4 ms·

The Sega Master System: Third Mark's the Charm

75 points by zdw 5y ago

Waterluvian 5y ago
“Likely to ensure compatibility with older Sega software, it was limited to a two-button controller.” I don’t understand this. Is this just a guess or is there some reason you can’t just ignore extra buttons with older games?
- nicole_express 5y ago
  It's just a guess. There are compatibility issues with some Master System software and the later Genesis controller which added additional buttons, though the specific issues in those cases wouldn't have been possible on the SG-1000.
- bane 5y ago
  I'm not exactly sure about the Master System [1], but many systems of the time send an 8 bit vector at 60 Hz to indicate what buttons were pressed. Each bit represents some action on the system e.g. bit 0 - up bit 1 - left bit 2 - right bit 3 - down bit 4 - button 1 bit 5 - button 2 bit 6 - start bit 7 - select This means that it was fairly easy to do some simple bit twiddling to read what buttons were pressed and what wasn't. Example: left+up+button 1 would produce a vector like: 11001000 1 - The bit layout is here under "Joypad Ports" and it's actually kind of interesting and a bit more complex than my simple example, but the method is the same. https://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/MasterSystemGameGear.php https://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/MasterSystemGameGear.php It looks like they maybe could have fit extra buttons in under the third port (&00) but never did. It's likely they tried to maintain backwards compatibility with previous systems like the SG-1000, only adding something new when the Gamegear came out. Here's some more on how the NES handles this http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/classes/2007/4840/reports/TupacMan.pdf http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/classes/2007/4840/repo...
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    That makes sense - but why was that abandoned in the 16 bit era? Neither the sega megadrive nor the super nintendo have 16 inputs.
    - fredoralive 5y ago
      SMS wires each button to a seperate pin on the connector in a variant on the Atari style controller port. Megadrive has a Master System backwards compatability mode (and the same 9 pin port), so its controller ports are going to be similar 8 bit IO ports. It adds extra buttons using a spare line as a select / multiplex output and reading the input lines multiple times. Nintendo used shift regiters in its controllers, and the SNES does use a 16 bit shift register, but some of the bits are unused (4 extra buttons deemed sufficient it seems).
  - Nition 5y ago
    For the record, you could plug a Sega Genesis controller into a Master System and it worked (at least with the games I had) despite having more buttons. The B and C buttons became the main two buttons.
    - city41 5y ago
      There's about ten games that require a SMS controller to work.
  - crtasm 5y ago
    There was only a D-pad and two buttons on the Master System, no Start or Select. The console itself had a single 'pause' button that I suppose might have been wired into the joystick circuit though.
pram 5y ago
The aesthetics on the US Master System are still amazing imo. I thought it looked super futuristic in the 90s, and I still do. It has a very pleasing minimalism.
- pcurve 5y ago
  I had one... My favorite game was Fantasy Zone. Its sound track has stayed with me even after 30+ years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7WQYjC26SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7WQYjC26SU
orionblastar 5y ago
I wonder if the Sega Fusion emulator supports it? http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/genesis/fusion.html http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/genesis/fusion.html
- louhike 5y ago
  Fusion isn't an accurate emulator for the Master System. You would have better result with Genesis Plus GX (through RetroArch, Bizhawk or OpenEmu) or MAME.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ricardobeat 5y ago
The Master System (gen 1) was the only videogame I had during my childhood. The memories of Alex Kidd, Sonic, Shinobi, and the secret Sega snail game are still fresh decades later. Good times.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I'm really curious about the mind/neurology aspect of this. How impactful such "limited" games had to our young minds, compared to today's borderline insanely sophisticated video games. There's something that I find more just in old games, they had simpler means to achieve the same goal (fun alone or with buddies, imagination, excitement).
  - Arisaka1 5y ago
    I feel like you're having specific genre(s) and their evolution in mind. Consoles barely had any strategy games and even those were sufficiently complex, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But in terms of game design I always believed that the more limitations you apply to the player the better (or just easier?) the game designer can come up with engaging tasks for the player.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      not a genre per se, or the action games set if you will, but it does apply to RTS too it's mostly a ratio visual complexity / human effect you had 2d games with limited colors and resolution, yet people would spend 40h+ totally excited on it now you have real time raytraced globally lit terapolygon scenes and you don't play with it more also I feel like advanced kinematics are wasted because games are still about moving in simple dimensions, control a few parameters (aiming guns, staying at distance) .. it's circling around the same interaction patterns. would more sophisticated rendering improve strategy planning and fun ?
- genocidicbunny 5y ago
  Alex Kidd was my Mario and Sonic. I only had a Master System 2 growing up, so I ended up getting really good at Alex Kidd in Miracle World (side note, I bought the remaster as soon as it was available to pre-purchase because of this.) We couldn't afford many games, so I only had a handful of other ones, like Submarine Attack. In addition, my grandfather was the one who bought the system for me, when I was only 2 years old (I didn't get to play it until much later) and he passed away before I grew up enough to really remember him, but there's a vivid image I do have of my grandfather bringing out the box to give to me, or more correctly, my mom, when we went to visit him. Master System 2 has a warm place in my heart.
bullen 5y ago
I had a C64C and sold that after I got a SMS. How I could play with those awful controllers is beyond me today (the Nintendo patented directional pad is miles ahead still today when it has expired)! As for retro dev. I think the C64 (also 16-bit memory) makes alot more sense as you can run software on real hardware!
- snvzz 5y ago
  >As for retro dev. I think the C64 (also 16-bit memory) makes alot more sense as you can run software on real hardware! Running code on the Master System is just easy instead of trivial.
conradfr 5y ago
> Interesting, the French RGB release is based off of the NTSC circuitboard, and it should be easy to add a 50Hz/60Hz timing switch. I haven’t done that yet, though I likely will. I need to crack this thing open anyway, its video port is very finicky and probably has some broken solder joints. Funny as I have a (French) Master System II and I remember from the last time I plugged it in that the port and/or Peritel cable was a bit faulty as well, but everything else was working fine.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kawsper 5y ago
The Sega Master System have the best sound-chip availiable in my opinion, the soundtrack from Ninja Gaiden is an absolute classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFoA0OICiB4&t=215s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFoA0OICiB4&t=215s
lordgroff 5y ago
This is one of those posts which I clicked completely out of boredom, not being terribly interested in the subject. Next thing it's 2 AM as I read each post. Lots of history and explanation of, to me, very niche systems.

