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Kyle Orland reviews by way of Ars Technica: Even large Sega followers can be forgiven for not being too aware of the Sega AI Pc. In spite of everything, the normally obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro contains solely the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 {hardware}. Fortunately, the parents on the self-described “Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism” web site SMS Energy have been capable of go a bit deeper. The positioning’s recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Pc contains an unbelievable quantity of well-documented info on this historic oddity, together with ROMs for dozens of beforehand unpreserved items of software program that may now be partially run on MAME. […]
Whereas the final existence of the Sega AI Pc has been recognized in sure circles for some time, detailed details about its workings and software program was extraordinarily laborious to come back by, particularly within the English-speaking world. That started to vary in 2014 when a uncommon Yahoo Auctions itemizing provided a boxed AI Pc together with 15 items of software program. The positioning was capable of crowdfund the profitable bid on that public sale (which reportedly ran the equal of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and extra software program from the winner of a 2022 public sale.
SMS Energy notes that almost all of the software program it has uncovered “had zero details about them on the Web previous to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photographs or scans of precise software program.” Now, the positioning’s neighborhood has taken the difficulty to protect all these ROMs and create a new MAME driver that already allows for “partial emulation” of the system (which does not but embrace a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation help).
That dumped software program is all “instructional and principally geared toward children,” SMS Energy notes, and is laden with Japanese textual content that can make it laborious for a lot of foreigners to even tinker with. Meaning this long-lost emulation launch most likely will not set the MAME world on hearth as 2022’s shock dump of Marble Insanity II did. Nonetheless, it is notable how a lot effort the neighborhood has put in to fill a previously black gap in our understanding of this nook of Sega historical past. SMS Energy’s write-up of its findings is properly price a full look, as is the positioning’s massive Google Drive, which is full of documentation, screenshots, photographs, contemporaneous articles and adverts, and rather more.
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