Sega was founded in 1940 by Martin Bromley, Irving Bromberg
and James Humpert, in Honolulu, Hawaii. In 1965 Rosen Enterprises merges with
Service Games to create Sega Enterprises. In 1968, Sega had its first smash
hit; the submarine simulator Periscope. Sega aims to develop the first proper
home console in Japan.
Sega released their first home console, the SG-1000, a
cartridge-based home video game console, also called the Mark I. The console
featured specs superior to most consoles, however it was not successful compared
to others. Initially Sega released this console for Japan in 1983, then they
exported the console to Europe and Australia in 1985, in attempt to expand the
market.
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| Figure 1 - Sega SG-1000 console |
Then Mark II was released, a remodeled version using
gamepads instead of joysticks, which also had a keyboard attachment slot
available, and 47 unique games were released.
The SG-1000 had an 8-bit, 3.58 MHz NEC 780C processor, 2KB
RAM, 16KB video RAM and 256x192 pixel resolution. It was capable of displaying
16 colors and 32 sprites per scene. It used ROM cartridge, cassette tape, or
Sega card game storage. A Texas Instruments SN76489 sound processor was used to
create a 4 channel mono sound.
Although it sold 2 million units worldwide, the launch of
the SG-1000 was not successful. Reasons for this include the more advanced
hardware of the Famicom, which was released on the same day by Nintendo, and
the North American video game crash of 1983.
The SG-1000 failed to capture the market share that Sega had
been aiming for, which lead to the creation of the Sega Mark III, a revision of
the console with improved video hardware and an increased amount of RAM.
Bibliography:
Wikipedia.org, (2015). SG-1000. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SG-1000
[Accessed 7 March 2015]
Segaretro.org, (2015). SG-1000. [online] Available at: http://segaretro.org/SG-1000 [Accessed
7 March 2015]
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