Did We Really Witness the Potential of Sega's Tower of Power?

hello cave dwellers there are many ways of playing the Sega Mega Drive here in the cave there's the Pioneer laser active with its unique Mega Drive games on laser disk there's the amstrad Mega PC for the British approach of mashing together a PC and a console or in the same vein the IBM Terror drive for a us and Japanese collaboration or maybe you remember playing on the megatech arcade cabinets a Mega Drive based arcade that will feature on the channel soon as will the Terra Drive and I used to play one of these at my local ice rink but for most of us it would have been the plain old Mega Drive or as you Cowboys in the US call it the Genesis but the Mega Drive for the rest of the world and while these exotic ways of playing on the Sega Mega Drive were exciting many of us wouldn't have even been aware of their existence back in the day we were used to the plain old vanilla Sega Mega Drive console as it came but over time that stock Mega drive itself morphed into something different a series of wild upgrades appeared in our cataloges and magazines that our common sense told us were illc conceived but our hearts told us were lust worthy those upgrades were the Mega CD and the 32x when these upgrades were all cobbled together the slightly haphazard Contraption before you Dawn the nickname the Tower of Power it's debatable just how much additional power it actually bought to the party when compared to the competition that was appearing at the time but his objective was to take you slightly closer to the offerings that Sega now had in the arcade as we moved into the 3D era of gaming if you couldn't have 3D you were being left behind and of course there was that little game that everyone wanted a piece of at the time that PC Gamers were enjoying Doom history has taught us that this whole upgrade path was poorly thought out and it conflicted with sega's own road map for their soon to be released Sega Saturn console it was poorly supported by developers it was expensive it was not a commercial success but for some reason it lives on on in our memories as the ultimate Mega Drive setup that we never had the Christmas that never came and that's exactly why I want a tower of power here in the cave so that people can come in sit down in front of it and decide for themselves did they get off lightly by not getting this for Christmas by their parents not throwing money at this thing or perhaps you actually did get one for Christmas um and maybe you do have good memories of it however when someone sits in front of it they can try out the 32x games they can try out the mega CD games and they can try out select few games which were for the 32x that came on CD so it utilized the full tower I'm really looking forward to trying those out later because I never have and I never thought I'd have one of these setups for myself here in the cave until a box came along this is how this whole journey started and we'll begin with that box we'd like to thank PCB way.com for supporting our episode today they aren't just about pcbs that they do do a tremendous job of that they also offer CNC machine CLE sheet metal fabrication 3D printing and injection molding if you're creating then pcb.com can help you bring your project to life get an instant quote now over at pcb.com and we thank them for their [Music] [Music] support [Music] and here is that box hand delivered by my friend John so this came about because his neighbor was having a clear out of their garage uh they were putting some things on eBay they know perfectly well what it was worth but they were happy to sell me the contents of this box for £110 and I think that was a pretty good deal um I don't know what that is in dollars I'm afraid off the top of my head but uh let's say $140 something like that there's no cables it's just what we see in here so um I'm going to pop this on the floor and then we can put it up on the desk one thing at a time starting with this every Tower of Power then starts with a mega Drive released in Japan in 1988 we finally got it here in Europe in 1990 and the US got it a little bit before us in 1989 16 bits was the name of the game to highlight that this was a new generation of gaming we had that gold lettering on the top which if I bring in the original Japanese console here on the left is even more prominent I actually think that original Japanese model is the better looking of the two and I wish we had that style in the UK it also promised intelligent terminal and high-grade multi-purpose use which just makes me think of fluffy French phrases on after shave bottles what does it even mean the original Japanese branding was also different to to ours too for the Mega Drive name here's the logo on their console and this is what we got on ours the sliced font deemed more attractive to our Market both I think are nice I've got no real preference between the two of those but it's interesting to see the difference the Mega Drive had a fairly long life it was discontinued in 1997 by Sega although third parties such as tech toy kept it alive for much much longer than that it's looked back on fondly in Europe North America and Brazil but it wasn't a huge success in its Homeland of Japan where the PC engine and super