As 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.
As 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.
Why don't we get games with those graphics nowadays? I'm bored of AAA realism.
Bring back the Amiga graphics.
There are games like this, just look for pixel art games. E.g. Terraria, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, etc
I also recommend: Sea of Stars is one of the recent “modern” award winning indie JRPGs with pixel graphics.
“A Short Hike” is a lot of fun.
Plenty over on itch.io .
Ok, try this :)
AAA 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 :)
Because 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.
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.
Wasn't the original prolog implemented on a PDP-11/20 which only had 256kb of physical address space and no virtual memory?
People 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.
That 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).
Early to the AI hype, Sega was truly ahead of current times.
...or late, 1986 was deep into the first AI winter.
I 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_Syst...
Dreamcast was also both early and late.
What strikes me is how similar that keyboard's layout is to the HHKB's.
As far as I know, the HHKB was inspired by the Apple Lisa / Macintosh keyboard: 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.
I think it's more based on the TRS-80 Model 100 maybe?
Sega absolutely nailed it with graphic design in those days. My goodness.
They really did. As a design-nerd, it's some of my all-time absolute favourite retro hardware and software design.
This is the kind of design I need at least one of the many AI hardware startups to use for inspiration
Because 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.
Nah, it exists. Just rare and only released in one country.
I 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]
Any time I learn about a new retro system that I have never heard of, is an interesting day.
I’d bet this was funded by the Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) initiative.
I love this. The graphics on the box alone make me happy.
I 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
Genesis (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.
Not sure if that's true in most places, but at least in Brazil, the Master System was incredibly popular... I don't live there anymore, but around just 10 years ago I remember seeing it still for sale (though IIRC they used a different name then - but it was clearly the same) as a low cost game console (average people just can't afford a PlayStation). I had a Master System in the late 1980's and then a Mega Drive, and really loved them both... the Mega Drive was definitely a huge upgrade from the Master System (I was upgrading to Master System from Atari, which was a similarly big upgrade). I never upgraded again, to the Saturn, just because I stopped gaming almost completely for a while (I started playing in a rock band, it was the 1990's, all the cool kids were doing it)... and I got a PC (also Windows 3.1, classic Pentium 100MHz!) and started doing my gaming on it.
Yeah, the Master System was huge in Brazil. Sega was willing to license the design out to Tec Toy to manufacture locally, which got them around the massive import tariffs that made other systems unaffordable.
It was also very popular in Europe (and Australia?) - not sure if there's any real reason for that, but the consequence of it - this [0] absolutely incredible rap by two British teenagers - makes me very glad it was.
In North America and Japan, though, Nintendo absolutely commanded the market. Basically no one had a Master System.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks0_3Xlr5y0
Nintendo was pretty bad about marketing the NES in the UK at least. Sega did a much better job so more people had a Master System. I assume this is true for the rest of the region too.
SEGA also made a few MSX machines
Back before retro consoles were really collectible, I snapped up a giant pile of SMS stuff at a thrift shop for 35 USD.
I believe it was almost my whole collection:
- SMS 1st gen - 2 controllers - Light gun - A few card games in their original boxes - ~25 cart games, most of them in original boxes, some with manuals
When I was living with a friend post-college, we would actually play it a bunch. Dreamcast and PS2 as well.
Not 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 :)
Is this the Jolly Roger restored build or a build of X-treme I haven’t heard of yet?
It's been several years I guess but from following my own breadcrumbs, yeah I think it was the Jollyroger build.
Darn. Thanks for checking though, I appreciate the effort
Something 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.
I 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.
It'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.
Sega still makes these neat things: https://www.segatoys.space/en/public/flux.html
That’s really cool! Do you own one?
I 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.
Do 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.
I have one of the original models and the motor noise is probably dependent on whether or not you're the sort of person who needs a perfectly quiet room or if you can sleep with a fan. If you have a ceiling fan (or any other noise maker, like a blowing AC system), you're almost certainly not going to hear the motor. IIRC, EEV blog tore one down and the whole rotating assembly is belt driven so that you don't have gear noise. The only thing I ever hear is a very slight hobby motor hum when everything is dead silent.
When you order it I think it comes with 2 discs, but yeah, all the others are individual orders, unless you want to order the 17 pack of third party discs for $300.
Other things to be aware of:
1) It looks really good, like good enough to feel like you really are out under the stars in a properly blacked out room. but getting the focus just right is fiddly and very easy to knock out of focus again
2) Like any projector it works best projecting straight on. I doubt you have space in the exact center of your room to project straight up, so be prepared to accept this will be a distorted projection. You get used to it and it doesn't really ruin the effect that much, but it's disappointing at first.
3) The 3 hour timer is built in and impossible to disable to the best of my knowledge. If you want it running all night, you'll want a smart plug or a programmable timer plug that can turn off for a few minutes intermittently. I found ~5 minutes every 2.5 hours to work well. Too short and the timer doesn't seem to reset.
4) There are some really nice 3rd party discs out there too, but their sharpness and overall realism varies greatly so be cautious when ordering.
I 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.
Sega was known as a games company then, too. They've always been a games company - the name Se-Ga stands for SErvice GAmes, because their original business was importing games for American servicemen stationed abroad to play in their leisure time. The most they've ever really deviated from being totally game-focused towards general-purpose computing is when they licensed out their hardware to be incorporated into computers like the TeraDrive.
I would assume the concept is about games because all of the software available for it looks to be edutainment games. More than anything, it feels like a predecessor to Sega's lines of educational game consoles like the Pico. There seems to be an association in Sega history between it and AI and education. As the link says:
The "computer" here might be something of a misnomer - there wasn't quite so hard a line between consoles and home computers back then, especially outside of North America. After all, the NES was known as the "Family Computer" in Japan.
I'd describe it as a gimmick because it's not clear what exactly the association with Prolog is here, particularly for the end user:
Sega might have pushed the AI/Prolog angle because, then-as-now, AI was a hot buzzword in tech. Japan in particular had bought into the AI/Prolog thing, due to the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project [0].
If the games mostly weren't written in Prolog, and the user can't use Prolog, but AI and Prolog were trendy at the time, I think calling it the AI Prolog to tap into that hype is a bit of a gimmick.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
Good time for Sega to bring it back
From 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_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.
Sounds 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.)
I’m neither , and think it’s insanely cool as well.