Fans Preserve and Emulate Sega's Extremely Rare '80s 'AI Computer'

Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: Even massive Sega fans would be forgiven for not being too familiar with the Sega AI Computer. After all, the usually obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro includes only the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 hardware. Thankfully, the folks at the self-described "Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism" site SMS Power have been able to go a little deeper. The site's recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Computer includes an incredible amount of well-documented information on this historical oddity, including ROMs for dozens of previously unpreserved pieces of software that can now be partially run on MAME. [...] While the general existence of the Sega AI Computer has been known in certain circles for a while, detailed information about its workings and software was extremely hard to come by, especially in the English-speaking world. That began to change in 2014 when a rare Yahoo Auctions listing offered a boxed AI Computer along with 15 pieces of software. The site was able to crowdfund the winning bid on that auction (which reportedly ran the equivalent of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and more software from the winner of a 2022 auction.SMS Power notes that the majority of the software it has uncovered "had zero information about them on the Internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of actual software." Now, the site's community has taken the trouble to preserve all those ROMs and create a new MAME driver that already allows for "partial emulation" of the system (which doesn't yet include a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation support). That dumped software is all "educational and mostly aimed at kids," SMS Power notes, and is laden with Japanese text that will make it hard for many foreigners to even tinker with. That means this long-lost emulation release probably won't set the MAME world on fire as 2022's surprise dump of Marble Madness II did. Still, it's notable how much effort the community has put in to fill a formerly black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega history. SMS Power's write-up of its findings is well worth a full look, as is the site's massive Google Drive, which is filled with documentation, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and ads, and much more.

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