famicom were favored what was inside it well I'll open up ours and it seems to have a va6 board inside which is one of the later revisions and the main Workhorse of it is the Motorola 68,000 CPU running at around 7.6 mahz this CPU is supported by custom chips including the video display processor or VDP on the left and to the right is an IO chip it's all very neat and tidy audio is interesting it's managed by this zylog z80 CPU audio is its main duty and that's controlling a ym2612 and a Texas Instruments programmable sound generator or PSG the CPU gets 64k of ram the z80 gets 8K to play with and the games themselves are stored on the ROM chips in the cartridges what this amounted to was a console aimed at bringing the games of Sega system 16 arcade platform into the home and using their reputation and franchises from the arcades to leverage sales as well as building on the market that they'd grown with their earlier Master System and it did a good job of it I certainly remember looking at it with envious eyes as a lowly Commodore Amiga owner let's take a look now at what else I've got in this magical box a tower cannot be made by a console alone so it's a good job that the mega CD is also in our box and that's a really tidy looking example so what does this bring to our party it was released in Japan in 1991 but we didn't get it here in Europe until '93 where it had a launch price in the UK of £270 the console itself was £190 on launch so Sager expected you to spend nearly one and a half times as much again for an add-on that price was unsurprisingly a commercial failure but in light of the competition releasing CD add-ons or announcing that they were working on them Sega had to be seen to be keeping up and this was the result regardless of the background of it I think it looks incredible when paired up with the console it's a gaming stack system with real visual presence inside the mega CD is another CPU it's a Motorola 68000 again this time running at 12/2 MHz and it's got a single speed CD ROM drive so it's pretty slow it can transfer data at 150k a second and it had its own custom graphics processor which adds Hardware scaling and rotation assistance as well as a mode 7 style effect just like those seen in its competitor the Super Nintendo the mega CD also added two extra sound channels for CD audio to stream direct from the CD and eight more PCM sound channels multimedia Madness had gripped Sega and us too but this was gaming on a PC Builder's budget not really a Home console budget back to our box amazingly there is even more in it let's take a look this Mega Drive 2 is included so this was the cost reduced re-release of the console came out in 1993 changes to this model include the removal of the headphone jack and a smaller video socket which had stereo sound output built in if I pop the model two on top of the one you can see the size difference no stacking these does not amount to a tower of power sorry and yes the Japanese model one Remains the best looking of them all but for this episode I really do want to focus in on the Mega Drive 1 it's fantastic that model 2 is included in the box and there is one more thing in the Box as well it's a mega CD too yes all of that two Mega drives two Mega CDs for for £10 which just goes to show that Bargains are still out there if you hump Beyond eBay the mega cd2 includes all the functionality of the model one along with the Mega Drive 2 stylings in the present day they are more available they're cheaper to get a hold of and I've read that they're more reliable as well I know which configuration I like but perhaps your preference is the model 2's side by side setup and you don't even have to use a Mega Drive 2 with the mega cd2 you can slot the Mega Drive 1 right on this Dock and even released a platform extension for the base of it to accommodate the full girth of the model one just in case you were wondering I will be cleaning all these items up later so don't worry this is just how they arrived side by side then well you decide which is the better looking the one or the two finnally it's the model one which is the wider console which ends up with a smaller footprint when it's combined with the CD the mega CD 2 also lacks the ready and access lights on the front of the CD I quite like those but do leave a comment and let me know which you'd rather have for the rest of the episode we'll focus in on the model one we're still missing something though for the full tower of power and so to complete it I had to pop to my favorite Retro Gaming shop retro Games HQ just down the road in Swindon so let's jump in the [Music] car no we're not going to go into the Tha massage Spar on the right there we're going to go into holes music a wonderful music and vinyl record shop in itself but hidden away at the back is Pete and his retro goodies let's see what we can find set over two floors it's very much a console shop as are most retro game shops these days but you will find a few cassette tapes hidden away there's a huge amount of Nintendo gear from Rob the robot through to special edition n64s and GameCubes and there's a ton of loose handheld cartridges and plenty of boxed ones too if you're looking for it Peter's probably got it here somewhere and you can always contact him online first to