New indie shooter “Frontier Force” released for Master System

We love new games released for Sega consoles here at SegaBits, and this is one you won’t want to miss. Homebrew developer Badcomputer has just released an amazing new shmup for Master System called Frontier Force. The game sees your Space Harrier-looking character on the ground firing upwards at enemy forces with six different weapons, five of which have limited ammunition that requires replenishing. The game boasts some incredible graphics with plenty of detail and parallax scrolling, more than you saw in most official Master System games at retail back in the day. It also features an incredible soundtrack by chiptune musician Crisps as well as a printable digital manual.

The game is now available as a digital ROM file for your favorite Master System emulator or to run on a flash cartridge on any Master System, Mark III, or Master System-compatible Genesis/Mega-Drive console for only $5 USD from Badcomputer’s itch.io page, which will be linked beyond the break below.

SEGA of America 1997 internal documents posted online, showing e-mails and revealing profit margins


Have you ever wanted to know what SEGA of America talked about privately about SEGA as a brand going into 1997? You know, the time period when SEGA was going against the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in America? When they lost most of the market share they gained with the SEGA Genesis? You can now thanks to a 272-page leaked internal document posted over at SEGA Retro.

In this document you can see SEGA of America discussing stuff like manufacturing costs, how badly the Saturn was selling, retail profit margins, and a lot more. For example, retailers only made a measly 6% per SEGA Saturn sold, that means they made $15 dollars per console. Why would they push it? Another surprising piece of information is that in 1996 it only cost SEGA $232 to manufacture a Saturn console which is a lot lower than we all thought.