the developers used approximately the same scheme as the representatives of Nintendo. Although, if the console really knows how to work with cartridges - this is a big plus.