check as lovely as all this is I'm in the wrong part of the shop for what I need to find I'm looking for the 32x for my tower that's likely to be downstairs with all of the Mega Drive games and all of the Master System games here and sure enough didn't take me long to find nestled in with the Sega Saturn items was an unboxed 32x Pete does also have a boxed one but I'm not too worried about the box it came with the power supply video cables and an adapter collar which would make it fit the Mega Drive 2 nicely which is useful to have I also spotted at the back of a cabinet there was a nice boxed copy of a game which I've read is one of the better ones to own for the 32x Star Wars arcade I also picked up a couple of six button gam pads and was good to go so thank you very much Pete and do say hello to him if you get out to Retro Games HQ if you happen to be in swind right do we just plug it in and play on it now but it's always worth checking before powering it on so I gave Mark fix's stuff a call who's worked on a lot of Mega [Music] CDs hello Neil So I've got this Sega Mega CD is there anything I should know before I turn it on yeah stop trying to set up fake video calls it's not some scripted TV repair show yeah thanks for that Mark we now have a 32x released at the end of 1994 its goal was to make the Mega Drive a 32-bit 3D Powerhouse it cost us 170 in the UK $159 in the US and the upgrade was designed to make your mega Drive compete with the Jaguar with the 3dio with the Sony PlayStation and with sega's own Saturn it introduces two more CPUs to our Tower in the form of sh2 32-bit risk processors the same as were found in the Saturn although these are running slower at 23 MZ each there was more video RAM it enabled 32,768 onscreen colors and more sound channels so when combined with the mega CD in this stack we have a total of 22 Sound channels the 32x was released in America in the same month that Japan got the Sega Saturn it was obviously a poor marketing move Sega and Japan and other regions were out of sync and the price of a 32x was a sizable chunk of the purchase price of Their Own True Next Generation console it was kind of a budget Saturn on a budget that would have cost you more than a Saturn having bought the sum of its parts the total I paid for the 32x the game and two six bom pads was £276 taking our build price now to £ 386 but remember we've also got a spare Mega Drive 2 and mega CD 2 in that price it's funny that these more premium 32-bit games for the platform came in paper packaging and not the plastic clamshell boxes that we were used to with Mega Drive games but it is nice to see that it supports two players and six button pads here are the pads that I picked up and there is a difference between the two of them but you have to look very closely to spot it each pad has a mode shoulder button and that's to switch between three and six button mode so You' got to be very careful not to knock that mid game and lose half your moves if we look at the back of the joy pads this first one is a Sega model 1653 50 it's a genuine pad with genuine finger Funk built up in the screws but if we look at the other one now it's a Repro a retro bit branded pad which is a licensed modern remake it's a good one too and you're lucky if you can find one they seem to be out of stock everywhere I look and it's just by chance that I accidentally picked one up at retro gamees HQ thinking it was just a Sega original but I'm happy with it add to the bench a stack of power supplies including some extras for the model 2 a bunch of video cables and some capacitors and we're nearly ready to try it all out of all the hardware on the bench the one that concerns me the most is the Mega CD one it really has a reputation for reliability problems and for leaky capacitors so I wanted to get a look at at the very least before putting power into it chatting to mark from his experience of fixing these many have already leaked horribly and destroyed the boards so I had my fingers crossed and I was hoping for the very best when he opened it [Music] up there are multiple boards in the mega CD the main board the powerboard and the laser board it's the surface mount capacitors on the main board which are prone to leak first in the system and deposit was it their electrolytic fluid all over the board on closer inspection we found that this has started to happen just there's some crustiness forming around the capacitors and nearby components and there is a very definite fishy smell present but this is far from a very bad example we've got really lucky here just next to this capacitor here this chip is the system ROM it's region locked but you can add a socket and swap out this ROM if you're going to modify it but given that we can play different region Mega CD games in the cave on the laser active for example I'm happy just to leave this as stock NOW the problem with corrosion caused by leaking capacitors is that it can cause problems safely desoldering components the goal is to remove them and clean the area without lifting the pads that the new capacitors were solder to now Mark tried a variety of approaches on the very crustiest of capacitors and um he was concerned with the way it was behaving uh would it delaminate the pad would it cause damage we were