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Sega AI
- tiltowait 3y agoWhat strikes me is how similar that keyboard's layout is to the HHKB's.
- nerdponx 3y agoAs far as I know, the HHKB was inspired by the Apple Lisa / Macintosh keyboard: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards which predates the Sega AI, so maybe the Sega design was also inspired by the Apple design.
- izme 3y agoI think it's more based on the TRS-80 Model 100 maybe?
- wk_end 3y agoAs a Sega nerd and a Prolog nerd, this is insanely cool to me. Even if it seems like the Prolog relationship might be some kind of marketing gimmick - it's not clear to me to what extent the games really are written in Prolog.
- Grazester 3y agoI would love to hear which console you have in your collection if any. I was a SEGA fanboy back in the day and have had a few of their console dating back to the Master System
- cglong 3y agoNot GP, but I had a Genesis, CD, and Game Gear. A few years back I bought a Saturn off eBay too to play a leaked early build of Sonic X-treme :)
- SandmanDP 3y agoIs this the Jolly Roger restored build or a build of X-treme I haven’t heard of yet?
- Grazester 3y agoSomething tells me it's someone's homebrew dev of Sonic x-treme. If it's that then the same developer also has a killer Quake style engine for the Saturn which is quite a showcase.
- cglong 3y agoIt's been several years I guess but from following my own breadcrumbs, yeah I think it was the Jollyroger build.
- SandmanDP 3y agoDarn. Thanks for checking though, I appreciate the effort
- beebeepka 3y agoI stopped caring about consoles decades ago but I still want the games. Why won't they just sell this stuff. I've been feeling the itch to play Bug! for like 20 years.
- wk_end 3y agoGenesis (MD), Sega (Mega) CD, Saturn, Dreamcast. The Master System was kind of a bust in North America so I don't carry very much nostalgia for it. I love each of these consoles in their own way, by some combination of their own merits and my own associations of them. The first game I ever played (or at least the first I remember) was Sonic 2, at a demo kiosk at a Canadian Tire while my mom was shopping. That's the sort of thing which sticks with you forever. At home we ended up getting an SNES, and although the SNES' highs were clearly higher than anything Sega put out, I think the average Genesis game holds up better (and it certainly has incredible gems of its own). The faster and easier to work with CPU, I think, gave devs a bit more breathing room; the FM synth has an iconic, crunchy, aggressive, alien sound that's way cooler than the canned, fuzzy, plinky soundscape of so many poorly-made SNES scores (of course, again: the best SNES soundtracks are sublime). You could put Go Straight from SoR2 on at a club now and get the dance floor going. The only thing about it that's dated badly is that it really, really could've used a richer colour palette. As a kid I never had a Sega CD, but I did have a Windows 3.1 computer, and it feels part-and-parcel with that era of "multimedia". It's all nostalgia, but I love the grainy look of the FMV, the very particular abstract and geometric style of the CGI of the era, the metallic sheen of those digital CD soundtracks. It's got some fantastic games, too: Sonic CD is a classic, and Lunar 2 (particularly if you can read Japanese and don't need to endure everything Working Designs did to it) is, as far as I'm concerned, up there with FF6 and Chrono Trigger as a definitive 16-bit JPRG. I of course understand why the Playstation won the 32-bit era, it's a better system than the Saturn with better games overall. But the Saturn has some absolute classics (again, Japanese knowledge helps here). It's not a system that I had much experience with at the time - except, again, for some time spent at a department store kiosk with Nights, which entranced me - but it's come to me to feel like the more interesting, mysterious machine than the Playstation. The Dreamcast feels more like the end of the 32-bit era than the start of the next-gen: a 32-bit system with next-gen performance. To me the quintessential Dreamcast game is fast, buttery smooth, vibrant, colourful. Again, it's easy to see why the PS2 came out on top, but looking back now I see the PS2 era more as a trial run for "modern" gaming - dark, muddy, slow, clumsy versions of the sort of games we're playing now; whereas the Dreamcast was home to the absolute best of the games we were playing then.
- brabel 3y ago
- ilaksh 3y agoIt's called an "AI" computer. Prolog was AI in 1986. I don't see that as a gimmick. I also don't see why one would assume the concept was really about games except for the fact that we know Sega as a games company today.
- actionfromafar 3y agoSega still makes these neat things: https://www.segatoys.space/en/public/flux.html https://www.segatoys.space/en/public/flux.html
- theNJR 3y agoThat’s really cool! Do you own one?
- actionfromafar 3y agoI do, actually. It’s just a projector, really, but it’s really neat. It’s analog so it has no pixels. It can rotate the starfield but the motor is noisy enough to disturb me when going to sleep, so I don’t use the motor.
- beebeepka 3y agoDo we have to buy all the cool discs one by one? Looks like a neat product, such a shame the motor is noisy because a little motion, just barely perceptible, would go a long way. I would think people would throw good money for the same but better. I know I would.
- actionfromafar 3y agoI bet many don't even notice the motor, but I do. It comes with two discs. I think you could put any slide film in there too, if you really wanted.
- tpmoney 3y ago
- Agingcoder 3y agoI’m neither , and think it’s insanely cool as well.
