Kyle Orlando reports via Ars Technica: Even if you're a big Sega fan, you'd be forgiven for not knowing much about the Sega AI computer. After all, the usual obsessive documentation found on Sega Retro includes only a small portion of the information pages about his quirky, educationally focused 1986 hardware. Thankfully, the folks at SMS Power, a self-proclaimed “Sega 8-bit preservation and fanatic” site, were able to dig a little deeper. A detailed article about the Sega AI Computer recently posted on this site includes information about this historical oddity, including dozens of previously unsaved software ROMs that can now be partially run on MAME. Contains an incredible amount of well-documented information about. […]
Although the general existence of the Sega AI computer has been known in some circles for some time, detailed information about its workings and software has been extremely difficult to obtain, especially in English-speaking countries. That began to change in 2014, when a boxed AI computer and 15 pieces of his software went up for sale in a rare Yahoo auction listing. The site was able to crowdfund the winning bid from that auction (reportedly worth $1,100) and then acquired the keyboard and other software from the winning bidder in the 2022 auction. SMS Power says that the majority of the software it discovered “had no information about them on the internet at all prior to publication. There were no screenshots, photos, scans, etc. of the actual software.” . Now the community on this site has created a new MAME driver that preserves all these ROMs and already allows for “partial emulation” of the system (which does not yet include support for keyboard, tape drive, or voice emulation). It takes a lot of effort to create it.
SMS Power says all of its dumped software is “educational and aimed primarily at children” and is filled with Japanese text that is difficult for many foreigners to even play with. That said, the release of this long-lost emulation probably won't set his MAME world on fire like 2022's sudden dump of Marble Madness II. Still, it's remarkable how much effort the community has put into filling what was once a black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega's history. His article on SMS Power's findings is well worth a read, as is his extensive Google Drive on the site, filled with documents, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and advertisements, and more.
