The console wars of the early 1990s had several players, but the battle that mattered was between Nintendo’s SNES and Sega’s Genesis, or Megadrive if you are European. They are both famous for their games, but in terms of software they can only run what’s on a cartridge. The Genesis has a Motorola 68000 on board though, which is capable of far more than just Sonic the Hedgehog. [EythorE] evidently thinks so, because here’s a port of Fusix, a UNIX-like OS, for the Sega platform.
As it stands, the OS is running on the BlastEm emulator, but given a Sega Saturn keyboard or a modified PC keyboard for the Sega, it could be run on real hardware. What you get is a basic UNIX-like OS with a working shell and the usual UNIX utilities. With 64k of memory to play with this will never be a powerhouse, but on the other hand we’d be curious to see it in a working cartridge.
Meanwhile, if the console interests you further, someone has been into its workings in great detail.
Header: Evan-Amos, CC BY-SA 3.0.
You mean Megadrive in the rest of the world, not just Europe. It was huge in Brazil back in the day.
Ah yes, Tec Toy.. They did a lot to support Mastersystem and Mega Drive.
There are quite some stories about it on the internet.
The company developed their own games, built their own consoles, built an online service for Mega Drive and so on.
Very interesting all in all. And not bad for such a little country. 😃👍
Brazil, little country? 🤦 You’re Merican don’t you
He definitely is, and might think that Europe is a country too.
Honestly curious to see if this will be updated to use the Mega CD addon; there is a boot mode for the addon that puts the Mega CD hardware in the address space for the rest of the Mega Drive to use from a cartridge, which means the extra 256K of RAM becomes usable
Shouldn’t be that hard to develop a cartridge with two or more megabytes of SRAM and little flash with a first-stage bootloader that reads a second-stage bootloader from an SD card into memory. The mapper would be dead simple, just swap out the flash for the SRAM, it is not needed after boot anymore.
And the SD card could either be bitbanged or, if one wants to get fancy, attached to some parallel to serial 74-type TTL or better.
I am not a MD dev but a quick glance on the cartridge port and the memory map my educated guess would be a cheap flash with 16 bit access that, as said, can be swapped for four megabytes of SRAM. Use the /DATA line/address space for our IO needs on the cart.
Huh? That’s not what I was talking about, I was talking about Mode 1, where the Mega Drive runs normally but can access the Mega CD freely. You get another 256KB RAM and a second, faster 68000 CPU. It doesn’t require custom hardware, you just need the Mega CD addon and an initialization routine in the code.
Though, in terms of hardware, I think the original Model 1 would be best for this, since it has a serial port that was removed from later revisions…
Thing for me is hardware availability, a normal MD can easily be found for pocket money and most enthusiasts will have one or three floating around in storage. A MCD on the other hand will cost you an arm and a leg if you don’t happen to have one.
So a rather inexpensive cart that one can make at home with some memory and a bit of TTL on it seems like the solution to make the MD a proper home computer for everyone who wants one. Stems from my credo regarding retro, retro should be there for everyone and not only the ones with deep pockets.
Oh, well iirc some of the modern flash carts provide Mega CD emulation via FPGAs inside them, to allow for playing Mega CD games without the addon, or to take advantage of Mode 1 games. And I think one of them supported connecting to the expansion port used by the Mega CD as well… Terra Onion was it?
A repro Mega CD module would be a nifty hardware project, and I do like the concept of sticking with “official” hardware to push this OS further.
You can easily expand the ram by using on cart ram. It would require making custom carts for the OS though….maybe a fun challenge in it self 😂.
Read my reply to Techokami above yours. ;)
Assumedly an april fools joke? Picked up late by hackaday. The github is from april 1st
It’s not “Genesis, or Megadrive if you are European” It’s “Megadrive, or Genesis if you are from the USA”. Megadrive was the official name worldwide, and Genesis was a regional name, and can’t say otherwise since Sega is a Japanese company so the Megadrive was not developed in the US.
