Sega System 24

From Sega Retro

System24.jpg
Sega System 24
Manufacturer: Sega
Release Date RRP Code
Arcade
JP
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Arcade
World
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The Sega System 24 (セガ システム 24) is an arcade platform released by Sega in the late 1980s. The System 24 is quite different from other "System" arcade boards - primarily it handles high resolution games with more colours, rather than serving as a direct successor to the standard Sega System 16 arcade hardware (this task was reserved for the Sega System 32).

Hardware

The System 24 uses two Motorola 68000 processors at 10 MHz. One is for booting, while the other is used by the game. The board holds 1360KB of RAM and 256kB of ROM, and was the first Sega arcade system that required a medium resolution arcade monitor. 4352 colors can be used on-screen from a selectable 32,768, or with shadow and highlight, 16,384 colors on screen selectable from 98,304.[1] The system can support up to 2048 sprites on-screen at once.

Sound is driven by a YM2151 at 4MHz; it is capable of delivering 8 channels of FM sound in addition to a DAC used for sound effects and speech synthesis. Early System 24s loaded their program off of floppy disks. Some later games such as Bonanza Bros. use CD-ROMs or hardware ROM boards as storage. No matter which storage device is used, a special security chip is required for each game an operator wants to play.

Technical specifications

  • Audio output: Stereo speakers, stereo headphones
  • GPU chipset: Sega 315-5242 Color Encoder, 315-5292 Tilemap Generator, 315-5293 Sprite Generator, 315-5294 Priority Mixer, 315-5295 Object Generator[1]
  • Video clock rate: 32 MHz
  • Pixel clock rate: 16 MHz
  • Graphical capabilities: Sprite zoom, scrolling, row & column scrolling, parallax scrolling
  • Internal memory: 1616–1872 KB
  • RAM: 1360–1616 KB
  • Main RAM: 512 KB (256 KB per CPU)
  • Video RAM: 848–1104 KB (16 KB colors, 192 KB tilemaps, 384 KB framebuffer VRAM, 256–512 KB sprite DRAM)
  • Internal ROM: 256 KB
  • Storage media: Floppy disk, ROM board
  • Resolution: 496×384 (display), 656×424 (overscan), progressive scan[2]
  • Refresh rate: 57.52416 Hz
  • Color palette: 98,304 (32,768 colors with shadow & highlight)
  • 16-bit color palette: 15-bit RGB high color depth (32,768 colors) and 1-bit shadow & highlight that triples up to 98,304 colors
  • Colors on screen: 16,384[2] (4352 colors with shadow & highlight)
  • Tilemaps:[3]
  • Tilemap layers: 4 (2 scrolling and 2 windowed)
  • Tile size: 8×8 pixels
  • Tiles per scrolling tilemap: 4096
  • Scrolling tilemap size: 512×512 pixels
  • Colors per tile: 16 to 256
  • Colors per sprite: 16 to 256
  • Sprite size: 8 to 1024 pixels in width/height
  • Sprite virtual space: 4096×4096 pixels
  • Sprites on screen: 2048
  • Framebuffers: Dual framebuffers @ 512×384 pixels each, double buffering[3]
  • Sprite texels per scanline: 1312
  • Sprites per scanline: 164

List of games

Production credits

Source:
Retrospective articles[4]


Magazine articles

Main article: Sega System 24/Magazine articles.

Promotional material

External links

Rererences


Sega arcade boards
Originating in arcades









Console-based hardware








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PC-based hardware








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