| Introduced in 1986, the 8-bit
Sega Master System (SMS) was SEGA's answer to Nintendo's NES. Although technically
superior to the NES, it did not gain as much popularity as the NES for several reasons.
One reason is because it was introduced later. And another is because of the
big "N"s control over 3rd party game makers. However, in europe, brazil,
and austrailia, the SMS was quite popular because Nintendo couldn't enforce it's monopoly
there. The SMS supported a wide variety of great peripherals, including 3D glasses, a light phaser, sports pad, control stick, master system to game gear converter, master system to genesis converter, and various other cool things. The SMS was originally released in a sleek black design, with a cart and a card port. The cart port supported cart's the same as a atari or NES would. But the card port would accept games that fit on credit card sized carts. The SMS would usually come packaged with a built in game, which would start up when ever the machine was turned on without a game in..quite a cool feature. Later on, Like the NES, a second, scaled down version of the SMS was released (SMS II). However, unlike the original, it did not include a card port. Even today, people are still collecting and playing SMS games.. on the emulators and on the original system. Because of it's scarcity in the United States, the sega master system is a hot collectors item. Plus, it has several excellent titles such as phantasy star. And several arcade ports such as shinobi, and hang on. Games released on the both the SMS and NES have an obviously better look and feel on the Master System.
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