One of SEGA’s rarest consoles has been found

The SEGA AI is one of the most rare and obscure parts of the SEGA catalog of consoles, and now an example has been found and preserved.

Even many dedicated SEGA fans will not have come across the SEGA AI, an extremely rare computer and games console released in Japan in 1986. Now a developer and SEGA fan has found one of these elusive consoles and made public a huge amount of data about the SEGA AI, including system ROM and game dumps.

The SEGA AI was created to be a multi-function device and had a number of modules to facilitate this, including a graphics tablet, a keyboard designed for programming, and a music composer. It also took game cartridges referred to as SEGA Cards, which are very similar to those used on the SG-1000 II and the original Master System.

Though the SEGA AI was considered to be ahead of its time in its approach to multimedia computing, it was not a sales hit, and plans to release a version of the SEGA AI in North America were quietly shelved. The computer fell into obscurity until one was found by Omar Cornut, a developer who has worked on titles such as the remake of Wonder Boy and the Dragon’s Trap. Cornut is also a huge SEGA fan and worked with a team of collaborators at SMS Power to preserve the console.

Hardware and software preserved

A huge amount of information has been made available on the console, including dumps of the game ROMs, internal system ROMs, photographs, screenshots, and more. Based on the information gathered, a basic MAME driver has also been created, allowing for emulation of the SEGA AI.

Omar Cornut

“The majority of these software titles had zero information about them on the internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of the actual software,” Cornut said, “Considering the elusive nature of this machine, it is possible that some games have never been seen or completed by anyone outside of their original development teams. We hope that this release will be interesting to obscure game and computer historians and hobbyists alike. We will further amend it over time by releasing extra scans, hopefully improving emulation and publishing/discovering new information.”