Welcome back, to the Hard4Games channel, everybody!
We are your number one show on YouTube in terms of having a regrettable name choice.
Today we're taking a look at the Sofia systems SegaSaturn programming box.
What can it do? What is the history?
What is it all about? Let's get started.
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So, a big THANK YOU to Andrew E. for lending this giant lug of a machine, and sending it over to us.
and also big THANK YOU to Shane Battye for just providing a massive amount of information on the Sofia.
So, the Sofia was the dev kit for the ill-fated Sega Saturn
or at least it was the "Sega Saturn" portion of the SegaSaturn development kit setup.
It was meant to be utilized in conjunction with other pieces of equipment,
so instead of describing it let's just go ahead and take a look at Shane's setup here.
We have these Sofia. It's connected to the e-7000, hooked up to monitors, a PC, etc.
So, I'm not going to talk about the other pieces of dev equipment too much.
The stuff that was contemporary and also the equipment that came after the Sofia that sort of replaced it.
But I do want to point out the pricing on this.
It was just, incredibly, stupidly expensive.
So here we have the Sega Saturn Dev system with Hitachi e-7000PC ICE package, the programming target box which is the Sofia.
Ah-dadadada
All for a cool 30,000 and a half dollars and in contrast just for these Sofia package,
I.e. the programming target box, It was about 7.4k.
Crazy expensive.
Especially in comparison to what Nintendo was selling their dev equipment for.
Not quite sure what Sony was selling their dev equipment for,
but I have a funny feeling it wasn't this amount.
Though it could be wrong. Tell me how wrong I am in the comments. You always do~
This, however, is definitely a barrier to entry for developers or was a barrier to entry anyways.
So, full stop aside, let's just talk about the Sofia.
So again, it was an early dev kit that eventually was replaced with other options.
It was also incredibly, and just real, real thick.
Now, Normally I start with a tour of the exterior
but today let's go ahead and start with the interior
since the internals were such a critical element in the commercial failure of the Saturn.
Now, the Saturn was known for being tricky to develop for
because of its dual processors the Itachi SH-2 processors.
Now, long story short the Saturn was supposed to just have one of these.
Sega realized that would not be enough power.
So instead of going with a more expensive, more powerful processor,
they opted to just have two of these processors.
so they had a dual, multiprocessor, setup.
Now, many developers really only ended up utilizing the master, or the main, processor.
They didn't really know how to utilize the slave because they just didn't know,
or if they did they utilized it very minimally because it was a hassle.
Back to the Sofia itself,
they're pretty pricey nowadays, but oftentimes when you get them they may or may not even be functional.
and there's a plethora of different things that could be wrong with it,
but one of the main reasons that it may not function or boot
is because it may be missing one or two of these SH-2 processors.
Shane says "because they were socketed boards and the devices themselves only shipped with one -
They tend to have been moved around. Many Sophia's will only have one or no SH-2".
So, Shane saw this as a problem and being a big Saturn fan he wanted to do something about it.
So, he decided to bring these Sofia's back to life by creating it his own, damn, SH-2 boards.
Which, of course, was a process in and of itself.
So, this particular Sofia actually has both of the boards replaced by his boards
and you can see his last name on them actually.
They actually look pretty awesome in this unit.
Very out of place because there like this vibrant blue, but pretty cool.
Another thing I do want to mention is that these have expandable memory.
So, you can see this one here has two of the four possible memory slots occupied with RAM.
Let's take a little bit of a tour of the exterior here. So obviously on the top we have our disk drive.
I have to be careful with that I feel like it's gonna break at any moment.
Indicator light right here for when it's gathering information off of the CD.
Everything is labeled here, but as you can see, "CD to VCD switcher".
We have a SCSI input here, controllers, and here we have a big old power button.
This thing really reminds me of my PC back in the early '90s.
Just like this big sort of industrial sized switch of a power button.
We also have some other power options right here.
They're all labeled but essentially they just allow you to determine what you actually want to reset on the Saturn.
Similar to the power options - All of the dip switches are labeled.
They essentially allow for different region switching, booting from SCSI,
essentially just turning on or off different options and connections.
and here it is again, just straight from the manual so you can read it for yourself.
Serial and AV-OUT, right here.
The AV-OUT is like the Saturn AV-OUT it supports RGB also supports S-video and composite.
I don't know if it supports RF didn't mention it in the manual at least that I'm familiar with.
Unless RF is called something else and I'm not reading properly.
But, if you play your Saturn games in RF you are just a horrible monster and you should go away.
So let's go ahead and boot this thing up. This is Sega Rally.
Now, I'm not super familiar with Sega Rally.
This might be an early version or an earlier build but I think it's probably closer to retail or possibly a final build.
Again, I'm not super familiar with it.
So, if you see a difference please let me know in the comments below.
I'm sure Andrew, who lent me the game, would be very happy to know that it is a beta.
Here I have Street Fighter the movie, the game.
I try to boot this thing up, and it isn't scratched up or anything, but it just doesn't seem to work, unfortunately.
One thing to note that's interesting is that these games are just regular ol' CDRs.
There's nothing special about the discs themselves.
I mean there Sega branding on it, but they are just CDRs.
Same ones you get at Circuit City or Best Buy back in the day.
Which makes me a little bit nervous because there's a bit of a -
bootlegging scene going on for beta builds recently and just
having it just a regular ol' CDR, nothing special about it, except for some branding.
I don't just it kind of makes me a little bit nervous.
I feel like someone's gonna try to bootleg one of these
and sell a beta that's not really a beta for like a grand or something like that.
[sarcasm] They're like "Oh, Panzer Dragoon. No, I have an alpha build. Aaah, Give me $5,000." [/sarcasm]
*Throws case on ground in frustration*
I don't know that's just my fear.
Another nice thing is that the Sofia can boot retail titles.
So here is Dark Savior, which is a little bit of a cult classic on the Saturn.
I guess you could say that about most of the Saturn's games, I suppose.
So, big THANK YOU again to Andrew and also to Shane!
Really appreciate it guys, again!
You know, I'm just absolutely blessed to be able to take a look at this weird and obscure content
that I oftentimes didn't even know about before or maybe knew about but
never thought I'd actually be able to like, touch, handle or operate in any way so I really do appreciate all of it.
and aside from that, you know, I really appreciate all of you watching,
Subscribing, ringing that Bell!
All that stuff that YouTube makes us say.
and - We'll see you all next time!
Cheers!
[Outro Music]
[Fade out]
