6 ms·

Apparently the hardware had 4MB of RAM in case anyone else was curious.

• MBCook 2y ago
  Oh that’s pretty big. Obviously full sized games couldn’t fit in the built in 64k of normal RAM, so they had to be put somewhere. I only got to use Sega Channel once. I knew about it from reading magazines, but when we went to a family Thanksgiving gathering it turned out my cousins had it! I don’t know if they were a test market or not, I don’t remember what year it was so I don’t know if it had been deployed nationally yet. I don’t know if I realized how it worked. I think cable modems may have started to exist by that point so at the time I probably assumed it was actually two way communication. I would’ve killed to have it at home. Sega Channel is the first place I ever played Sonic 3-D Blast, the two have always been linked in my memory because of that.
• ndepoel 2y ago
  4 MB is the maximum size of the console's ROM address space, so this would've allowed for any Genesis game to be published through this service, with the exception of the few games that used bank switching to go beyond 4 MB (really only Super Street Fighter II). 4 MB was a lot of RAM to be putting into a relatively cheap consumer electronics device in 1994, so I imagine some of the cost of that was subsidized by Sega and had to be covered by the subscription fees.