[poke646]

> The other surprising thing is that you could actually run the Z80 in parallel with your 68000 when running a Genesis game. We used the Z80 as a sound co-processor running MIDI and playing sampled drums without bothering the 68000.

I always thought that was a key reason to include a Z80. A dedicated sound processor (often Z80) was a mainstay of arcade games from the mid-80s and onward and SEGA's engineers would surely have been familiar with such a design. It might even have helped when porting arcade games.

[skywal_l]

They were because sega was, at the time, an arcade manufacturer first. The Megadrive is the console version of the system 16 after all.