Sega AI
smspower.org
smspower.org
I love each of these consoles in their own way, by some combination of their own merits and my own associations of them.
The first game I ever played (or at least the first I remember) was Sonic 2, at a demo kiosk at a Canadian Tire while my mom was shopping. That's the sort of thing which sticks with you forever. At home we ended up getting an SNES, and although the SNES' highs were clearly higher than anything Sega put out, I think the average Genesis game holds up better (and it certainly has incredible gems of its own). The faster and easier to work with CPU, I think, gave devs a bit more breathing room; the FM synth has an iconic, crunchy, aggressive, alien sound that's way cooler than the canned, fuzzy, plinky soundscape of so many poorly-made SNES scores (of course, again: the best SNES soundtracks are sublime). You could put Go Straight from SoR2 on at a club now and get the dance floor going. The only thing about it that's dated badly is that it really, really could've used a richer colour palette.
As a kid I never had a Sega CD, but I did have a Windows 3.1 computer, and it feels part-and-parcel with that era of "multimedia". It's all nostalgia, but I love the grainy look of the FMV, the very particular abstract and geometric style of the CGI of the era, the metallic sheen of those digital CD soundtracks. It's got some fantastic games, too: Sonic CD is a classic, and Lunar 2 (particularly if you can read Japanese and don't need to endure everything Working Designs did to it) is, as far as I'm concerned, up there with FF6 and Chrono Trigger as a definitive 16-bit JPRG.
I of course understand why the Playstation won the 32-bit era, it's a better system than the Saturn with better games overall. But the Saturn has some absolute classics (again, Japanese knowledge helps here). It's not a system that I had much experience with at the time - except, again, for some time spent at a department store kiosk with Nights, which entranced me - but it's come to me to feel like the more interesting, mysterious machine than the Playstation.
The Dreamcast feels more like the end of the 32-bit era than the start of the next-gen: a 32-bit system with next-gen performance. To me the quintessential Dreamcast game is fast, buttery smooth, vibrant, colourful. Again, it's easy to see why the PS2 came out on top, but looking back now I see the PS2 era more as a trial run for "modern" gaming - dark, muddy, slow, clumsy versions of the sort of games we're playing now; whereas the Dreamcast was home to the absolute best of the games we were playing then.
Not sure if that's true in most places, but at least in Brazil, the Master System was incredibly popular... I don't live there anymore, but around just 10 years ago I remember seeing it still for sale (though IIRC they used a different name then - but it was clearly the same) as a low cost game console (average people just can't afford a PlayStation). I had a Master System in the late 1980's and then a Mega Drive, and really loved them both... the Mega Drive was definitely a huge upgrade from the Master System (I was upgrading to Master System from Atari, which was a similarly big upgrade). I never upgraded again, to the Saturn, just because I stopped gaming almost completely for a while (I started playing in a rock band, it was the 1990's, all the cool kids were doing it)... and I got a PC (also Windows 3.1, classic Pentium 100MHz!) and started doing my gaming on it.
It was also very popular in Europe (and Australia?) - not sure if there's any real reason for that, but the consequence of it - this [0] absolutely incredible rap by two British teenagers - makes me very glad it was.
In North America and Japan, though, Nintendo absolutely commanded the market. Basically no one had a Master System.
Back before retro consoles were really collectible, I snapped up a giant pile of SMS stuff at a thrift shop for 35 USD.
I believe it was almost my whole collection:
- SMS 1st gen - 2 controllers - Light gun - A few card games in their original boxes - ~25 cart games, most of them in original boxes, some with manuals
When I was living with a friend post-college, we would actually play it a bunch. Dreamcast and PS2 as well.
I would think people would throw good money for the same but better. I know I would.
When you order it I think it comes with 2 discs, but yeah, all the others are individual orders, unless you want to order the 17 pack of third party discs for $300.
Other things to be aware of:
1) It looks really good, like good enough to feel like you really are out under the stars in a properly blacked out room. but getting the focus just right is fiddly and very easy to knock out of focus again
2) Like any projector it works best projecting straight on. I doubt you have space in the exact center of your room to project straight up, so be prepared to accept this will be a distorted projection. You get used to it and it doesn't really ruin the effect that much, but it's disappointing at first.
3) The 3 hour timer is built in and impossible to disable to the best of my knowledge. If you want it running all night, you'll want a smart plug or a programmable timer plug that can turn off for a few minutes intermittently. I found ~5 minutes every 2.5 hours to work well. Too short and the timer doesn't seem to reset.
4) There are some really nice 3rd party discs out there too, but their sharpness and overall realism varies greatly so be cautious when ordering.
I would assume the concept is about games because all of the software available for it looks to be edutainment games. More than anything, it feels like a predecessor to Sega's lines of educational game consoles like the Pico. There seems to be an association in Sega history between it and AI and education. As the link says:
> It does have some legacy though: starting with the Mega Drive, games on Sega platforms were required to have a ROM header. If it was a game, it was designated "GM", but educational software was designated "AI".
The "computer" here might be something of a misnomer - there wasn't quite so hard a line between consoles and home computers back then, especially outside of North America. After all, the NES was known as the "Family Computer" in Japan.
I'd describe it as a gimmick because it's not clear what exactly the association with Prolog is here, particularly for the end user:
> The Prolog interpreter appears to be used by existing software to allow some form of natural language processing. It doesn't seem accessible to the end-user. [...] The Prolog interpreter is for running applications only — it cannot be used for programming.
Sega might have pushed the AI/Prolog angle because, then-as-now, AI was a hot buzzword in tech. Japan in particular had bought into the AI/Prolog thing, due to the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project [0].
If the games mostly weren't written in Prolog, and the user can't use Prolog, but AI and Prolog were trendy at the time, I think calling it the AI Prolog to tap into that hype is a bit of a gimmick.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
A few years after this, a project I was loosely involved with embedding a Prolog interpreter into a much larger system that was mostly implemented in C, just to implement a reports query language feature for a complex data model. Years later, for a very similar purpose for a rich data model, we instead exposed SQL to the power user/integrator.
(Today, you'd probably do the custom reports by making a GUI forms-based or wizard-based way of doing custom queries, or overkill it with a drag&drop visual programming language. To do NLP-ish stuff this year, you'd be shot if you didn't first try to do it with an LLM.)
I wonder if there is a connection to Japan's FGCS project which was active during that time frame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
It would make sense if Sega was involved and the activity on this "extremely rare and unknown system" was due to it being funded by research grants instead of purely commercial new product development. The FGCS was heavily invested in advancing Prolog based systems and that makes the possibility of a connection to this system even stronger.
I really want to know more about this less than 128K Prolog interpreter (it shares the ROM with the OS) running at only 5 MHz.
Which language features does it support?
How does it work?
Writing a useful Prolog interpreter for such limited hardware is quite a feat.
I kinda hope someone will extract the interpreter from the ROM and convert the machine code to readable ASM.
Which is kind of ironic when dimissing them for certain uses nowadays, on hardware that would be like super research computers for them.
Bring back the Amiga graphics.
Put the minecraft textures in 2d and it is utterly horrible, but in 3d with shadows and shaders it starts to look very good.
MAME 0.262 was just released
New systems marked not working
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Sega AI [Chris Covell, Fabio Priuli, Wilbert Pol, smspower, The Game Preservation Society]