a little bit worried about how much heat we were finding we had to apply so for a couple of the capacitors he adopted the approach of snipping them off very carefully with very sharp Snips to minimize any stress caused to the pads then he removed the remnants of the capacitor and then was able to Simply slide off the legs that remained on the pads with an iron it's not a recommended method of recapping don't take this as advice but it's a useful technique with which Mark likes to use some times when absolutely necessary and the result is an undamaged pad which we can reuse so that's exactly what we want as an aside if your mega CD has been ruined by leaking caps there are now brand new Recreations of the boards inside being developed by kosam with the help of Chrissy and Simon also known as airgon I'll pop the links in the video descriptions and I'll update them as these boards become available to help you out so all is not lost if you have a mega CD that looks like it's just been destroyed by leaking capacitors there is now hope meanwhile lots of cleaning has taken place around the leaked capacitors and this one here this is far better behaved this is what we want it's obviously leaked less or there's been less corrosion going on around it because it lifts right off with Mark's heated tweezers that's how they should come off it should be that easy [Music] there's a couple of through hole capacitors on the board too which we'll replace just because we can we've got it out we might as well and we did decide to test them just to see how they were and they measured just fine so we didn't need to replace them but there you go we have done Ino the new capacitors it's not a terribly large job this but the 3mm diameter capacitors can be a bit fiddly to work with when you're as hamfisted as us with those all done we can pop the board back in screw it all together and finally take this bad boy for a spin and I'm not talking about [Music] Mark [Music] so with those fishy caps taken care of we're ready to test out some games on this there are more capacitors to change on the mega CD I just didn't want to turn this whole episode into a recapping episode so I'll talk about that a bit later what we need to change and why we need to do it and I will get on with doing that but there are games to be played it also needs a wipe down I'll do that um after I've tested it out because I'm desperate to try this thing and um there's the small matter of wiring it up now this is a games console a games console with lots of upgrades and when these upgrades are added it goes from being the pull out the box Plug and Play solution that A Game's console should be into a bit of a a mess of spaghetti wiring let me show you how all this works back here first of all there's power to deal with and believe it or not there's three power inputs the 32x the uh Mega Drive and the mega CD two of them have negative polarity in the center one has positive polarity which means if you accidentally plug one the wrong cable into the wrong thing you are at risk of doing irreversible damage to it so we've got to be very careful about what we put where the 32x is Center positive and that's this one this is an original power supply so put that in there and then the Mega Drive one and the mega CD both have Center negative and we'll pop those into the Mega Drive and the mega CD and then I just want you to take a look at the plugs here so I've got an original Sega power adapter in here there it is that's the original one and then these are a couple of modern Replacements notice how chunky it is a wool wart as I think you call it in the US Sega actually produced their own power strip Sega branded power strip for the Tower of Power because you wouldn't fit The Originals next to each other on a standard um plug socket and it costs over100 for a collector to get one now which is just Madness um you could just spread them out so that they would all fit together even original ones absolute Madness anyway there you go three power supplies to get this console going now we need to hook up the video so we'll start with the mega drive itself so we're using the RGB output where our lovely blast processed 2D Graphics are spat out comes out there this cable also has a 3 and 1 half mil stereo Jack on it a breakout cable what we do with that is we plug it into the headphone socket and on the headphone socket on the front of the Mega Drive we get our Mega CD audio and our Mega Drive audio is mixed in there so it comes up and it joins our video and goes down the same C cable um if you were just using a mega CD normally and according to the manual you're supposed to run a 3 and2 mil Jack from the headphone socket so you're still coming out the front of the Mega Drive it's pretty juny and you're supposed to go in the 3 and half mil mixing Port here and then you get left and right Pho outputs to go wherever you want so that's that's a neater way of doing it I guess if you're going into um a stack system or something that uses Pho ports but as you're getting the mix down audio anyway on the headphone jack you might as well we just use that so we've got our audio and our video on our cable here this cable um needs to be joined up with a smaller cable of the type that you would get with a mega Drive 2 