That makes sense, but maybe we must keep in mind that HaD is an US site with an US audience.
From their point of view, there was Sega America, with the Sega Genesis being a very important thing in their best time in history.
In addition, the Genesis also was very American by character.
It was bulky, fast, cool and cutting-edge at the time.
So the wording is the very understandable, I think.
I mean, me as a German wouldn’t tell them that the fridge, car, telephone, light bulb and the computer are all German inventions, even if it was true.
That would not only be unpolite of me but also demolish their self-esteem.
I’d be kinda mean if I did that. Especially on an US site.. Oops.
And in the end, by heart, the Genesis indeed was more of a property by the US than Japan.
The Americans truely loved the Genesis, whereas the Japanese Mega Drive never had been as much of a super star in its home land.
In fact, Sega Japan did sort of kill-off the MD/Genesis against the saying of Sega America,
because the mother company primarily cared about sales in Japan.
Reminds me of pop stars or actors who’re more popular in other places than in their land of origin.
As far as Europe goes.. We liked the Genesis/Mega Drive, too, I think.
It was #2, behind the Super Nintendo, I would say.
Though on a second thought, Master System and NES were still going strong in early 90s, too. Handhelds, too.
We still had 8-Bit games sold new in the department stores and toy stores, even for obscure platforms. Amiga/Atari ST games were similar.
Well, at least in my country, which basically was in the middle of Europe.
I forgot, I hadn’t mentioned places like Australia, S. Africa, Iceland and New Zealand. Or Switzerland. Etc.
Being PAL countries, I think they can feel being part of team Europe. :)
Buddy, Switzerland I S Europe, and you are assigning countries from different continents to Europe because they share PAL system? ))
Hi! I do so in terms of classic video games only, I’d say.
Switzerland is independent/neutral, I think. It’s always a bit special, too.
But yes, it’s in Europe geographically, though.
On good ol’ NES, the territories were split in three regions: PAL-A, PAL-B and NTSC (see NES lock-out chip, CIC)
Then there also was the original Famicom that was technical related,
which had existed in NTSC version (Japan) and some rare PAL version(s). Hong Kong etc.
The Sega Gen.. MD had offered an even finer region system, depending on how we look at it.
There was PAL and NTSC, but also US vs Japan vs EU and 50Hz/60Hz in terms of the region detection used by games.
There also was TMMS on some models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#History
https://segaretro.org/TradeMark_Security_System
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/why-switzerland-doesn-t-want-to-join-the-european-union/47391050
Historically, customs such as use of metric systems and AC standard (50 Hz/60 Hz and 110v/220v) and video standards (PAL/SECAM/NTSC) were sort of an indicator of political relationship between countries.
Brazil in South America is weird in this aspect, though.
It’s like a cross between North America and Europe.
It’s PAL but in a weird version in 60 Hz and with 525 lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-M
Yes, but they could simply say “Genesis, or Megadrive if you are from outside the US” and that would be perfectly fine ;-)
I know, but same time I think they’re being quite tolerant already.
Too much already, maybe. Asking for even more is going too far, maybe.
As an outsider from another continent I sometimes think that this nation
is living through some sort of mental crisis right now that what it needs is its (old) self-esteem again, before it snaps.
And that kind of optimism of the past. Or optimism of a bright future, rather. Just think about TV series like TOS or TNG..
I mean, let’s look back at the 80s and 90s, in which the US media/news press still acted as if the US was the center of the very world..
Everything was seen US-centric, mainly, in first place.
– That’s at least the impression I got from casually watching old US news on YouTube.
In the late 90s and the 2000s, maybe also due to the rise of Internet, that nation (its people) got more aware of what’s being happening outside.
If there only wasn’t 9(11, which traumatized the country.
Considering its impact on the world it’s not good if something like this gets unstable.
Canada forgotten once again. Poor fellas