Kyle Orland reviews through Ars Technica: Even large Sega followers can be forgiven for not being too accustomed to the Sega AI Laptop. In spite of everything, the often obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro contains solely the barest stub of an info web page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 {hardware}. Fortunately, the parents on the self-described “Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism” web site SMS Energy have been in a position to go a bit deeper. The positioning’s not too long ago posted deep dive on the Sega AI Laptop contains an unimaginable quantity of well-documented info on this historic oddity, together with ROMs for dozens of beforehand unpreserved items of software program that may now be partially run on MAME. […]
Whereas the final existence of the Sega AI Laptop has been recognized in sure circles for some time, detailed details about its workings and software program was extraordinarily laborious to come back by, particularly within the English-speaking world. That started to alter in 2014 when a uncommon Yahoo Auctions itemizing provided a boxed AI Laptop together with 15 items of software program. The positioning was in a position to crowdfund the successful bid on that public sale (which reportedly ran the equal of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and extra software program from the winner of a 2022 public sale.
SMS Energy notes that almost all of the software program it has uncovered “had zero details about them on the Web previous to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photographs or scans of precise software program.” Now, the positioning’s neighborhood has taken the difficulty to protect all these ROMs and create a brand new MAME driver that already permits for “partial emulation” of the system (which does not but embrace a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation assist).
That dumped software program is all “academic and principally geared toward children,” SMS Energy notes, and is laden with Japanese textual content that may make it laborious for a lot of foreigners to even tinker with. Which means this long-lost emulation launch in all probability will not set the MAME world on hearth as 2022’s shock dump of Marble Insanity II did. Nonetheless, it is notable how a lot effort the neighborhood has put in to fill a previously black gap in our understanding of this nook of Sega historical past. SMS Energy’s write-up of its findings is effectively price a full look, as is the positioning’s large Google Drive, which is stuffed with documentation, screenshots, photographs, contemporaneous articles and adverts, and way more.
