Sega Hang-On hardware is an arcade system produced by Sega in 1985. It has no official name, but debuted with Hang-On (from which the name comes from) and went on to power several bike racing games of the mid-to-late 1980s. An upgraded version is the Sega Space Harrier hardware, based on Space Harrier which released later in 1985.

The system's specifications are similar to those of the later Sega System 16, but it has a stronger focus on graphics, with a second 68000 processor and a separate video board with a powerful graphics chipset. Sega Hang-On hardware acts primarily as an advancement over the VCO Object board - it was designed to scale a large number of sprites/textures in real-time, allowing for the creation of three-dimensional graphics, with a player moving towards the screen. It was also capable of Z-buffering and depth mapping, manipulating sprites/textures in a manner similar to later texture-mapped polygons. At the time of release, this technology was considered groundbreaking, the first in the Super Scaler series of arcade systems, and it would go on to fuel the Sega OutRun hardware specification as well as the X Board and Y Board systems.

As this board was designed to serve one purpose, only five games were produced to make use of this system, all of which opt for the third-person perspective.

Hardware

Designed by Sega AM2's Yu Suzuki, this was the first in Sega's Super Scaler series of three-dimensional arcade hardware. At the time of its release, this was the most powerful game system. The three-dimensional sprite/texture scaling was handled in a similar manner to textures in later texture-mapped polygonal 3D games of the 1990s, including the use of Z-buffering and depth mapping. In an interview with 1UP, Yu Suzuki stated:

“ My designs were always 3D from the beginning. All the calculations in the system were 3D, even from Hang-On. I calculated the position, scale, and zoom rate in 3D and converted it backwards to 2D. So I was always thinking in 3D. „

— Yu Suzuki

Hang-On was controlled using a video game arcade cabinet resembling a motorbike, which the player moved with their body. This began the "Taikan" trend, the use of motion-controlled arcade cabinets in many arcade games of the late 1980s, two decades before motion controls became popular on game consoles.