« Architecture of Consoles

Sega Master System Architecture

A practical analysis by Rodrigo Copetti

Blink edition - Last updated: 12 October 2020

Languages available: English, Polski, Español, 简体字, Add translation


Book cover

Read this article in chapters

  1. Supporting Imagery
  2. A quick introduction
  3. Models and variants
  4. CPU
  5. Graphics
  6. Audio
  7. I/O
  8. Operating System
  9. Games
  10. Anti-Piracy and Region locking
  11. That's all folks
  12. Sources
  13. Changelog

About this edition

The 'blink' edition goes a step beyond the 'classic' counterpart by paying tribute to HTML 2.0 and plain HTTP, allowing equipment from the 1990s to access it. After all, the World Wide Web was originally designed to share research.

This edition is identical content-wise. However, interactive widgets have been simplified to work with pure HTML, though these will offer an link to the original article in case the reader wants to try the 'full version'.

As always, this article is available on Github to enable readers to report mistakes or propose changes. There's also a supporting reading list available to help understand the series. The author also accepts donations and translations to help improve the quality of current articles and upcoming ones.


Contributing

This article is part of the Architecture of Consoles series. If you found it interesting then please consider donating. Your contribution will be used to fund the purchase of tools and resources that will help me to improve the quality of existing articles and upcoming ones.

You can also buy the book editions in English. I treat profits as donations.

Book edition

Big thanks to the following people for their donation:

Alternatively, you can help out by suggesting changes and/or adding translations.


Copyright and permissions

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may use it for your work at no cost, even for commercial purposes. But you have to respect the license and reference the article properly. Please take a look at the following guidelines and permissions:

Article information and referencing

For any referencing style, you can use the following information:

For instance, to use with BibTeX:

@misc{copetti-mastersystem,
    url = {http://blink.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/},
    title = {Sega Master System Architecture - A Practical Analysis},
    author = {Rodrigo Copetti},
    year = {2020}
}

or a IEEE style citation:

[1]R. Copetti, "Sega Master System Architecture - A Practical Analysis", Copetti.org, 2020. [Online]. Available: http://blink.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/. [Accessed: day- month- year].

Special use in multimedia (Youtube, Twitch, etc)

I only ask that you at least state the author’s name, the title of the article and the URL of the article, using any style of choice.

You don’t have to include all the information in the same place if it’s not feasible. For instance, if you use the article’s imagery in a Youtube video, you may state either the author’s name or URL of the article at the bottom of the image, and then include the complete reference in the video description. In other words, for any resource used from this website, let your viewers know where it originates from.

This is a very nice example because the channel shows this website directly and their viewers know where to find it. In fact, I was so impressed with their content and commentary that I gave them an interview 🙂.

Appreciated additions

If this article has significantly contributed to your work, I would appreciate it if you could dedicate an acknowledgement section, just like I do with the people and communities that helped me.

This is of course optional and beyond the requirements of the CC license, but I think it’s a nice detail that makes us, the random authors on the net, feel part of something bigger.

Third-party publishing

If you are interested in publishing this article on a third-party website, please get in touch.

If you have translated an article and wish to publish it on a third-party website, I tend to be open about it, but please contact me first.


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