Sega X Board
From Sega Retro
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| Sega X Board | |||||
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| Manufacturer: Sega | |||||
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The Sega X Board is an arcade system board released by Sega in 1987 as a successor to Sega OutRun hardware. It debuted with After Burner and Thunder Blade.
The X Board specification is largely similar to that of the OutRun Hardware board, but allows for twice as many sprites/textures on screen at once, twice as many tile layers, and sprite rotation effects. The contents have also been condensed onto a single board, making it slightly easier to manufacture.
The X Board would be succeeded by the Y Board and System 32, before the Model 1 made true 3D arcade games more financially affordable.
Contents
Hardware
As the third in Sega's Super Scaler series of arcade hardware (after the Sega Hang-On hardware and Sega OutRun hardware), it was noteworthy for its sprite/texture manipulation capabilities, which allowed it to create high quality three-dimensional visuals, such as the scaling and rotating environments in 1987's After Burner, and the ray casting like environments in 1988's Last Survivor. This trend would continue with the Y Board and the System 32, before the Model 1 made true polygonal 3D arcade games more financially affordable.
Technical Specifications
X Board Specifications
- Board composition: Single board
- CPU:
- Sound chips:
- Graphics processing unit: Sega Super Scaler chipset @ 50MHz
- Main graphics chips: 315-5197 tilemap generator, 315-5211A sprite generator, 315-5242 color encoder, 315-5275 road generator, 315-5278 sprite ROM bank control
- Math chips: 315-5248 hardware multiplier, 315-5249 hardware divider
- Video resolution: 320×224 (display), 400×262[1][2] (overscan), progressive scan
- Scanlines: 224 (display), 262 (overscan)
- Refresh rate: 59.6368 to 60Hz (V-sync)
- Frame rate: 59.6368 to 60 frames per second
- Color palette: 98,304
- 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: 24,576
- Graphical planes:
- 4 tile layers
- 1 text layer
- 1 sprite layer with hardware sprite zooming
- 1 road layer, can draw 2 roads at once
- Translucent shadows
- Sprite/texture capabilities: Dual sprite framebuffers, 512×256 framebuffer resolution, hardware sprite zooming, sprite rotation, ray casting[3]
- Sprite/texture sizes: 8×8 to 512×256 pixels
- Colors per sprite/texture: 16
- Sprites/textures on screen: 256 on screen at one time per frame, 15,267 to 15,360 scaled per second
- Video clock cycles: 50 MHz
- Fillrate: 50 million pixels/texels per second
- Sprite pixels/texels per frame: 833,333 (60 Hz) to 838,408 (59.6368 Hz)
- Sprite pixels/texels per scanline: 3180 to 3200 sprite pixels/texels per scanline
- Sprites/textures per scanline: 256
Super Monaco GP Specifications
Super Monaco GP (1989) added the following upgrades:
- Additional boards: Network board, sound board, motor board
- Additional CPU: 2× Zilog Z80 @ 8MHz (2.32MIPS)
- Additional sound CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 4MHz (0.58MIPS)
- Additional sound chip: SegaPCM @ 4MHz (additional 16 PCM channels, totalling 32 PCM channels)
- Sound output: 4-channel surround sound
List of Games
- After Burner (1987)
- After Burner II (1987)
- Thunder Blade (1987)
- Last Survivor (1989)
- Line of Fire (1989)
- Super Monaco GP (1989)
- GP Rider (1990)
- AB Cop (1990)
- Racing Hero (1990)
- Caribbean Boule (1992)
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