10 Amazing Sega Mega CD Facts
Вставка
- Опубліковано 24 тра 2024
- In this episode of Amazing Facts I take a look some fascinating trivia surrounding the failed Sega Mega CD add-on.
Video Links:
Sega Mega CD2 Review - • Sega Mega CD 2 - Revie...
10 Amazing Sega 32X Facts: • 10 Amazing Sega 32X Facts
Story of the Sega Neptune - • The Story of the Unrel...
5 Cancelled Sega Consoles - • The Story Of: 5 Cancel...
5 Rare Sega Consoles - • The Story of: 5 Rare &...
5 Obscure Sega Consoles - • The Story of 5 Obscure...
Mega Drive 1 & 2 Comparison - • Sega Mega Drive - Mode...
Sega Mega CD Games - • Over 100 Sega Mega CD ...
Sega Mega CD Exclusives - • 10 Amazing Sega Mega C...
10 Amazing Mega Drive Facts - • 10 Amazing Sega Mega D...
Support my creative work on Patreon: / lairdslair
#sega #segagenesis #segamegadrive - Ігри
Love the aesthetic of the model 1. Has a real early 90's hi-fi look to it.
Sega cd and its non fmv games were quite good- sonic cd, third world war, shining force etc. They should have kept it and scrapped the 32x.
Agreed.
Yeah, it had potential but SEGA was focusing on the wrong thing (FMV).
I think the opposite, they should have doubled down on the 32x and scrapped the Saturn. Focus on squeezing the last bit of life out of the Genesis ecosystem until they could launch a console to smash the PlayStation much as Sony dropping the PS2 later did the Dreamcast.
@@mikeg2491There's no scenario where the 32x saves Sega. The Saturn is actually MORE powerful than PS1. The problem is the power was focused on sprite based games instead of 3D which was the hype at the time. Proven by the best of the era and more arcade accurate Capcom fighters are on Saturn and not PS.
its true, we miss SEGA so much🥲
I would think that the head of governments would have more important things to do than looking at video games.
The think-of-the-children crowd demands that the government does "something" about it.
Politicians like to virtue signal
CLEARLY YOU ARE NOT THINKING OF THE CHILDREN
(I'm kidding)
They do this every ten years or so. The "concern" is really a ruse to allow the government more power over something they don't have complete control of.
Just in the headlines today: The victims' families from horrifically tragic Uvalde Texas school mass shooting filed a lawsuit against Activision/Call of Duty for their endorsement deal with the manufacturer of the exact assault rifle the shooter used to blow away children and teachers. The gun manufacturer and Meta are also being sued.
It is a potentially historic legal case.
Those stodgy lawmakers could not have imagined the scenario in this new case.
This console has a lot of good games, but everyone focuses on FMVs (a bit like battery consumption for the Game Gear), which is a shame. 6 Mega CD / 32X games, Surgical Strike 🤗.
Agreed!
Snatchers, Sonic CD and Final Fight CD, couldn't be bettered!!!!!
4:08 besides the fact Sega wanted to put it on the MegaDrive, after the launch of the MegaDrive, scaling, ecaling and rotation
Sega of america, we beat nintendo who can beat us !?
Sega of japan, we can...and we will !
Going into this video without really caring about the sega cd. Lets go
Yeah I'm not missing out 😁
Well, I hope you still found it interesting.
May God have mercy on their souls for creating full motion video games. I never cared for them or even bought one back then. I just shook my head at this decision. Now years later it seems common place to look at FMV games and ask why. It’s like saying “ No video game fans you don’t know what you like, we will tell you what you should like.”
Never regretted getting a mega cd.. Sonic CD, Jaguar XJ220 and Thunderhawk made it worthwhile alone
I especially loved Jaguar XJ220, played that so much with my next door neighbour in split-screen mode.
Not to mention pretty great Ecco the Dolphin and Dune ports.
I also loved mine but had some questionable taste as a kid lol. I really loved playing Dracula, Sewer Shark and Road Rash CD in addition too the actually good games like Sonic and Final Fight.
Imagine the GX4000 won the poll - "2 amazing facts..."
