Hardware and History

Hardware and History covers the machines and the marketing behind them: consoles, chips, model revisions and the slogans that sold them. This site takes its name from one of those slogans, and the section holds one article so far.

That article, Blast processing: what SEGA claimed and what the Genesis did, traces the phrase Sega of America used in the early 1990s to sell the Genesis: where it came from, who coined it, what the hardware actually did, and how Nintendo answered, with every claim traced to a named source. It is the right first read on the site, because it explains the name and shows the standard the game pages keep: a date or a claim is printed with its source.

The game pages carry much of the hardware story in passing. Sonic the Hedgehog is the game the slogan was built to sell, Gunstar Heroes is the Genesis game people point to when they want to show what the hardware could do, and Sonic 3 & Knuckles explains a cartridge with a slot for another cartridge.

Planned for this section: the Genesis and Mega Drive by region, with names, dates and model revisions; then the 32X, the Sega CD, the Saturn launch, the Dreamcast, the Super NES's chips, cartridges against CDs, and the console-war advertising of the 1990s. The games themselves are in Retro.