Sega Nomad

Info

The Sega Nomad, the second handheld game console released by Sega in North America, was released on
October 13th, 1995 for $180. It sold 1 million units over the course of its lifetime. The Nomad was essentially a
portable Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), in that the cartridge slot was formatted to play Genesis cartridges. The
handheld, however, did not sell well due to a multitude of negative factors: a prohibitive price, short battery life (up
to 2 hours), and a release date set between two console generations. Also, as there were no games developed
specifically for the handheld, its entire library was essentially complete when it was released, limiting its
opportunity to market itself as a worthwhile standalone purchase.

Accessories

The Nomad used a battery pack to power up, requiring 6 AA batteries. This allowed the Nomad to be used
regardless of access to a wired power source, arguably the one feature that justified its existence. An A/V cable
could be used to hook the Nomad into a television set, allowing for two-player gaming, with one player using the
TV screen and the other the Nomad’s LCD screen. The handheld had a controller port for the second player to
hook into. This made the system a traditional console as well as a handheld. The Nomad was also able to use
the expansion hardware of the Genesis, such as the 32x and the Mega-CD drive, however users encountered
variety of issues with software for these add-ons, some severe enough to leave the game virtually unplayable.

Facts

On the day of its release, the Nomad had an established game library in excess of 600 games. However the
Genesis was no longer being developed for – the Sega Saturn was released in the spring of 1995, and the
growing popularity of rival Sony’s Playstation Console (released in 1994) and the looming release of the Nintendo
64 essentially halted game development for the Nomad before it was even released.

The Nomad was originally planned to be released with a touch screen, nearly a decade before the first dedicated
handheld gaming console to feature one, the Nintendo DS. The idea was scrapped due to pricing concerns.

The Nomad is one of only a handful of official retail videogame consoles to allow for full, region unlocked access
without the need of additional hardware or hacking.

On the technical side, the Nomad sported a screen resolution of 320 x 224 and had 156kb of internal memory. Its
processor was a Motorola 68000 (16 bit).

An optional external battery pack was made available, at a price of $80. The pack could be recharged, but it did
not improve the battery life over the standard battery pack.

Successor

After the disappointment of Nomad sales and Sega’s shifting focus towards competing directly with Nintendo and
new rival Sony in the console space, Sega did not release another handheld console since. The dream of
another Sega handheld was ended when they announced on January 31 st, 2001 that they would shift from a
hardware developer to a third party software developer for other consoles.