You really know your shiz thanks for your work mate
Your support is much appreciated!
Laird's dedication is remarkable. He even played Earnest Evans for video footage. That's true suffering for your art.
The original PC engine CD add-on was the CD-ROM² the Super CD-ROM² is something different. There are games that are made for super CD ROM which won't run on the original CD-ROM², which is why they released the super system card as a way to upgrade the CD-ROM² without having to buy a new CD drive.
I am well aware, I have talked about this in other videos. This video is about the Mega CD, I didn't want to go into the PCE CD in great detail here.
The problem with the mega CD is that it took away vital resources from skilled developers who could have been working on cartridge games that would have boosted the main platform.
Great video as always :-) Love my Mega CD and it genuinely felt like the future of gaming on release. Keep up the awesome work!
Core design were the best developer on Mega CD. I loved thunderhawk so much and used to replay it time and time again. Still listen to their games soundtracks 😅
Couldn't agree more, they rocked it!
Plus, game arts and malibu.
It was also disappointing that the powerful sampled audio hardware went woefully underutilized in favor of rater lackluster Redbook audio streamed from the discs with sound effects generally just using the old FM and PSG chips on the main unit.
Both the Ricoh of the sega cd and 32x q sound were all hardly used.
A part of me has wondered what might have happened if more cart games utilised 'mode 1'.
So instead of 'native enhanced ports', a regular cartridge game would just initialise the Mega CD, check for a disc and load any 'enhancements' from there.
So far I've only seen this used in some rom hacks/homebrew to allow for CDDA, but I wouldn't be surprised if more couldn't have been done e.g. extra levels.
Especially svp chip if they never abandoned it.
I think the Sega CD had a ton of untapped potential.
Considering it had its own CPU and RAM, it might have been a better idea to launch it as a standalone console like the Wondermega right from the start. That could've also allowed them to get around some of the restrictions of the Genesis, like the limited colours and palettes. With proper engineering they could've handled Genesis compatibility using the hardware in the Sega CD, eliminating redundancy, dependencies, and bottlenecks.
They could have partnered with some retailers to offer a deal where you trade in your Genesis and get a discount on the new Genesis/CD units and a free game (since CDs are so cheap), then sell the traded-in Genesis as refurbished consoles as a super cheap option instead of manufacturing more Genesis units.
Yeah, how hard can it be to have a switch or a memory region where the palette has more bits per color channel? 68k only uses every 4th clock to access memory. Apparently, this “use” is wrong. It starts access there, but needs two to complete. Still, as for 6502 (on pcEngine), memory is idle half of the time. Amiga and Atari used this to interleave video and audio DMA. Genesis could interleave a second CPU and the first would not notice.
How does TAS work? I think that it is an atomic read modify write instruction. Just 68k is too late to announce that it needs the bus one more cycle. So a custom chip would need to detect the opcode reads from both 68k (there is an out-pin for this), check for the TAS opcode and then halt the other CPU for one wait state. 68k maps all unknown OpCodes to NOP. So the custom chip could do other fun stuff.
The Sega CD is probably my all time favorite console, but also the reason why I finally left SEGA as a fan after 8 crazy years. I remember other kids shelling out 300 bucks for this criminally underused albatross, hoping to get arcade super scalar, 3D graphics, rotation, and all of the other cool features that no other machine had.
We were out almost 500 bucks for the whole machine before SoJ demanded that it be turned into Devastator with the 32X.
Some kids were now out over $700 for the whole tower of power, powerstrip, etc, and now SEGA comes whistletoning downtown, telling us we have to blow another $400 for the Saturn?!
SONY demos their upcoming "2 99" and shows off games pushing 3D limits right out of the box! The Console Wars were already over. Everyone was tired of SEGA's antics. Four years later, when SEGA had a superPS1 and SONY had their superSaturn, SONY still won because developers, retailers, casual gamers, game shop salesmen, the press, and enthusiasts could all remember getting raked over the coals during the early 90s.
4:18 typo lol. Interesting video that highlights an important stage of the storage media evolution. I give credit to sega, they never stopped trying - until they did. Love your channel.
