SEGA’s first foray into the portable gaming market and a direct competitor to Nintendo’s Game Boy. Released on October 6th 1990 in Japan and April 26th 1991 in America and Europe. It was later re-released by Majesco in 2000 but only in America. The console’s main selling point was it’s full color, backlit display.

The Game Gear is architecturally very similar to the Master System but with a broader color palette. Master System games can actually be played on the Game Gear with use of an adapter. The console’s biggest drawback is its need for 6 AA batteries to run without a power adapter. It suffers from poor battery life and the capacitors have a tendency to leak and cause the screen to fade and the sound to quieten over time.

A total of 390 games were released for the system and 10.62 million consoles were sold worldwide by March 1996.

The SN76489 Digital Complex Sound Generator (DCSG) is a TTL compatible programmable sound generator chip created by Texas Instruments. It main application was the generation of music and sound effects in home computers, arcade machines and home game consoles. Functionally the chip was similar to the General Instrument AY-3-8910.

Sound Capabilities:

• 3 Square Wave tone generators, 16 volume levels
• 1 White Noise Generator (white and periodic noice, 3 frequencies, 16 volumes)

The SN76489 Was originally designed to be used in the TI-99/4 computer, where it was first called the TMS9919 and later SN94624, and had a 500 kHz max clock input rate. Later, when it was sold outside of TI, it was renamed the SN76489, and a divide-by-8 was added to its clock input, increasing the max clock input rate to 4 MHz, to facilitate sharing a crystal for both NTSC colorburst and clocking the sound chip. A version of the chip without the divide-by-8 input was also sold outside of TI a