A MAME driver has been developed by Wilbert Pol and Fabio Priuli, allowing the Sega AI Computer to be emulated. The system's software titles, which are mostly in Japanese and text-heavy, are difficult for non-Japanese readers to play. However, scans and screenshots of the games can give a sense of what they are. The Sega AI Computer's hardware was built by Nippon Gakki Co., Shizuoka, and the Prolog was developed partly by the CSK Research Institute. The system's software was developed by various companies, including Marubeni Corp and Kamiya.
Key takeaways:
- The Sega AI Computer, released in late 1986, is one of Sega’s least known and rarest systems, with limited information available about it.
- It was primarily an educational tool, with most of the software being educational and aimed at children. The system hardware was not used to its maximum potential, with later software titles from 1988-1989 being of higher quality than earlier ones.
- The system can boot software from small-sized cards similar to Master System and PC Engine cards, and also from its cassette drive. The Sega AI Computer cassettes are stereo, with one channel dedicated to storing encoded data, and the other to storing regular audio.
- A MAME driver has been developed by Wilbert Pol and Fabio Priuli, based on hardware research by Chris Covell, allowing the Sega AI Computer to be emulated. However, there are still known emulation bugs and issues as of January 2024.