When you think back to Sega’s arcade heyday in the Eighties, games like Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner spring to mind first. It was these show-stopping Super-Scaler titles, in their deluxe sit-down forms, that drew crowds and defined Sega as perhaps the most exciting arcade developer of the era.
Yet the arcade industry was a battleground back then, with manufacturers fiercely competing for floor space. Sega couldn’t rely on one or two high-profile titles per year to keep itself at the forefront of the scene, so it utilised different arcade hardware to produce a steady stream of releases that provided operators with the widest possible choice in terms of cost and game type. Take 1988 as an example. In the year that Sega released Galaxy Force and Power Drift, two stunning titles running on its then flagship Y Board hardware, it put out another 14 arcade games. Among these were several System 16 titles such as Altered Beast, Dynamite Dux and Passing Shot, plus games on three other formats, including an arcade version of Tetris that ran on what was essentially Master System hardware.
1988 also saw the launch of System 24, Sega’s new format that would further extend its output by offering games running at higher resolutions. At themedium-resolution 24KHz monitors. This resulted in a more-detailed, higher-density display thanks to a 65% increase in horizontal resolution and a 50% increase in vertical resolution compared to an ordinary low-res monitor. The system also marked another first for Sega – the game data was stored on a floppy disk which was read using a standard 3.5-inch disk drive connected to the main arcade board. The idea here was to reduce costs for operators. Not only did the disk reduce the number of chips required on the board, but once takings for a game started to tail off, a new game disk and accompanying EPROMs could be purchased and slotted straight in. So operators could buy in the hardware and 24KHz monitor for £2,795 and then benefit from a low-maintenance system that could be regularly refreshed with top new Sega games costing around £400 each – typically half the cost of a new game PCB at the time.
