A Sega Genesis / Mega Drive Streaming Video Player

Overview

Kinetoscope can either play video embedded in a standard ROM, or it can stream video over WiFi using special hardware in a custom cartridge. It uses a custom video format detailed in software/player/inc/segavideo_format.h and encoded by encoder/encode_sega_video.py.

Kinetoscope takes its name from the first moving picture device, invented in 1891 by Thomas Edison and William Dickson. While the 1891 original Kinetoscope was able to display 46 frames per second, this project for a 1988 game console can only push 10.

The default format is displayed at ~320x240p analog SD resolution at 10fps, with 8-bit PCM audio at 13kHz. The encoded pixels are not square. The encoded frames use a 256x224 resolution due to hardware limitations, and are displayed at a different ratio by the Sega's Video Display Processor (VDP).

If video is embedded in the ROM, you can only fit about 13.6 seconds in a 4MB cartridge/ROM.

For streaming, an RLE compression scheme is used to reduce required throughput, and the microcontroller decompresses the video into SRAM on the fly.

Schematics and board layouts for special streaming hardware can be found in the hardware/ folder.

You can download a pre-built emulator for macOS, Windows, or Linux from the releases page. (NOTE: On Linux, you should have OpenGL and PulseAudio pre-installed to use these binaries.)

Web Demo

To see Kinetoscope in a web-based emulator, check out https://joeyparrish.github.io/kinetoscope/

Prototype

The first working prototype of the hardware was a stack of boards that looked like this:

Project Folders

Each folder has a README with more information, including prerequisites that must be installed to work on that part of the project.

• software/: The player library and sample projects, which run on the Sega, written using SGDK.
• encoder/: The video encoder, which generates videos in an appropriate format for embedding or streaming.
• hardware/: The schematics and board layouts for a custom cartridge with special streaming hardware.
• firmware/: The firmware that runs on the microcontroller of the custom cartridge hardware.
• emulator-patches/: Patches for OSS emulators to emulate the streaming hardware.
• server/: Details on running a server for Sega video streams.
• canned-videos/: Download canned, pre-encoded videos.

Links

• SGDK: A free and open development kit for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive
• The logo font is Kode Mono
• TODO: Presentation slides coming soon
• Sega Genesis Slide Generator and Viewer
• Krikzz: Incredible hardware for retro game console hacking and development, including flash carts.