Can't try while bankrupt
I like that part when it turns out that prototype sega CD’s with it’s cd drive werent designed with data seeking games in mind as it turns out those CD drives were originally only ment for digital audio signals,
I also do like that part where you explain that the sega CD could do both sprite scaling and background scaling trough hardware and all atonce, as opposed to the snes wich could only scale 1 background at low resolution and it cannot do sprite scaling at all, and with that said evemtroygh i hate to say it but i have to admit as a snes fan that the snes is sadly not the best 2D system, so sega was really ahead for it’s time with the sega CD.
I'm not a materialistic person but before I die I really want a Sega CD again. I don't need a Lambo. I just want to relive my childhood one last time. Wonder Dog, Rise of the Dragon, Sewer Shark and Batman Returns. Oh sonic CD was really good as well. I played Luna to death too. Really good version of Streets of Rage. Silphead was fun as hell.
Thanks for this video. Sega CD is my 3rd favorite system (behind PS1 and Switch) and it's always nice to see it given attention. And yes, I know it's technically an add-on, but it truly felt like it's own thing.
Well you had the Wondermega and CDX and they were standalone consoles so it definitely counts.
CDX was my favorite of all time, though I had just the G1 Genny + CD. Tragic. That Sega didn't just make a bunch of games for the Sega CD that would utilize the SVP and 128KB of RAM in Virtua Racing.
Great video! Love your channel
I love my JVC X’Eye. The only downside to it is the 32X sits too low to use with the 32X CD games.
The Sega CD can use both 68000 CPU at the same time? Are you certain? Which game did this?
But thank you for highlighting the secrecy and apathy that doomed the Sega CD - it's a story that keeps getting left out, and just one video like this reaches a larger audience than all of our posts on the subject.
That's my understanding from what I read online, I couldn't tell you what games do though. I'd suspect the Core Design scaler titles as likely candidates.
@@TheLairdsLair I used to write some of those posts, and it's something I wish I could take back. Everything I've since been told by the homebrew community and developers back in the day says that it was limited to a single 68000 at a time.
Another issue that was brought to my attention was that games like Dragon's Lair and Batman Returns had to be limited to 16 colors to get their results. It seems the Sega CD is the rare system where the technology is both underrated and overrated.
That said, the Jaguar racing game is doing the scaling entirely in software, according to the developer's website. I wish I knew what happened with Road Rash...
@@TheLairdsLair [The fundamental problem is that the system doesn't support shared memory access. In other words, both processors can't use the same chunks of memory simultaneously. They could run the same code (provided a copy was made in two different regions of RAM), but they can't really operate on the same data set at a time.]
From what I'm reading, the CD CPU sends data to the Genesis CPU for display, but it's nothing like the 32X or modern computers.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633so the second CPU could scale sprites and write them to VRAM? So you mean that Sega nerfed the TAS instruction of the 68k?
Mega-CD was an incredible add-on for the Mega Drive, in my opinion, but not fairly handled in terms of publicity or exploration of its capabilities, with ups and downs in its strategies. Of course, it is dated when the considering the FMV games, but enhanced the gaming in Mega Drive in ways that could, indeed, win over the competition. I've played some of the Mega-CD games here in Brazil long time ago, played again some more with the emulation, and I still admire the effort Sega has put into it. Too bad that the Super Scaler arcade games haven't had proper adaptations in the system until the arrival of the 32X... Instead, After Burner III came in the first years and was a disappointment. Probably the game programming didn't know how to handle the juggernaut of two Motorolas 68000. Good to see the stages with scaling effects on certain other games, though, and to see how high was its potential. But I wish it could have been more explored in the Mega-CD...
Well said. I 100% agree.
Plus, the genesis vdp and sega asic chip. Only Malibu, game arts and core knew how to operate this add-on.😊
Add-ons have a history of not exactly selling on par with their main system, that being said at least the Sega CD wasn't a complete failure when compared to the 32x, but I am surprised nobody asked the chief designer of this add-on why would anyone choose to view video on the Sega CD when it looked worse than watching video on a VHS tape? Take a look at Rebel Assault to see how much better it looked on PC, than on the Sega CD...and on a separate note there will always be a "What if".....if more developers sought to take advantage of the capabilities of the machine like Core Design did.....if Capcom decided to release Super Streetfighter 2 on the Sega CD instead of Final fight...
