Amstrad Mega PC

[englishinvader]

I remember seeing one of these in a magazine when I was a kid and thinking "Wow!". It's a 386 PC clone that has a built in Mega Drive console:
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Ultr...SwIwhWRPGT

The auction is currently at £226. I'm not bidding because I have neither the money or the space for it. I think the machine would have been a lot better if the MD and the 386 had been able to interact with each other instead of being completely separate. Would have made a great hacking and development tool.

[Centrale]

It looks like that listing has been removed. I'm not sure if this was the same thing, but there was a MD/PC combo made by Sega in 1991 called the Tera Drive. It had an 80286 processor as well as the Mega Drive's standard Motorola 68000 and Zilog Z-80. There were three models with 640KB, 1MB and 2.5MB RAM. In many ways it would have been my dream computer during a certain time of my childhood... I was always hoping they'd use the expansion ports on the Master System and Genesis to expand them into desktop computers. However in retrospect I think I was better off with an Amiga 500.

[englishinvader]

Nov 19, 2015 15:14:50 GMT Centrale said:

It looks like that listing has been removed.

Looks like someone made him an outside eBay offer he couldn't refuse.

[ShadowAngel]

Nov 19, 2015 15:14:50 GMT Centrale said:

I'm not sure if this was the same thing, but there was a MD/PC combo made by Sega in 1991 called the Tera Drive.

Different system.
The TeraDrive was produced by IBM mainly for the japanese market, which in itself was a weird decision, considering PC's were never all that popular over there (even the MSX couldn't change that)
The TeraDrive was also a very horrible, outdated computer. It was released in 1991 but still featured only a 286 CPU with only 10 MHz. I mean the 486 CPU with 25 MHz was released in 1989 and by 1991 you needed at least a 386 at home. The first version also only had the basic 640 KB Ram and not even a Hard Drive! The third release at least had 2 MB Ram and a 30 MB HDD (again, laughably outdated) and despite it featuring a old, slow CPU it has overheating issues because of the bad case and wiring inside.

The Amstrad had basically the same problem with it's completely outdated PC Hardware: 25 MHz 386 SX(SX was always the cheaper CPU type, usually either having only a 16-Bit BUS instead of 32-Bit or a deactivated numeric processor, they were crap), SVGA Graphic Card with only 256 KB Video-Ram, 1 MB Ram and an insane price. It originally retailed for 999 British Pounds which was later cut down to 599 but considering it was released in 1993 where a 40 MHz 386 DX with 4 MB Ram, 1 MB SVGA Graphic Card and a bigger HDD than the 40MB (you can't even install Ultima VII on that thing!) was standard, it was insane of Amstrad to expect a lot of people buying it.

Later they released another version called the Mega Plus where they decided to go with the Cx486LC CPU from Cyrix which was branded as a 486 Type CPU but realistically was only a 386SX with some Instruction Sets from the 486 CPU Line and 1KB L1 Cache added. But at least the PC came with 4 MB Ram.

Also i wonder who came up with that idea. Considering the PC Part was useless for gamers at the time and it's also not really family friendly. Imagine your typical family: Kid wants to play, Father has to do work on the PC. A lot of debate and chaos would ensure with this construction.