This one has run on real hardware. A Sega Genesis Model 1 from 1988 generates English text, and the token rate on screen is the console counting its own vertical blanks — not a number we supplied.
Sega GenesisMega DriveMotorola 68000real hardwareternary weightsretro computing
A transformer language model running on the Genesis’ Motorola 68000 at 7.67 MHz. The weights are on the cartridge; the 68000 does the arithmetic.
Video of it running on a real 1988 Genesis Model 1 (there is also a shorter cut). Asked “When were you born?” on real hardware it answered “March fourteenth, two thousand twenty five.”
Under a cycle-exact emulator the port measures 131,766,162 exact 68000 bus cycles for a full generation — 1.674× faster than where it started.
On the real console it reports 1.77 to 2.00 tokens/sec, and that gap turned out to be instructive. The rate is quantised to 60/k: the game runs one forward pass per loop and synchronises to vertical blank, so 2.00 tok/s is exactly 30 frames per token and 1.77 is 34. Pure inference is 27.13 frames; the rest is drawing glyphs, animating her mouth, and printing the counter.
The emulator and the hardware agree. We had briefly claimed a 12% disagreement and retracted it — we had been comparing a headless benchmark against a full game loop.
The single largest speedup was not a code change. Storing weight offsets pre-doubled as big-endian 16-bit values lets the 68000 use move.w (a2)+,d0 / move.w (a5,d0.w),a1 instead of four instructions, three of which existed only to zero-extend and double a byte. That is 1.344× from the file format alone, on an identical engine, because the Mega Drive cartridge bus is 16 bits wide.
Asked its name, the model once answered “Scott, who keeps the thread between sessions” — fluent, grammatical, topically adjacent, and wrong. That is the operator’s name and role, not the character’s.
A lookup table cannot make that mistake. It either hits or it misses. A coherent, related, wrong answer is the failure signature of real inference.
github.com/Scottcjn/legend-of-elya-genesis The full measurements
Part of a five-console series from Elyan Labs. See also: NES · Sega Genesis · Super Nintendo · Nintendo 64 · Game Boy Color · the full measurements, including the conclusions we had to retract.