It’s a shame when I was a kid back then seeing the mega cd was like wow in my little head I thought we would get all the great Sega arcade super scaler and other arcade games but was met with disappointment but still we did get some great games
The saddest amazing fact about the Sega CD for me:
I had it in my possession for two months in 1994 and didn't have a single game that was worth playing ( some crappy space rail shooter was it)... The way I ended up with it, was my University Dorm(floor) mate had got himself in debt (this was long before legal online sports gambling) with a bookie for making too many bad bets on NCAA and NFL football games. He asked me to borrow approximately the retail value of the Sega CD in 1994.. I knew he had the unit, and I wisely told him that if he gave me the Sega CD as collateral I would indeed loan him the money to pay the most pressing part of his debt to the bookie. He got his debts settled and paid me back on my personal loan within 60 days ( that is the happy part of the story, he was a good guy, I did not want to see him get knuckles busted with a hammer 😂). But I was not aware of an on campus rental shop that rented Sega CD games. And did not have a car on campus at that point. So i never played a single good game for it!!!
Your studies thank you for not playing any good games instead of cracking the books! :D
I would have bought the sega cd if I was an adult in 1992. But I was a 7th grader and no way I could get my parents to spend $300 on an add on.
OK here is for the kids from this era, how was the feeling of the Sega CD back in 1992?., it was totally cutting edge, only the most powerful PCs of the time were the "multimedia CD-rom" ones, before windows 95 made multimedia accesible, but why if it was so cutting edge it died too soon?., well it is like the PS VR from Playstation, at launch it surprises but as the time goes by it can´t keep on surprising so in the eyes of gamers it doesn´t exist anymore or it starts to feel old, that is what happened with Sega CD, in 93 better PC games, arcades, the 3DO and Jaguar appeared and were the new thing, and the Sega CD was kinda old news, kinda what is happening with the Steam Deck, but for a brief time, 1991-1993 the Sega CD wow us on the magazines and was totally cutting edge, FMV games really died with the Playstation (ps1) by that time the technology was old and there were better games
Oh yeah, totally, when my neighbour bought one on launch day I was blown away by it - Cobra Command especially. Very few times in my life I have been totally blown away by a new system like I was that day.
@@TheLairdsLair Joe Montana Football looked incredible to me at the time and now looks almost like abstract art LOL.
I loved sewer shark
Which led to the genesis aging reputation in 1994.
I got into an argument in elementary school with some teacher hyping how their new McIntosh computers could do Full Motion Video and I said “my Sega cd can do that!” and she chastised me saying, “ oh not like this”
SEGA's "in your face" advertising has not aged well. I absolutely hate the commercials I've seen here, print and video.
Yeah, I agree, it's pretty cringe these days, but that "in your face" stuff was all the rage in the 90s.
I like it... as a time capsule/nostalgia.
Sadly the CD32 stomped all over all these systems but was never marketed by Commodore :( Capable of FMV easily, silky smooth locked 60fps on all these games the Mega CD and 32X with CD struggled with. Oh, what could have been
I remember seeing the commercial for sherlock Holmes consulting detective for the tg 16 cd and was blown away. The price was like 500 or something if i remember right. Anyway, i bought the sega cd on launch day at Sears for like 320 including tax (i think). Its still my favorite system to this day.
I really really regret life forcing me to sell my collection....
The mega cd, after my Saturn was my favourite system!
So misunderstood and generally thought of as an awful FMV system
My dad got me it in 93 for £275
...most luckiest 11 year old ever.
My next door neighbour got one at launch, he parents were loaded and would buy him anything he wanted pretty much.
@@TheLairdsLairI was lucky like that too... although I think my dad drew the limit at the NeoGeo 😂.
Sadly he passed away January 2nd this year and I'm his only heir... so...as I sit here watching your vids in his house on his TV- deemed now my house; it feels very strange as once upon a time I sat on the floor playin with my "tower of power" before school - for which I now send my daughter to the very same school....