actually for your video and then that feeds into the 32x up here so as our 3D processing is done here it takes our 2D video does its 3D processing and overlays it onto the 2D video and then spits it combined out a bit like us PC owners who used to have a 3D voodo Gra graphics card you would have to daisy chain it up to your 2D graphics card and then it would spit out the combined video that's exactly what's happening here so the 32x is the final place where the video is spat out if I can get that in there we go and that's just going to our Scot socket on our television um I think that's everything yeah three power supplies uh one 3 and a half mil Jack and three video cables and we're ready to go and test it out I think that's right anyway way just double check the wires make sure I'm not going to blow anything up okay we're good let's turn it on and that's the mega CD splash screen it's um it's a thing it's certainly a splash screen of its time I quite like it 1993 version one it says at the top right hand side finally let's try out some games then uh we're going to skip the Mega Drive games I think we all know what stock Mega Drive games are like we really want to see the mega CD games Mega CD games with 32x enhancements and the 3 2 X Games first question is how do you get a CD game in there when there's no eject button uh well the answer is you press reset of course you press reset on the Mega Drive and the tray slide's open and we put the game in and then to close it we press start on the joy pad and then the game should load up let's see what it's got to [Music] offer [Music] it's Night Trap Of course perhaps the most well-known Sega Mega CD game it's a full motion video game starring Dana PLO who appeared in the US sitcom Different Strokes and whose life would end quite tragically in 1999 what's the game all about well this guy knows your mission protect those girls from whatever happened to the last ones now listen up last night one of our agents got into the house and found some kind of weird security system hidden cameras in almost every room and a series of traps our agent spliced an override into the security system allowing you to have control of the cameras and The Traps with this remote unit use the traps to capture anyone or anything that endangers the lives of those girls but make sure you don't trap someone you should be protecting the game comprises of eight rooms and different videos play out in those rooms your job is to visit the rooms at the right time and press a button at the right time to capture The Intruders it's basically Channel hopping with the memory game Simon thrown in and as simple as that sounds it's actually a novel way of trying to eek some gameplay out of the otherwise very linear format that is video a challenge many game developers of the time were trying to overcome before they realized video is best used to supplement gameplay I'm not saying it's a incredibly playable game just that it's a novel approach this 1992 release we're watching is using the Mega Drive and the mega CD but there was a later 1995 re-release for the 32x so let's see the difference this is the 1992 Mega CD version she'll be arriving with the rest of the girls I'm putting her life and the lives of those other girls in your hands so don't even think messing up this is my attack Squad and that's Kelly one of my my best undercover agents she'll be arriving with the rest of the girls I'm putting her life and the lives of those other girls in your hands don't even think of messing up well the acting hasn't got any better but the video is certainly enhanced the 32x is providing help to achieve this but I still wouldn't say that it's acting as an FMV module of the quality scene in say the Philip CDI or the amga cd32 those FMV modules which did come at an extra cost do do a much better job of playing video CDs back smoothly and with a greater color depth the result however is a more enjoyable version of the game but it doesn't really feel like it's given us everything this Hardware has to offer it's an FMV game and by 1995 that's feeling dated regardless of how good the video looks bad we must visit the augs tonight I'd much rather stay here and enjoy our new guests radical dude we're going from the same creators came corpse killer in 1994 also on the mega CD and then with a 32x enhanced version later released which we're watching now this is a little bit more fun than night trapping that it combines video with light gun support to create an on Rails shooting game I'm playing it here quite badly with a joy pad it's cheesy and it amounts to a game of operation wolf with zombie skateboarders hurling themselves at you but it's more of a game Than Night Trap you'd still be struggling to justify the cost of your Tower of Power based on this though so I think we need to move away from video based games and see what else it can [Music] do a mega CD game now and we can always Ry on sega's mascot to help us out Sonic CD from 1993 is a whole new Sonic game that's enhanced by the mega CDs Hardware it's got a really lovely CD based soundtrack although that single speed CD ROM does mean that you get a noticeable gap between songs which is a little jarring it also has bonus stages which make use of the extra video Hardware so that mode s style