???? – 1996retired
32X
“Project Mars never quite landed, but it gave the Genesis a brave, brief boost.”
“160 times the space, and it used some of it to play full-motion video. We loved it anyway.”
The Sega CD, known as the Mega-CD in most regions outside North America and Brazil, was a CD-ROM add-on for the Sega Genesis, released in Japan on December 12, 1991 and reaching North America on October 15, 1992. Built with JVC, it added a faster CPU and a custom graphics chip for sprite scaling and rotation, and could play audio CDs and CD+G discs besides. The great promise was storage — CDs offered roughly 160 time
Sega redesigned the hardware several times and even licensed it out, with Pioneer and Aiwa selling home audio products that doubled as Sega CD game machines. But the run wound down in 1996, when the add-on was quietly discontinued. It left behind a memory of an era when expanding your console meant parking a CD drive next to it — and it never stopped playing your music CDs, either.
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“Project Mars never quite landed, but it gave the Genesis a brave, brief boost.”
“Product of the Year 1993, gone by 1996 — even Time can't save you from a price tag.”
“The first 64-bit system, if you were willing to meet it halfway”