Video Game Gazette
Sega released the Megadrive in 1988. It was the first genuine 16-bit system. A year later they brought the system to America and renamed it the Genesis. It was the dominant system of the early part of the 16-bit revolution.
At its core is a Motorola 68000 running at 7.61 MHz. It has a dedicated video display processor that controls the background and sprites. There is hardware support for 2 scrolling backgrounds, and 1 sprite plane. The system has a resolution of 320x224 pixels. The Genesis has a 512 color pallete and can display 64 colors simultaneously. The sound is handeled by two chips: (1) A Texas Instruments 76489 Programmable Sound Generator; and (2) Yamaha YM 2612 Frequency Modulation chip. The system could produce si channels of sound in stereo The Genesis uses a Z80 co-processor running at 4 MHz to contol the programmable sound generator and frequency modulation chips. It has 64 kilobytes of dedicated VRAM, 64 x 9-bits of CRAM (Color RAM), and 8 Kilobytes of RAM dedicated to audio. The system itself has 64 kilobytes of RAM.
