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A handful of years ago, SEGA released a miniaturized version of its classic Mega Drive, packing in some fan-favorite games that gamers loved from that era of gaming. Three years later, and they're ready to improve upon that, by releasing the Mega Drive Mini 2. Stylized just like the second variant of the Mega Drive, the mini version will offer Sega CD games as well. The throwback console was revealed during a livestream from Sega of Japan, and has no western release confirmed for now. It'll release on October 27th, and will retail for about $75 (¥9,980). The confirmed games are as follows:

Silpheed (SEGA CD)
Shining Force CD (SEGA CD)
Mansion of Hidden Souls (SEGA CD)
Sonic CD (SEGA CD)
Popful Mail (SEGA CD)
Virtua Racing (Mega Drive)
Bonanza Bros (Mega Drive)
Shining in the Darkness (Mega Drive)
Thunder Force IV (Mega Drive)
Magical Taruto (Mega Drive)
Fantasy Zone (new Mega Drive release)

Notable among these titles is Fantasy Zone, which never actually released for the Mega Drive itself. According to the livestream, this version of the game is a brand new port, and is based on Super Fantasy Zone, which did release on the Mega Drive in 1992.

 

[Jayro]

What about Sega Saturn ?

Saturn is a bitch to emulate, even the Pi 4 barely cuts it. I don't see it cost effective for a long time.

 

[Marc_LFD]

It also had a lot more bad games. And a high price tag.

Not sure where "poor marketing" factors into it; they marketed the heck out of it.
https://archive.org/details/Sega-MegaCD-Promo-Video-1993

The Wii U was a commercial failure with not a lot of games, but the ones it had were really good. Same goes for the Sega CD.

Seems folks are much more critical of Sega than Nintendo.

 

[chrisrlink]

Saturn is a bitch to emulate, even the Pi 4 barely cuts it. I don't see it cost effective for a long time.

well PS4 (fpkg's) seem to work fine anything i threw at it (minus multi disc games saturn-fpkg doesn't have support yet) but then again the ps4 is loads more powerful than a pi 4

 

[Kwyjor]

The Wii U was a commercial failure with not a lot of games, but the ones it had were really good. Same goes for the Sega CD.

Really now, these systems were released twenty years apart in wildly different environments. I suppose you could say that the CD-ROM at the time was similar to the Wii U gamepad in that they were both new technology and no one really understood how to best take advantage of it – but no one is ever likely to release a system with something like the Wii U gamepad again. After all, most of the really good Wii U games have since been ported elsewhere.

 

[spectral]

well PS4 (fpkg's) seem to work fine anything i threw at it (minus multi disc games saturn-fpkg doesn't have support yet) but then again the ps4 is loads more powerful than a pi 4

Yes Saturn can be emulated well on suitably powerful hardware and Sega could most certainly make one. However would people be willing to pay the $200+ it would likely cost?

 

[godreborn]

well PS4 (fpkg's) seem to work fine anything i threw at it (minus multi disc games saturn-fpkg doesn't have support yet) but then again the ps4 is loads more powerful than a pi 4

I think that's using an already built emulator, the one for cotton actually. it seems to be more stable than any other system emulator, but it's not built by developers.

 

[raging_chaos]

Yes Saturn can be emulated well on suitably powerful hardware and Sega could most certainly make one. However would people be willing to pay the $200+ it would likely cost?

That's only if you are looking at emulators that are trying to be cycle-accurate and/or add graphical enhancements. SSF does not have very high system requirements, has high compatibility, and is in fact the same emulator running in the Switch Cotton game. An SSF emulator box wouldn't cost that much to produce, but would casual buyers be happy with the look of low-resolution 3D Saturn games on modern TVs? Probably not. The 2D games would shine brightly however.

 

[godreborn]

That's only if you are looking at emulators that are trying to be cycle-accurate and/or add graphical enhancements. SSF does not have very high system requirements, has high compatibility, and is in fact the same emulator running in the Switch Cotton game. An SSF emulator box wouldn't cost that much to produce, but would casual buyers be happy with the look of low-resolution 3D Saturn games on modern TVs? Probably not. The 2D games would shine brightly however.

thanks for confirming. I have the cotton reboot, but I think this is the original? a friend of mine bought cotton 1 and 2 on disc for the ps4, but I think it had to be imported since the usa didn't receive a hard copy.

 

[spectral]

That's only if you are looking at emulators that are trying to be cycle-accurate and/or add graphical enhancements. SSF does not have very high system requirements, has high compatibility, and is in fact the same emulator running in the Switch Cotton game. An SSF emulator box wouldn't cost that much to produce, but would casual buyers be happy with the look of low-resolution 3D Saturn games on modern TVs? Probably not. The 2D games would shine brightly however.

It has way higher requirements than the SOC's most mini consoles use and they usually go for between $70-100. With the extra power needed to emulate Saturn and the extra storage for the much larger file sizes and adding on the kind of profit margin they usually add, I really do think we'd still be looking at $200+.

 

[Deleted member 532471]

Idk who's going to win e3, but I know who lost.
Between this and the new sonic being cool but getting a "Cuphead tutorial" journalistic presentation from IGN Sega has it really bad this year.