75 points by zdw 5y ago

“Likely to ensure compatibility with older Sega software, it was limited to a two-button controller.” I don’t understand this. Is this just a guess or is there some reason you can’t just ignore extra buttons with older games?

nicole_express 5y ago
It's just a guess. There are compatibility issues with some Master System software and the later Genesis controller which added additional buttons, though the specific issues in those cases wouldn't have been possible on the SG-1000.
bane 5y ago
I'm not exactly sure about the Master System [1], but many systems of the time send an 8 bit vector at 60 Hz to indicate what buttons were pressed. Each bit represents some action on the system e.g. bit 0 - up bit 1 - left bit 2 - right bit 3 - down bit 4 - button 1 bit 5 - button 2 bit 6 - start bit 7 - select This means that it was fairly easy to do some simple bit twiddling to read what buttons were pressed and what wasn't. Example: left+up+button 1 would produce a vector like: 11001000 1 - The bit layout is here under "Joypad Ports" and it's actually kind of interesting and a bit more complex than my simple example, but the method is the same. https://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/MasterSystemGameGear.php https://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/MasterSystemGameGear.php It looks like they maybe could have fit extra buttons in under the third port (&00) but never did. It's likely they tried to maintain backwards compatibility with previous systems like the SG-1000, only adding something new when the Gamegear came out. Here's some more on how the NES handles this http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/classes/2007/4840/reports/TupacMan.pdf http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/classes/2007/4840/repo...
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  That makes sense - but why was that abandoned in the 16 bit era? Neither the sega megadrive nor the super nintendo have 16 inputs.
  - fredoralive 5y ago
    SMS wires each button to a seperate pin on the connector in a variant on the Atari style controller port. Megadrive has a Master System backwards compatability mode (and the same 9 pin port), so its controller ports are going to be similar 8 bit IO ports. It adds extra buttons using a spare line as a select / multiplex output and reading the input lines multiple times. Nintendo used shift regiters in its controllers, and the SNES does use a 16 bit shift register, but some of the bits are unused (4 extra buttons deemed sufficient it seems).
- Nition 5y ago
  For the record, you could plug a Sega Genesis controller into a Master System and it worked (at least with the games I had) despite having more buttons. The B and C buttons became the main two buttons.
  - city41 5y ago
    There's about ten games that require a SMS controller to work.
- crtasm 5y ago
  There was only a D-pad and two buttons on the Master System, no Start or Select. The console itself had a single 'pause' button that I suppose might have been wired into the joystick circuit though.

