Preservation group The Forest of Illusion has uploaded a trove of SEGA hardware manuals and other technical documentation. This batch of documents gives us insight into the work that took place behind the scenes at SEGA in a way that we rarely get to see for ourselves.
The announcement of these files being made available was posted to the group's Twitter account. The trove of documents is available for anyone to freely download and is (frankly) a bunch of nerd stuff. If you're looking for some cool stuff about why they thought the Dreamcast controller was a good idea, the SEGA Hardware Manuals collection isn't for you. If you're interested in communications protocols and circuit board designs, then you're sure to find something to love in here!
Documents in the collection include the Mega-CD Hardware Manual, information on the SEGA Saturn Boot ROM, a manual on the C Langauge Coding Standard, and a whole bunch more. Frankly, the lot of it is way above my head, but the more technically-minded types out there can probably make some sense of it. Heck, some of you might even enjoy it, you crazy devils you.
You can view the collection of SEGA hardware manuals over at the Internet Archive as just one set of millions of documents that are preserved online. You might also want to follow The Forest of Illusion on Twitter, mostly because they post a bunch of cool content about video gaming history like this adorable Princess Peach sticker or this strange Chinese rip-off of Donkey Kong.
What do you think of the SEGA Hardware Manuals? Would you like to see more game developers put their old documentation online? Let us know in the comments below!