Weird weird feeling times and I miss my collection.
Very sorry to hear that dude, I bet my wife can relate, as she is an only child and we now live in her mother's home after she passed away last year. She too had a Mega Drive growing up!
@@TheLairdsLair bless
... just finished watching "my retro life" channel; a channel about his dad who video recorded everything to do with games who passed away in 2007 - boy for some reason that drew a tear; a happy tear, but tear all the same....
Anyway, after you and retro life, onto patmanQ than battle of the ports!
Analog made the Sega/Mega CD add-on compatible with their Mega SG FPGA clone console, out of the box. There is a slot on the underside of the device, just like the Genesis/Mega Drive, as well as a pad to raise the unit to proper height. It looks silly on any model CD unit, but it works with no modifications, unlike the 32X add-on. This means a real CD unit could be used with a native HDMI output to a modern TV.
11:48: "Scent of a Woman" is such a revolting name for that movie, I sure don't want to smell no women!!
Sega should have fully committed to the Mega CD as their next gen system: the CDX or Multimega could have been a success especially if they had not offered the bulkier upgrade at all.
They should've had it go against the cdi, neo geo and neo geo cd high end gaming market as its own console.
As a launch Genesis, and launch SegaCD and launch 32X owner my biggest gripe remains with the internet's persistence that add-ons were stand alone consoles. As a Genesis owner I was glad to purchase the Sega CD instead of a SNES in 1992. I could play my Genesis games and new Sega CD games from the same TV without figuring out multiple hookups. When the 32X came around in late 1994 I was hungry for more. I shopped and played the very expensive 3DO, and more expensive Jaguar, and ended up choosing the 32X for it's launch lineup alone.
The promise of the 32X and SegaCD being used together was not a down point. If Sega marketed, in 1994, that SegaCD was being dumped in favor of 32X I would have dumped Sega then and there. I had already seen the Master System demolished in the US by Nintendo's anti-competitive marketing.
The Sega CD's second 12.5Mhz 68k and custom Graphics Co-Processor along with two SH-2 CPUs in the 32X and a new VDP with none of the Genesis' color limitations was actually delivered. I just wish more games used the Sega CD and 32X simultaneously, much less to their fullest.
I guess I lucked out when I got my Sega CD, it was 1996 and it was about done on the market so the unit and all the games I bought were heavily discounted. Wish I could have gotten Snatcher though, I never saw it anywhere for sale.
Oooh...I had to step away from System Shock for a minute. This was the perfect video to do that with. Fantastic coverage as always but this one has me a bit perplexed....
The Motorola 68K in the Genesis wasn't fast enough for rotation and scaling? That doesn't make any sense. At the time of the Sega CD's release 3rd parties were utilizing software scaling for Genesis games and that had to be more taxing on the CPU than using a chip (ASCII) to do all the work for it right?! At least I would think it would. Also how did NEC pull it off without using extra hardware (minus the RAM)? I know the PC Engine Super CD ROM ROM had a few games that scaled, rotated, ect... It's crazy man. Was it just down to architecture differences?
Not just the new graphics chip, it also had to drive the CD-ROM, which is very CPU intensive, which is why a lot of later CD consoles had a separate chip just to deal with the CD drive.
There is some good discussion about this in other comments.
US adverts were so obnoxious back then
I have trouble thinking of the Sega CD as a failure. It did just about as well as it probably could have in terms of sales. Sure there could have been better games. More super scalers. more arcade hits and third party titles, but I doubt that would have sold more Sega CDs. Multiple companies took a crack at the cd based console idea and didn't do better or much better. The Playstation was the first to really take the industry to the next level and that was done mostly on the power of its 3D hardware. the CD medium was just a convenience.
The SEGA 32X i think came up for many reasons, many wrong reasons, one must have been the FX chip of the Snes, which sega made the SVP chip but they might have found it too expensive, i mean they had to sell 100 dollar games to make even, might be cheaper just to make an add-on with cheaper cartridges, the main difference of the Sega CD and 32x is that the sega CD came at a time when it was perceived as total cutting edge, the 32x on the other hand came at a very WRONG time and was considered like a minor comment or something, the eyes of the world were on PCs, the launch of the Saturn and Playstation, nintendo´s answer and the new arcades, 16-bit consoles were totally old stuff in 1994 and the 32x just wasn´t relevant at all, was kinda considered more of the same, just more megadrive in a time were the megadrive was very old
Both CPU's could not be used together to run the same code. So every traditional 2D game on the Sega CD Sonic CD, Final Fight CD etc. is just a Genesis game taking advantage of the CD audio and storage.