effect we mentioned earlier you can see that here in the bonus stage this effect was also used in other games like thunder HW and it would be a welcome addition to Mega Drive Gamers who looked enviously at their Super Nintendo friends who were playing Mario Kart F0 and pilot wings and other games that use mode [Music] seven we've tried some Mega CD games and mega CD games with 32x support let's try a 32 2x cartridge now in 1992 virtu racing hit the arcades and its silky smooth 3D Graphics turned our heads away from the 2D Sprite scaling based races the 32x got a version of this game in 1994 when it was a launch title with the hardware and it really was the ideal game to show it off it Clips along at 20 frames per second making it perfectly playable but not as smooth as the arcade the draw distance is quite short and compromises have been made to bring it into the home but I think it's an impressive that being said Sega also released this for the stock Mega drive with the addition of the SVP or Sega virtu processor an extra chip in the game cartridge itself the result of that was the game cost £70 or $100 in the US to cover the cost of that chip and it certainly wasn't as good as the 32x version but it was impressive nonetheless in the UK we'd get the 32x version in 1995 in this year we could see a Mega Drive release a a 32x release and a Sega Saturn version of the game the latter being vastly Superior and an advert for why you should probably put your money towards the Saturn the biggest problem for the Tower of Power was quite simply [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] timing and the same could be said of virtu of fighter which is another very playable game which shows us what the 32x can do but virtu of fighter was released on the Sega Saturn in November of 1994 in Japan and it was over a year later before we got it on the 32x here in Europe it was an inferior version of a game on a previous generation console although some reviewers did complement bug fixes which had been applied since the Sega Saturn's version it is a good game though and not to be skipped and an SVP enhanced version of it for this stock Mega Drive was planned but then cancelled to become part of the Sega Saturn's launched lineup the same thing happened with Daytona USA virtal fighter and racing I get but the heavily texture mapped 3D models of Daytona would surely have never been able to make it on the 32x even the Sega satin struggled with that [Music] one K an absolutely huge game which owes a lot of its success to the Mega Drive is FIFA soccer which I remember bursting into 3D on the very expensive 3dio console in 1994 it combined a 3D environment with 2D Sprites and that's what we see on the 32x too The View can be changed to your taste and you can enjoy FIFA in the third dimension in a way that wasn't available on stock Mega drives however unlike the 3dio this isn't 1994 the 32x got FIFA 96 so it's that question of timing again direct comparisons therefore could be made on the PlayStation on the Saturn and on the PC all of which were Superior versions of the game and they utiliz the CD ROM's capacity to have commentary in game on the 32x we just get this shout if goal is scored go it's once again admirable that the platform was getting game releases for it at this time and it is playable although it's still a period of FIFA where I felt that the pace of kickoff 2 or sensible soccer were a lot more fun to play I'm perhaps not painting the most positive picture so far but I was Finding fun in the system and Star Wars arcade was was especially enjoyable this was a launch title for the 32xs release and an exclusive one to the platform so even Sega Saturn owners couldn't play this one it's a spiritual successor to atari's 1983 wireframe arcade game and this version features filled polygons and finds you intercepting Tie fighters and making a run on the Death Star it also supports two players so player two can act as a second gunner in the same ship for cooperative play The Emptiness of space has always lent itself well to low polyg on gaming and it does so again here maintaining a nice frame rate and it's really good fun [Music] gameplay the 32x was also used to enhance 2D games and this really does help the system to hit a sweet spot games like Mortal Kombat and afterburner complete are elevated beyond the capabilities we've come to expect from a stock Mega Drive and become near arcade perfect ports the same applies to NBA Jam WrestleMania and others as a retro gamer it's great to go back and enjoy these games and I think you'd get a huge amount of pleasure out of them at the time to although even some of these could have been a little bit better Mortal Kombat 2 has been patched in the modern day to make it an even more complete and more arcade perfect port and there's a link to that in the video description but what about Doom the Killer game that set PC gaming a light in 1993 well this game on the 32x is a story of two halves or was that FIFA Doom came to the 32x in November of 1994 it was stripped back it lacked the final episode and some of the maps were cut down some of the enemies were completely removed the view is reduced to increase the frame rate and the resolution isn't particularly clear but that being said it's completely