On november 30, 1990 appeared on the Sega Mega Drive in Europe in the shops. The 16bit console at the time was much more advanced than its main competitor: the 8bit-NES. It was also the first console where a Sonic game for appeared.
In the Sega Mega Drive is a Motorola 68000 processor with a clock frequency of 7.6 MHz and 72kB of ram. The 16bit chip is assisted by a Zilog Z80 coprocessor at 3,58 MHz. That chip was since 1976, is widely used in various devices, and is today still to be found in graphing calculators from Texas Instruments. In the Mega Drive was the Zilog processor used for control of the sound; because we feared that the Motorola processor is not powerful enough would be to at the same time, the image and the sound to take care of. The graphics processor is a Yamaha YM7101 with 64kB. This allows the Mega Drive to be able to with a resolution of 320×240 pixels, 64 colors simultaneously on the screen to identify, from a palette of a total of 512 different colors.
With his hardware had the Sega Mega Drive quite a head start on the 8bit system from Nintendo. The NES had to do with a 1,55 MHz cpu and could be up to 24 colors at the same time. Although in 1990 the 16bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan was released, it still took until June 1992 before Sega in Europe had to deal with the competition of Nintendo’s 16bit console.
The Mega Drive was the first console where a Sonic game for appeared. Sega was looking for a new gamekarakter, that also as a ‘mascot’ would be for the company to compete with Mario. Ultimately, it was Sonic the Hedgehog. The game appeared in June 1991, and the blue egeltje grew to be the mascot that Sega wished. In addition, the bundling of the game with the Mega Drive is seen as a major reason for the success of the console.
With the Sega Mega Drive was even possible to online games to download and to the via the internet against other gamers. At least, Sega introduced the Meganet service in Japan, where a special Mega Modem and a paid monthly subscription for were required. However, it was not a great success and although there are plans to bring the service under the name of Tele-Genesis to the US, were not continued.
There were several variations of the Mega Drive. So was the Mega Drive II a smaller and more fuel-efficient variant. In 1995, when the 16bit era came to an end, did Sega even have a handheld version of the console. This Sega Nomad came, however, only in the USA. The Mega Drive was in november 1994 followed by the 32bit Sega Saturn. That console appeared in July 1995 in Europe. Until the day of today, however, there is still a license created variations of the Sega Mega Drive sold. The British company Blaze, released in 2009 a new variant of the console.
Motherboard Sega Mega Drive – Photo © Bill Bertram (Pixel8) 2008 Creative Commons