Like, I would be so happy if they would only dump a handful of Saturn games on steam, but they keep pretending it didn't exist.

 

[Deleted member 532471]

It has way higher requirements than the SOC's most mini consoles use and they usually go for between $70-100. With the extra power needed to emulate Saturn and the extra storage for the much larger file sizes and adding on the kind of profit margin they usually add, I really do think we'd still be looking at $200+.

They have the source code, they don't need to emulate it. They could probably run the games out of a raspberry pi I'd they would only port them.
Storage is not really that expensive either, even the mega 2 mini has room for 20 CD games, each iso is 700mb.
You can fit every single worthwhile game on the Saturn in a 32/64gb micro SD card and those are cheap.
The only problem is Sega despises the Saturn and even skips it in retrospectives

 

[subcon959]

They have the source code, they don't need to emulate it. They could probably run the games out of a raspberry pi I'd they would only port them.
Storage is not really that expensive either, even the mega 2 mini has room for 20 CD games, each iso is 700mb.
You can fit every single worthwhile game on the Saturn in a 32/64gb micro SD card and those are cheap.
The only problem is Sega despises the Saturn and even skips it in retrospectives

Objection: Hearsay/Lack of foundation.

 

[tech3475]

even the mega 2 mini has room for 20 CD games, each iso is 700mb.

Not necessarily true, my EU bin/cue rip of Sonic CD is only 556MB, which can be further compressed by converting the CDDA to a lossy format. The actual game data iso is only 123MB and quickly converting the OST to ogg got it down to around 45MB, so 168MB in total.

 

[spotanjo3]

Hopefully it's not just these games. Sega CD had a lot of good games, but Sega's poor marketing and Nintendo fanboys buried it.

Like what "a lot of good games" do you recommended ? I don't see any good games in my opinion. I would like to know.

 

[raging_chaos]

It has way higher requirements than the SOC's most mini consoles use and they usually go for between $70-100. With the extra power needed to emulate Saturn and the extra storage for the much larger file sizes and adding on the kind of profit margin they usually add, I really do think we'd still be looking at $200+.

That extra power is only needed when you start turning advanced settings on like the Vulkan renderer. You didn't need a supercomputer to run Saturn games at decent framerates back then and you don't need one now. The absolute minimum depending on the version of SSF used to be something like:

CPU: Supports FPU (Floating Point Unit), supports the TSC (Time Stamp Counter),
and supports MMX, SSE, and SSE2 instruction sets. (Pentium 4/Athlon 64, or above)

RAM: 256MB or above

Video card: A GPU capable of drawing textures at the size of 1024x512 and 1024x1024.
This includes any modern video card or onboard video device.

I'm certain Shima is capable of getting SSF to run on a $100 720P Linux box. When you keep expectations low the costs are low. No one should be expecting to be able to run Mednafen, Yabause, etc or do things like upscale textures/resolution on such a box. We're talking about driving 320×224 to 704×224 worth of unfiltered pixels and unprocessed textures at 720P here. Will eye candy 4/8k 300FPS loving freaks find a reason to complain? Absolutely. A nostalgic collector that missed out back in the day probably won't care much.

 

[PacBunnyXV07]

It has way higher requirements than the SOC's most mini consoles use and they usually go for between $70-100. With the extra power needed to emulate Saturn and the extra storage for the much larger file sizes and adding on the kind of profit margin they usually add, I really do think we'd still be looking at $200+.

Wouldn't Sega most likely make a Sega Saturn Slim rather than just making a console and then slapping an emulator in it?

 

[duwen]

Like what "a lot of good games" do you recommended ? I don't see any good games in my opinion. I would like to know.

Aside from the titles confirmed for the device, there's a handful of great shmups, the best home port (pre XBLA/PS3) of Final Fight, some of the FMV games like Road Avenger and Night Trap (granted, they haven't aged well, but they're classics of the genre)... and a little game called Snatcher from some Kojima bloke.

 

[spectral]

That extra power is only needed when you start turning advanced settings on like the Vulkan renderer. You didn't need a supercomputer to run Saturn games at decent framerates back then and you don't need one now. The absolute minimum depending on the version of SSF used to be something like:

I'm certain Shima is capable of getting SSF to run on a $100 720P Linux box. When you keep expectations low the costs are low. No one should be expecting to be able to run Mednafen, Yabause, etc or do things like upscale textures/resolution on such a box. We're talking about driving 320×224 to 704×224 worth of unfiltered pixels and unprocessed textures at 720P here. Will eye candy 4/8k 300FPS loving freaks find a reason to complain? Absolutely. A nostalgic collector that missed out back in the day probably won't care much.

That is still way more power than the SOC's in the likes of the PS Mini or SNES Mini,etc and they retail at $70-100. They aren't going to make it and sell it at cost

 

[spectral]

Wouldn't Sega most likely make a Sega Saturn Slim rather than just making a console and then slapping an emulator in it?

No, the components in the Saturn are long since out of production. That would be very expensive to do now if even possible at all. None of the mini consoles are actual mini versions of the actual console. They're all just low powered SOC's running emulators.

 

[Viri]

I don't know if it's just me, but I prefer the model 1 Sega CD over the model 2 Sega CD. Model 2 just looks so cheap for some reason. Model 1 reminds me of a PC disk drive.