Fans Preserve and Emulate Sega's Extremely Rare '80s 'AI Computer' (arstechnica.com) 15
Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: Even massive Sega fans would be forgiven for not being too familiar with the Sega AI Computer. After all, the usually obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro includes only the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 hardware. Thankfully, the folks at the self-described "Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism" site SMS Power have been able to go a little deeper. The site's recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Computer includes an incredible amount of well-documented information on this historical oddity, including ROMs for dozens of previously unpreserved pieces of software that can now be partially run on MAME. [...]
While the general existence of the Sega AI Computer has been known in certain circles for a while, detailed information about its workings and software was extremely hard to come by, especially in the English-speaking world. That began to change in 2014 when a rare Yahoo Auctions listing offered a boxed AI Computer along with 15 pieces of software. The site was able to crowdfund the winning bid on that auction (which reportedly ran the equivalent of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and more software from the winner of a 2022 auction. SMS Power notes that the majority of the software it has uncovered "had zero information about them on the Internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of actual software." Now, the site's community has taken the trouble to preserve all those ROMs and create a new MAME driver that already allows for "partial emulation" of the system (which doesn't yet include a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation support).
That dumped software is all "educational and mostly aimed at kids," SMS Power notes, and is laden with Japanese text that will make it hard for many foreigners to even tinker with. That means this long-lost emulation release probably won't set the MAME world on fire as 2022's surprise dump of Marble Madness II did. Still, it's notable how much effort the community has put in to fill a formerly black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega history. SMS Power's write-up of its findings is well worth a full look, as is the site's massive Google Drive, which is filled with documentation, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and ads, and much more.
While the general existence of the Sega AI Computer has been known in certain circles for a while, detailed information about its workings and software was extremely hard to come by, especially in the English-speaking world. That began to change in 2014 when a rare Yahoo Auctions listing offered a boxed AI Computer along with 15 pieces of software. The site was able to crowdfund the winning bid on that auction (which reportedly ran the equivalent of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and more software from the winner of a 2022 auction. SMS Power notes that the majority of the software it has uncovered "had zero information about them on the Internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of actual software." Now, the site's community has taken the trouble to preserve all those ROMs and create a new MAME driver that already allows for "partial emulation" of the system (which doesn't yet include a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation support).
That dumped software is all "educational and mostly aimed at kids," SMS Power notes, and is laden with Japanese text that will make it hard for many foreigners to even tinker with. That means this long-lost emulation release probably won't set the MAME world on fire as 2022's surprise dump of Marble Madness II did. Still, it's notable how much effort the community has put in to fill a formerly black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega history. SMS Power's write-up of its findings is well worth a full look, as is the site's massive Google Drive, which is filled with documentation, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and ads, and much more.
What was the binary architecture? (Score:1)
Did it use A.out?
Re: (Score:2)
A much more pertinent question today: since it was an "AI computer", which "LLM" did it use?
Seriously, cool hobby. I found a pile of 8086 chips, memory modules and various other junk in an old storage room at school a few months ago and a part of me still wants to build a pc from them. Or better yet, see if someone with this kind of hobby needs them for something.
Re: (Score:2)
They use x86 chips in stickers these days, the kind you put on your windshield and are scanned by tolling booths on the highway. Saw it in a YouTube video a few years ago.
Those things continue to function in nearly any condition, including being baked by the sun all day.
Re:What was the binary architecture? (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the day, Prolog was a language commonly used in AI and computational linguistics research because it is good at representing and processing logical relations. If I remember my college classes right, the unification algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_(computer_science)) was at it's core.
The race to bottom with neural networks is rather sad to see.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I remember it fondly, I once had to build a GUI on top of a simple expert system we developed for someone... Oh, the horror :)
How did we not hear about this? (Score:2)
The specs on this machine were surprising! If my understanding of the timeline here isn't too inaccurate this was probably being developed as the game market was crashing. One of the reasons the NES loaded cartridges the way it did was to keep the product from looking too much like the big pile of shovelware that was suffocating Atari. Sega here went full "educate the kids!" in surprising ways. It doesn't surprise me that it failed, but wtf did the Sega AI surprise me in 2024 yet I've seen like four
Re: (Score:3)
not really surprising - Atari had computers and much better computers than game consoles. This was released in 1986? The year after the first Macintosh came out with a 16bit processor. These sorts of computers were all the rage at the time. What's surprisi
Re: (Score:3)
I remember reading The fifth generation: artificial intelligence and Japan's computer challenge to the world [archive.org] by Edward Feigenbaum & Pamela McCorduck at the time.
Marble Madness 2 was a lot of nothing (Score:4, Informative)
Marble Madness 2 didn't set anyone's world on fire. A few people played it and realised it's a shit game, and everyone promptly forgot about it five minutes later. It failed location test for good reasons. The only reason people ever cared about it was because Scott "SafeStuff"/"AtariScott" Evans had spent twenty years making sure everyone knew that he had it and they didn't.
That's the thing with all these holy grails of emulation. People only care about them as long as they remain unemulated. The moment they're emulated, they lose their mystique, and people start begging for the next thing to be emulated. In the last year we've managed to emulate Namco System 10 (long considered impossible due to encryption and complexity), Um Jammer Lammy NOW! (very rare due to basically failing in the market against Konami Guitar Freaks) and Kato's Shamisen Brothers (very obscure Japanese rhythm game). Everyone's forgotten already.
The Sega AI computer emulation is more interesting due to its place in the history of educational computer development. But it's largely been overshadowed by Dragon's Lair and Thayer's Quest becoming playable in the same release, despite these being fairly lame games that are basically a sequence of QuickTime events and multiple choice questions.
Marble Madness 2 was special (Score:4, Interesting)
To anyone of a certain vintage who heard the stories of marble madness 2 it would be something that they would desperately want to experience. And I can promise you that people would have enjoyed that experience in and of itself and not just its ideal.
I don't think this little computer is anywhere near the importance to Old School retro gamers as marble madness 2. It's just another cool rare computer. It doesn't have anywhere near the sentimentality that marble madness 2 has for anyone that grew up with the original arcades and on stuff like Crystal castles and Temple of Doom and return of the Jedi and any one of a dozen other classic games from the mid 80s