- neilv 3y agoSounds like they had some kind of Prolog inferencing/runtime stored in ROM, and running on a normal early x86 CPU. Games packaged for the machine could call that runtime code, but Prolog wasn't exposed to the user. So there is the marketing aspect (that generation of "AI" hype, and government initiatives), plus whatever unusual functionality that enabled being exposed through games (e.g., simple natural language parsing). A few years after this, a project I was loosely involved with embedding a Prolog interpreter into a much larger system that was mostly implemented in C, just to implement a reports query language feature for a complex data model. Years later, for a very similar purpose for a rich data model, we instead exposed SQL to the power user/integrator. (Today, you'd probably do the custom reports by making a GUI forms-based or wizard-based way of doing custom queries, or overkill it with a drag&drop visual programming language. To do NLP-ish stuff this year, you'd be shot if you didn't first try to do it with an LLM.)
- rabbits77 3y agoFrom the article > The presumed software release timespan (at least 33 months between August 1986 > and May 1989) is particularly odd considering this is an extremely rare and > unknown system. I wonder if there is a connection to Japan's FGCS project which was active during that time frame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... It would make sense if Sega was involved and the activity on this "extremely rare and unknown system" was due to it being funded by research grants instead of purely commercial new product development. The FGCS was heavily invested in advancing Prolog based systems and that makes the possibility of a connection to this system even stronger.
- bitwize 3y ago[flagged]
- doublerabbit 3y agoWhy don't we get games with those graphics nowadays? I'm bored of AAA realism. Bring back the Amiga graphics.
- Jensson 3y agoBecause making decent 2d graphics requires more skill than decent 3d. Put the minecraft textures in 2d and it is utterly horrible, but in 3d with shadows and shaders it starts to look very good.
- pjerem 3y agoOk, try this :) https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wlq6fFOqI28 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wlq6fFOqI28
- Lammy 3y agoAAA 3D gaming isn't only about the games but was also a way for the security state to incentivize development of certain kinds of hardware broadly applicable outside of just graphics. SEGA were directly part of the paradigm shift from war-focused development to entertainment-focused development in the early '90s with their whole "omg look at our Lockheed tech!!" era. That was right at the fall of the USSR and end of the Gulf War when war became (briefly) publicly unpalatable, so the demand to keep working on this stuff had to come from somewhere and the somewhere is us :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gbalint 3y agoThere are games like this, just look for pixel art games. E.g. Terraria, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, etc
- miohtama 3y agoI also recommend: Sea of Stars is one of the recent “modern” award winning indie JRPGs with pixel graphics.
- b0rbb 3y agoSega absolutely nailed it with graphic design in those days. My goodness.
- robertheadley 3y agoAny time I learn about a new retro system that I have never heard of, is an interesting day.
- Mistletoe 3y agoEarly to the AI hype, Sega was truly ahead of current times.
- flohofwoe 3y ago...or late, 1986 was deep into the first AI winter.
- p3rls 3y agoDreamcast was also both early and late.
- rabbits77 3y agoI don't think that is the case, especially not in Japan which was in the middle of heavy investment in AI via the FGCS. FGCS ran from 1982 - 1992 and promoted both hardware and software research into the development of high performance concurrent prolog systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
- copx 3y ago>Sega's AI machine uses a run-time Prolog-language interpreter residing in 128-K bytes of read-only memory. I really want to know more about this less than 128K Prolog interpreter (it shares the ROM with the OS) running at only 5 MHz. Which language features does it support? How does it work? Writing a useful Prolog interpreter for such limited hardware is quite a feat. I kinda hope someone will extract the interpreter from the ROM and convert the machine code to readable ASM.
- aidenn0 3y agoWasn't the original prolog implemented on a PDP-11/20 which only had 256kb of physical address space and no virtual memory?
- pjmlp 3y agoPeople nowadays tend to be unware how little Lisp, Scheme, Prolog and Smalltalk had available for them, on the systems they were originally developed on. Which is kind of ironic when dimissing them for certain uses nowadays, on hardware that would be like super research computers for them.
- aidenn0 3y agoThat is the usual error. The one exception was when I encountered someone trying to get a minimal Lisp up and running on a microcontroller with no external memory bus. We did determine that the micro, with 16K of RAM, was less capable than the 704 that the original LISP was developed on (I could never find specific specs, but it almost certainly had at least a 733 drum, which was 8 kilo-words).
- rolltrunhert 3y agoI am guessing the context here is: MAME 0.262 was just released New systems marked not working ------------------------------ Sega AI [Chris Covell, Fabio Priuli, Wilbert Pol, smspower, The Game Preservation Society] https://www.mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0262.txt https://www.mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0262.txt
- bfrankline 3y agoI’d bet this was funded by the Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) initiative.
- vdaea 3y agoBecause of the name of the system and the web page claiming there's no information of the system anywhere in the web I can't help but think that this some sort of art project and that everything has been generated with AI and that the system never existed.
- goosedragons 3y agoNah, it exists. Just rare and only released in one country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXMBwMcJ_pY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXMBwMcJ_pY
- b3nji 3y agoI love this. The graphics on the box alone make me happy.