SEGA has successfully dipped into the mini console trend and released two Mega Drive Mini consoles but what’s very interesting is that an individual who says he works for a small specialist electronics manufacturer received a Request for Quote from a company that has worked on licensed SEGA hardware before. The request was for what appears to be a modern low cost 2D centric handheld gaming device. This could be SEGA dipping its toes into the handheld market with a modern handheld that plays classic SEGA games. Here’s what the post author wrote:
- Low cost handheld gaming device
- Low power ARM processor, not x86
- 5″ OLED panel (same form factor as the Vita), aggressive cost cutting elsewhere to accommodate this
- Seemingly pretty limited internal storage
- Removable game cartridges
- No mention of 3D acceleration beyond basic UI/compositing
- References being designed for “modern 2D titles” and “pixel art presentation”
The cart design is the the most interesting part:
- Not the usual high capacity consumer NAND you’d expect of a modern handheld
- Looks like low capacity industrial eMMC modules – these are readily available and not caught up in the AI memory price inflation
- Smaller storage, makes sense if the target games are 2D Indies etc.
So sega is gonna get another company to slap it’s sega logo in it again? Sammy corp won’t allow sega to make another console unless they get a Chinese company to make a cheap plastic one
Watch it be like a MyArcade handheld for 50$ that only has like the first 2 sonic games.
Potentially big. The only problem is physical releases can be a barrier for indie devs that make these smaller scale games. Surely an Mini SD card slot could fix that, right?
If Nintendo ever does another dedicated handheld, they should totally go in this direction… an economical, low-powered machine that plays less intensive games.
Evercade offers carts that bundle a bunch of indie titles together.
Watch it having the same damn ported games.
They had me at cartridges. I just want a damn system, portable or otherwise, that i can play games on like the old days without an internet requirement.
Of everything here, the most surprising is the swappable cartridges. I would have expected something pure digital.
I imagine it will be mostly a retro machine. There aren’t that many modern games that would likely be able to run on this thing. I wonder if it can at least handle Somic Mania?
Sounds bad like AtGames junk. Too cheap to be anything worth playing on over what’s available. Bad screen and control latency are things Sega would tolerate, you just know it
Those AtGames have very bad emulation, I don’t think this will have bad emulation unless they really cheap out on that.
Sega has let plenty of third parties put out bad Sonic the Hedgehog emulation. The Genesis mini had such a cheap SoC that not even M2 could save Sonic from jumping seconds after pressing down the button. Even after a mod came out to fix the latency it was still bad because Sega went with the cheapest garbage components they could source
And Nintendo doesn’t cheap out on their own hardware..? The Switch 2 screen has worse response time than the original Switch. And that’s just one example.
can hear sonic fans running to play sonic 1,2, and 3 again for the 1000th time.
If it includes sonic advanced trilogy and sonic battle i’d be surprised though lol
Sounds like a bad idea to me.