I’ve had one for a few years now.
It’s a 16-bit Sega Mega Drive and dates from about 1991.
The games are on cartridges and I have Sonic the Hedgehog
and Italia 90, Rambo, Columns and Super Hang-on.
I was wondering if anyone else has one and what games you have.
Can someone tell me the advantage of Sony PlayStation 2 games being run on a 128-bit processor as opposed to the 16-bit Mega Drive. What does it mean about the game speed when the processor can deal with a higher number of bits?
A clarification: What was released as the Mega Drive in Asia and Europe was called the Sega Genesis in the United States, just to allow more people to respond to you.
I never had one, since my brother and I had an 8-bit Nintendo NES and graduated to the 16-bit Super NES. It seemed like you were either from a Nintendo family or a Sega family back then.
Basically, games for the next-generation systems can be bigger, faster, louder, longer… more complex stories, more involved game play, better graphics and sound. CDs can hold much more information than cartridges, which is why all the next-gen systems have CD-based games.
But you can’t go wrong with some of the NES and SNES classics, and even Genesis/Mega Drive had some great games like Strider and the Sonic series.
I have two Geneses (?), two 32Xs, and a Sega CD, but I don’t think any of them work anymore. IIRC, the games I still have are Sonic 1/2/3, NBA Jam, and Mortal Kombat 1/2. I’ve also had Taz-Mania and Eternal Champions in the past.
“Number of bits” comparisons didn’t mean very much back in the 16-bit days, and they mean even less now.
If a processor is advertised as “128 bit”, that means one or more of the following:[ul][li]The processor can read and write 16 bytes from memory (or other I/O) at once.[/li][li]The processor can do numerical operations on 128 bit numbers.[/li][li]The processor can hold 128 bit numbers in its onboard registers.[/ul][/li]The PS2’s CPU also runs at about 20 times the clock speed of the Genesis’s (~300 MHz vs. ~16 MHz), and because the design is so different, it can do a lot more work than the Genesis CPU in a single clock cycle. The CPU in the Genesis is a boring old Motorola 68000, the same chip you might find in an old Mac, but the PS2’s Emotion Engine was designed specially for the PS2.
Incidentally, you can get all the old Sonic games for GameCube now.
Dealing with a higher number of bits means the processor takes less cycles to deal with the same data. A 128bit processor can process 128bits of data in one cycle, a 16bit processor would take 8 cycles, or 8 times as long (if the speed was the same)
Ah, the Genesis. What a great machine. It also had a z80 processor (same processor the Sega Master System used, I believe) to handle the sound, if I’m not mistaken.
No, I didn’t have one, but several of my friends did (and still do). I kinda wish I had bit the the bullet and picked one up–that system had far too many great games.
Ah, many’s the summer evening I spent at my friends house playing Mortal Kombat on his Mega Drive. After a while, we were too bored with trying to finish the game and learning the special moves, so we would spend hours perfecting Scorpion’s “Getoverhere! Excellent” combination.
Oh HELL Yea! We still have and love our Genesis. (Wish I could say the same for the Sega CD.) My Nephew still gets with his friends and brings home games for the thing. I do not think he has spent more than 3 bucks apiece for the carts. It’s always great fun for me as an adult to sit with the Teenagers and have something in common with them. Great Family thing our Genesis.
Yeah! I love my sega megadrive! (Prefer it to my playstation and my brothers x-box).
I have Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic and Tails, and some golfing game, oh, and something which is basically Tekken.
I really only play Sonic though. Now I wish that it wasn’t about 120 miles away… still just 3 weeks until I go home for Christmas and then I can play Sonic until my hands hurt!
turbot How right you are! Panic on Funkotron surely sucked so hard that the vaccum created at Sega of America still pulls in unsuspecting strangers to this day.
Has anyone yet played the sequel available on (?)XBox.