Absolutely inefficient and a horribly designed add-on. Should and could have had a similar add-on out for $100 less with 90% of the exact same software released.
Sega CD still has a bunch of good/great games but the design ruined it's chances of catching on with a casual audience.
Overbuilding of the sega cd made the add-on fail.
It sucks so hard the wonder mega don't hook up with the 32.X
The pc engine cd is the only add on for consoles I can think of that could be considered a success.
Was it though? It sold less than Mega CD and that was only in Japan the numbers it sold in the rest of the world were negligable. So I probably would say it was equally as much of a failure since it not only did it fail to help them survive past the generation but it mainly went in noticed in the rest of the world.
Game Genie
Only in japan. Sega cd failure in japan led to the saturn being released early in the 5th gen console.
Excellent video. There is just one problem. It is called the Sega CD not the Mega CD.
Nope, most of the world, including the people who created it called it the Mega CD, majority wins out 😉
Fair point
Gud vid 👌
Too bad my Sega CDX is broken. It was a gift for my birthday in 1994 with the game Sonic CD hehehe
But even if it was not broken, I would not sell it. I stopped to sell my old consoles.
13:52... yea and that game *which was really just 'Strike Fighter' [A different version of G-Loc] - didnt even use the sprite scaling abilities; meaning, other than the CD red book audio, the Megasis/Genedrive could of done this easily!
At least Core Design gave us Soul Star, Battle Corps and Thunderhawk to fill that void.
@@TheLairdsLair yeah totally! These games, even though I don't have my collection, I emulate almost weekly on my phone via my neogeo cd Bluetooth controller and play hella-lot!
Like I say - favourite console bar the Saturn
So 15:40 neptunecd32x?
Pretty sure the mega modem predates the mega CD by like 2 or 3 years
does anyone know where the song from the video intro is from.
The Atari Lynx version of STUN Runner
@@TheLairdsLair wow that's a game i haven't heard in ages. Thanks for answering my question.
Did you forget about the Aiwa CSD-G1M unit ?
Nope, there just wasn't room for it in the video, likewise the karaoke unit.
My launch Sega CD went through like 4 drives in the time I had it back then.
The second 68k wasn't added because the main was too slow
That makes 0 sense as the cpu in pcengine is by far slower a 68k is plenty fast to run cdrom i can mention many computers that used 68000 amiga being 1
You clearly didn't understand that segment properly, it wasn't just because of the added CD-ROM it was because there was also the new graphics chip (scaling/rotation) and FMV to run too. As I said in the video, the PCE CD added no extra hardware capabilities.
What funny is md+ roms replace sega cd now
When I finally got one I was 13 towards the end of 93 it was right after the model 2 released with sewer shark and it was a total letdown it's literally one of the worst games ever made in that era.Other than the FMV trash that was released I did have the good ones Sonic CD,Lunar,Final Fight CD,Vay,Silpheed,Mortal Kombat CD(Probably the best version).But the good games were very few maybe 10 or 12 worth owning and it was Segas first step in destroying itself truthfully It's not much better than the 32X.
Most gems never left Japan.
The PC Engine's CD-ROM expansion was actually a downgrade in every respect aside from ROM size: a large percentage of the core system's resources were taken up with operating the CD drive, making the games more primitive (and limited) than the carts / cards. I've seen interviews with the designers admitting that this was a sheer error.
And I thought the downfall of SEGA was the 32X and not the CD.
*maths
1st 😂 gr8 vid
I had it, and the 32x, it was all garbage except the genesis, and it is genesis because mega just sounds generic and lame. But 99% of the CD games were trash.
American thinking America is the only relevant marketing. Also another problem was that most gems were not released outside of Japan.