Do you wanna hear about the raddest piece of tech in microcomputing?? Forget your Commodore 64, that's garbage. ZX Spectrum, what the christ. No, buddy, you wanna play with power.
Introducing the
Sega Computer Three Thousand™!
Look at that! It plays games! It lets your little sister make music! It lets your dad do finances! Wow!
Look at this sexy mechanical keyboard:
So, what we got here? A MSX comparable, 8-bit micro computer that is basically a SG-1000 (the first Sega console) with a keyboard strapped on it. It actually doesn't do much until you put in the BASIC cart.
Let's load this, baby:
Heaven knows who those MITEC guys were (I actually did try to find out more about them), but they made several revisions of their BASIC software for this system and this is the last one, BASIC Level 3-B with an amazing 32KB of RAM to store your programs and then save them to tape.
This here's a French model, released by a company called Yeno (also gone) and, like all other PAL SC-3000 systems, with full RGB support because SCART was a thing in France and the rest of Europe got it as a bonus. They were nearly impossible to be found in my country -- and I would know, I had been looking for years -- so I used ebay.fr and found some helpful sellers willing to ship things here, and bought two lots. One with two carts, boxed SC-3000H and a joystick, and one with four carts and unboxed SC-3000, which you can see below:
The extra "H" stood for a more expensive version that had a mechanical keyboard. The standard version uses a membrane and feels terrible to type anything on it. They are otherwise equal.
These are the carts I got:
You'll note there's two BASIC carts and they look the same, except they are not. One is Level 3-A, which came with the standard SC-3000 and the other is Level 3-B, which came with the H model. The difference lies uniquely on RAM size. 3-A has 16KB and 3-B has 32KB, making the latter an obviously more expensive proposition, but one that is compatible with a vaster amount of software.
What about the games themselves? They are pretty 'uh'. Nothing exciting like we'd see on the Master System later on.
Tennis supports two players but it handles rather oddly since you don't use the fire buttons to hit the ball, the ball just moves to the other court depending on the angle your stick figure's racket touches it. Not bad, but not a system seller even back then.
Borderline I found it to better in theory than execution. Like, you are some sort of rambo guy on a jeep, moving past obstacles and dealing with enemy tanks, but in truth it's quite hard to handle the vehicle and so you'll lose your three lifes quite early and I don't think even memorization would help much here.
Yamato is some sort of battleship shooter. You try to shoot the incoming enemies. It gets harder as it goes on and it's not much fun in general. It wouldn't even beat the likes of Galaxian.
Monaco GP was my favorite of the bunch, which isn't saying much. There's a Famicom game called Road Fighter, which I'm not sure if you are familiar with, but this is basically the same concept: guide your car through obstacles and suicidal drivers. It looks nowhere as colorful as Road Fighter and, at points, you can't even tell what's going on. Stage 2 for instance has a part where it becomes night and you guide yourself only using your head lights, which is a fun concept, but it was basically three colors: black for the road, red for the car, and a yellow triangle for the lights -- I couldn't tell what was going on until I hit a car and realized "oh! it's night and I have to evade drivers who don't know what lights are, but of course!". Similarly, you will step on ice and lose control, but it's just a blue bar, so visually you have to step on it to know what it actually does. Not good game design, but I think the hardware is just that limited and couldn't do a better representation.
Finally, here's the joystick:
It's actually fairly decent and completely responsive in spite of its age. You can also use SMS controllers as an alternative.
So, all in all, I'm quite happy I finally managed to add this piece of Sega history into my collection. The games aren't anything most people would return to, but it'll probably be fun to try and fiddle with the BASIC interpreter and make some sort of mini game.
By 1984, only 120k units had been sold worldwide, so it's not surprising that finding working units more than thirty years later would be pretty hard. In fact, on the international Ebay the few SC-3000 units available are all very costly (over 300€ and such). I'm clinically insane and of course decided the sane thing would be to buy two at once, but even I did it only because the two listings put together + their shipping was actually slightly under 200€ in total because, as it turns out, France had more SC-3000 units than the rest of Europe put together due to Yeno -- the French just don't advertise it much if at all. So if you want one of these babies that would be one place to look into. Strangely, Egypt is the other one.