playable at a fairly acceptable frame rate quite a feet really you would think but it turns out so much more was possible and it would take nearly 30 years to prove that [Music] point this is Doom Resurrection it's been around for a couple of years now but the latest release has just arrived and the beauty of this game is that it uses the full tower of power it uses both of the sh2 CPUs in the 32x to spread that in load something the original didn't do it offloads sound mixing to the mega CD Hardware it increases the resolution and it restores all of the maps and missing enemies it even adds split screen multiplayer and link up play and it has Sega mouse support for good measure this is everything Doom should have been for the 32x and it's banging on every part of the Tower of Power to show us what it can do it is an astonishingly good Port of the game and that's something I'd never thought I'd say about doom on a Mega Drive you'd be happy with this performance on your 486 PC here's a sidebyside comparison for good measure on the left is the retail release on the right is the modern patched version and as this was based on the Jaguar source code originally it makes you wonder what else the Tower of Power is capable of when used in this [Music] way [Music] and the difference between those Doom ports is really the takeaway story that I got from this Tower of Power from playing with it the mega CD it came out in good time in Japan and cashed in on the multimedia hype of the day but it took two years to get to us in the UK by which point we were looking towards games that had a bit more playability than the things that FMV had to offer FMV complemented games well but ultimately this was still a 16bit system just with the capacity of a CD and then there was the 32x which just felt like a kind of misguided misunderstanding between two divisions of Sega when actually they should have all been unified and focused on the launch of the Sega Saturn to take on the Sony PlayStation an unknown quantity at that point as Sony hadn't entered the market and Sega got quite a shock from that and that's why it was so nice when this version of Doom was released uh version three of this patched version of Doom it's been around for a while but this new version three came out while I was filming it was very timely um its release and it just gave me a sense of what was possible when the full stack was used without the pressures of release dates and budgets and trying to rush something out for Christmas back in 1994 this was just somebody using their experience using modern development tools and showing us what's possible when you use the whole stack and it makes me think what else is possible that Doom Port was based on Jaguar source code would it be possible to run say the Jaguar version of Alien versus Predator could you port that across to the Tower of Power what else could you do with it hopefully there's an appetite out there to do more ports and to show us more about what this is capable of and um it can become more than just that thing that we thought we wanted and we became we were glad that we didn't get um looking back on it and seeing the failure that it was and then began to lust after as we became retro game collectors yeah it's a really interesting one and it's great to see people still developing for it as I said I didn't want to turn this episode into a recapping episode so the coffe is on uh I've had a chat again with the guys who created those replacement Sega Mega CD pcbs they know the system inside out and they've advised me that while the Leaky SMD caps that we replaced are a good catch and needed to to be done there are a few more that should be swapped out as a necessity in the name of preventative maintenance the three 100 microfarad caps on the subboard for example they insist I should absolutely do and that's all in the name of making sure this lasts and can be enjoyed here and then I'll turn my attention to the mega drive to and check that over as well I did of course give it a good wipe down and a clean so um you don't worry about touching it if you come here to have a go on it and it's found pride of place in the Hands-On exhibition area I just need to do a bit of signage to tell people about it who perhaps haven't seen this video and then they can enjoy it there's much more to learn about the system there are many more games to play which I haven't mentioned I just wanted to choose a spectrum of games to show you that highlighted different capabilities of the system if you've got any recommendations for me do let me know uh and I'll go and try those out and if you want to come and try out for yourself head over to retrocollect live.co.uk when you can see when I open up the cave and you can get a ticket to come and hang out and challenge me to a death match if you like on Doom thank you as always for taking the time to watch if you'd like to support what we do here head over to patreon.com RMC retro where all of your support is hugely appreciated and I'll see you next time take care [Music] bye-bye [Music] all

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 630,129

Keywords: nostalgia, computer history, tech history

Id: nrPOMsn3BZM

Length: 41min 39sec (2499 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023