Raspberry Pi and MiSTer users can now experience a fully playable Sega Channel revival in 2025
Back in the 1990s, SEGA launched its first subscription service, similar in some ways to today’s Xbox Game Pass. It was known as the Sega Channel, which allowed Sega Genesis owners to download games straight through their TV cable connection.
The Sega Channel launched in 1994 in collaboration with cable giants of the time, such as Time Warner and TCI. It was essentially an early iteration of today’s streaming platforms, offering members a rotating library of 50 games each month at a flat cost.
Sega Genesis owners had to plug in a special adapter tuned to a dedicated channel to access classics like Sonic the Hedgehog and exclusive demos. The Sega Channel was ahead of its time, but due to certain limitations, the service was shut down in 1998, at the tail end of the Genesis era.
Fast-forward to 2025, and the Sega Channel is making a comeback with a twist, thanks to preservation efforts by the Video Game History Foundation. To make things all the more interesting, developer Shane Lynch released a new MiSTer core dedicated to the “Sega Channel Revival.” This project aims to emulate Sega’s cable service on classic consoles with “near-perfect” accuracy.
Lynch’s MiSTer core modified the Sega Genesis to run special ROMs created by BillyTime! Games, who has spent years putting together an offline version of the channel using leaks and prototype ROMs, boasting original menus, iconic characters like Psycho Cat and King Iguana, allowing you to browse games and play them just like back in the Genesis’ heyday.
To boot the Sega channel on MiSTer, users require a setup with 128 MB of SDRAM. For the time being, game saves aren’t supported, but that’s a minor caveat that could be fixed in future releases. As of now, you can download the complete collection from the Internet Archive. For those looking to skip MiSter cores, BillyTime! has also provided Raspberry Pi images with MAME support.
Earlier this month, VGHF announced that they recovered nearly 144 prototype ROMs that had been deemed lost for over 2 years, including exclusives and system data dating back to 1994 to 1997. The major finds from the endeavor include unreleased games like Garfield: Caught in the Act – The Lost Levels, with developer commentary; a rougher port of The Flintstones; a scaled-down version of Mortal Kombat 3; and even a dedicated Sega Genesis web browser.
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