Sega System 16

The Sega System 16 is an arcade system board released by Sega in 1985. Throughout its lifespan, there would be around forty games released on this hardware, making it one of Sega's most successful hardware designs. It was produced in two variants, the System 16A and System 16B.

In order to prevent piracy, as well as illegal bootleg games, many System 16 boards used an encryption system. A Hitachi FD1094 chip, containing the main CPU as well as the decryption key, was used in place of a regular CPU.

Notable games include Sega's Tetris, whose Mega Drive version has become very rare, Golden Axe and arcade versions of various other popular Sega franchises.

System 16 Specifications

 * Main CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 10 MHz
 * Sound CPU: ZiLOG Z80 @ 4 MHz (5 MHz in System 16B)
 * Sound Chip: Yamaha YM2151 @ 4 MHz (+ NEC uPD7759 ADPCM decoder in System 16B)
 * Display Resolution: 320 x 224
 * Colors: 4096
 * Graphical Capabilities: 128 onscreen sprites, 2 tile layers, 1 text layer, 1 sprite layer, sprite scaling. Note only System 16B supports sprite scaling.