pram 5y ago

The aesthetics on the US Master System are still amazing imo. I thought it looked super futuristic in the 90s, and I still do. It has a very pleasing minimalism.

pcurve 5y ago
I had one... My favorite game was Fantasy Zone. Its sound track has stayed with me even after 30+ years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7WQYjC26SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7WQYjC26SU

orionblastar 5y ago

I wonder if the Sega Fusion emulator supports it? http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/genesis/fusion.html http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/genesis/fusion.html

louhike 5y ago
Fusion isn't an accurate emulator for the Master System. You would have better result with Genesis Plus GX (through RetroArch, Bizhawk or OpenEmu) or MAME.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

ricardobeat 5y ago

The Master System (gen 1) was the only videogame I had during my childhood. The memories of Alex Kidd, Sonic, Shinobi, and the secret Sega snail game are still fresh decades later. Good times.

agumonkey 5y ago
I'm really curious about the mind/neurology aspect of this. How impactful such "limited" games had to our young minds, compared to today's borderline insanely sophisticated video games. There's something that I find more just in old games, they had simpler means to achieve the same goal (fun alone or with buddies, imagination, excitement).
- Arisaka1 5y ago
  I feel like you're having specific genre(s) and their evolution in mind. Consoles barely had any strategy games and even those were sufficiently complex, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But in terms of game design I always believed that the more limitations you apply to the player the better (or just easier?) the game designer can come up with engaging tasks for the player.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    not a genre per se, or the action games set if you will, but it does apply to RTS too it's mostly a ratio visual complexity / human effect you had 2d games with limited colors and resolution, yet people would spend 40h+ totally excited on it now you have real time raytraced globally lit terapolygon scenes and you don't play with it more also I feel like advanced kinematics are wasted because games are still about moving in simple dimensions, control a few parameters (aiming guns, staying at distance) .. it's circling around the same interaction patterns. would more sophisticated rendering improve strategy planning and fun ?
genocidicbunny 5y ago
Alex Kidd was my Mario and Sonic. I only had a Master System 2 growing up, so I ended up getting really good at Alex Kidd in Miracle World (side note, I bought the remaster as soon as it was available to pre-purchase because of this.) We couldn't afford many games, so I only had a handful of other ones, like Submarine Attack. In addition, my grandfather was the one who bought the system for me, when I was only 2 years old (I didn't get to play it until much later) and he passed away before I grew up enough to really remember him, but there's a vivid image I do have of my grandfather bringing out the box to give to me, or more correctly, my mom, when we went to visit him. Master System 2 has a warm place in my heart.

bullen 5y ago

I had a C64C and sold that after I got a SMS. How I could play with those awful controllers is beyond me today (the Nintendo patented directional pad is miles ahead still today when it has expired)! As for retro dev. I think the C64 (also 16-bit memory) makes alot more sense as you can run software on real hardware!

snvzz 5y ago
>As for retro dev. I think the C64 (also 16-bit memory) makes alot more sense as you can run software on real hardware! Running code on the Master System is just easy instead of trivial.

conradfr 5y ago

> Interesting, the French RGB release is based off of the NTSC circuitboard, and it should be easy to add a 50Hz/60Hz timing switch. I haven’t done that yet, though I likely will. I need to crack this thing open anyway, its video port is very finicky and probably has some broken solder joints. Funny as I have a (French) Master System II and I remember from the last time I plugged it in that the port and/or Peritel cable was a bit faulty as well, but everything else was working fine.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kawsper 5y ago

The Sega Master System have the best sound-chip availiable in my opinion, the soundtrack from Ninja Gaiden is an absolute classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFoA0OICiB4&t=215s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFoA0OICiB4&t=215s

lordgroff 5y ago

This is one of those posts which I clicked completely out of boredom, not being terribly interested in the subject. Next thing it's 2 AM as I read each post. Lots of history and explanation of, to me, very niche systems.