Apparently in some Dreamcast game or other this is the name of a supercomputer which runs all the operations of Sega (whatever that means). (Why do I get the feeling I'm writing like some of these babelfish tranlated pages I've been looking at?) In real life the Teradrive was, well, a really cool name for something that doesn't quite live up to the improvement suggested by the name (Gigadrive would be 1000 times more powerful than a Mega Drive, judging from the logic; instead we have a Teradrive, which should be 1 million times more powerful!) See the bottom paragraph for a quick link to a page with some good info about this thing.

What is the draw of this computer (why am I considering dropping a multiple of $100 on it if I ever find one)? There are a few things besides the fact that it's the neatest Mega Drive console, etc. To name the main draws:

a.) Play Genesis games on a monitor -- I'm not quite certain about this, actually; [link url="http://member.nifty.ne.jp/tarucus/museum/cool/tera_s.jpg"]this ad[/link] shows it plugged into a TV and basically acting as a PC and Mega Drive at once -- this is a rather tricky issue as the PC and Mega Drive were somewhat aware of each other and able to transfer stuff back and forth, unlike the shoddy Amstrad Mega PC. The one Teradrive specific game I've heard of would use the PC as a level editor and then play the game on the Mega Drive portion of the unit.

b. The monitor itself (about $550 at the time) is capable of syncing to both 15KHz (and thus can accept, say, Neo Geo AES RGB input, which normal US monitors won't) as well as 31Khz. This feeds my suspicion that you could play Mega Drive games right on the monitor, and thus get perfect resolution. W00t!

On the PC side, the system is terribly anemic, with a 286 processor (those date from around 1982 or so, and were pretty common by '85 and certainly obsolete by 1991 when the Teradrive was released) and 640K RAM on the low end Model 1. No hard drive, unless you got the high-end Model 3! (You got a 30 MB hard drive.) The high end Model 3 also had the maximum RAM installed with 2.5MB. The OS was a Japanese language variant of IBM DOS, so I'm not sure what sorts of stuff you could run on there. Maybe Duke Nukem 1..!

At least one Japanese fellow's managed to upgrade (or at least was trying to upgrade) his Teradrive to a Pentium 200Mhz with 128 MB RAM and a CD-ROM drive, among other things. This would certainly be quite a feat as there's no room at all left inside the thing in its original configuration, so Assembler tells me.

Good page to start off with: http://nfg.2y.net/games/teradrive/. NFG generally kicks Assembler's sorry ass whenever it posts something about a system -- as far as I know Assembler still has stuff that nfg doesn't, but I've seen stuff on nfg that'll never be on Assembler. Assembler's Teradrive information is slightly off balance, too.

On another note...whatever happened to the forums earlier? I got on sometime earlier in the day, but it was down until just a few minutes ago. What's up with that?