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What could be considered the start of Sega's downfall, the Mega CD. Sega noticed the huge potential within the new CD format (As did several other companies) and having become the first real challenge for Nintendo to overcome, it was time to take on the big boys. NEC's TurboGrafx-16, which had a huge budget above and beyond Sega and Nintendo's and was quite advanced for it's time. This move was somewhat short-sighted of Sega of Japan however, because outside of Japan the TurboGrafx-16/PC-Engine was having a miserable time, so a direct competitor to it just seemed to be a waste of time.
It was originally going to be upgraded, allow for more colours, to truly rival the SNES but the idea was cast aside, a shame because more power might have sold the Mega-CD a bit more. It also supported music CD playing as well as CD+G, which in laymans terms is the earliest version of DVD, it's not particularly good though. The Mega CD's abilities were focussed around it's ability to play live action movies, and the ability to create games which interacted with those movies. Despite being a technical marvel at this, it unfortunately didn't sell the console at all and Sega would have been better off marketing it's massively increased storage space to third parties and obtaining a larger software base than focus only on the consumer's want for movie-gaming (Which fizzled out soon after anyway) due to the use of pre-rendered graphics for cut-scenes and in same cases in-game backdrops. The Mega CD I used a motorised tray as the disc door to insert the discs, with two lights on the front with "Ready" and "Access" on them, lighting up when the console was powering on or loading from the disc. These same lights were used on several hybrids such as the Wondermega, but never made it onto the Mega CD II. It connected to the side of the Mega Drive and sat underneath it, making any Mega Drive II look a bit out of place. The bios screen for this model was 1.0 a planet rotating with the Sega logo. Specifications CPU The main CPU is a 12.5-MHz 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor. The Mega Drive/Genesis has the same processor, but at a lower clock rate of 7.67 MHz (NTSC) / 7.61 MHz (PAL). Graphics Graphics Processor: Custom ASIC Number of simultaneous colors on screen: 64 out of 512 Display resolution: 320 x 224 pixels and 256 x 224, video size from ¼ to full screen Advanced compression scheme Software-based upgrade RAM Main RAM: 6 Mbit PCM samples: 512 Kbit CD-ROM data cache: 128 Kbit 64 Kbit Internal Backup RAM The Mega-CD also features sprite enhancement effects such as scaling and rotation, similar to that of the Super Famicom/SNES Mode 7. However Sega initially refused to allow developers access to the software required to take advantage of these features, partially leading to the system's downfall. Storage 500 MB CD-ROM discs (equivalent to 62 min of audio data) ¼ screen B/W footage video: 1.5 to 4 hours ¼ screen color footage: 45 minutes CD-ROM drive transfer rate: 150 Kbytes/s (1x) BIOS Size: 1 MBit Used for games, CD player, CD+G and karaoke Access time: 800 ms |
Bios Videos 
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