Video Game Gazette
The Sega 32X was released in 1994. As the name suggests it is a 32-bit system, and was Sega's first foray into the 'next generation' systems. It is somewhat unique amongst game systems in that it is a hardware upgrade for the Sega Genesis rather than a standalone system. Strangely enough, the 32X is not compatible with the last Genesis system, the CDX. Unfortunately, it had a short life and was soon replaced by the Sega Saturn.
The guts of the system consist of twin Hitachi SH2 32-bit RISC chips running at 23Mhz each. They can process 40 million instructions per second. The 32X only has 512 kilobytes of random access memory. This is not much of a problem because most games are cart based and thus have fast access times. The co-processing is handled by the Genesis' 68000, Z80, and VDP, and the 32X's custom VDP. The 32X has a palette of 32,768 colors, and can display 50,000 texture-mapped polygons per second. It has hardware scalling and rotation so that the processor is not tied up with routine stuff. The sound is processed by a stereo PCM chip which adds 2 extra channels to the Genesis.
