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Mega Modem serial numbers

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Sik, Apr 18, 2012.

  1. Sik

    Sik

    Sik is pronounced as "seek", not as "sick". Tech Member
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    being an asshole =P
    The Mega Drive header has a field to put Mega Modem support information. When the game doesn't support the modem, this field is filled with spaces. When the game supports the modem, this field is filled with a string in the format "MOxxxxyy.zzz" where xxxx is the company code, yy is some... number and zzz is... some other number >_>

    I was looking through the ROMs I have around, and found these values for yy.zzz:

    • 03.000: Game Toshokan
    • 04.050: Cyberball
    • 05.010: Advanced Daisenryaku
    • 06.010: Shi Kin Joh
    • 33.100: Sansan
    OK, I still have no idea what zzz is, but yy seems to be some specific number (probably assigned by Sega) that works akin to a serial number for modem games. They seem to be assigned in the order they were made. So, this leaves us with two questions:

    1. What the fuck happened to 01 and 02?
    2. What the fuck happened to 07 to 32?
    As for the first question, Game Toshokan was supposedly released along with the modem, right? So this means there were two more programs before this that supported the modem (or three if they started counting from zero). They could have been just test programs and thereby meaningless, but the gap is there.

    As for the second question, well, I didn't check all ROMs out there so there may be some more games with the code in them, but are there really that many games supporting the modem to fill that much space? I suppose there must be a lot of games that were supposed to support the modem but were never released or lacked the feature. Also some software that had modem support didn't fill this field (Mega Anser has this field blank, for instance), so that probably also adds "unused" serial numbers.

    So, does anybody know what's the deal with that huge gap there? And more importantly, does anybody know why was Sega assigning serial numbers to games that supported the modem? Especially considering they are completely independent from each other and not tied to a specific service or something. Any ideas?

    PS: Rent A Hero has "SEGA" in the modem field. Huh? o_O (but then again the header is broken, the region field is at $1C0 instead of $1F0)
     
  2. Meat Miracle

    Meat Miracle

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    Probably games we don't have, or games that went unreleased for whatever reason. Plenty of those.

    For all we know they could've been assigned to Sega Channel titles, or something else.
     
  3. Sik

    Sik

    Sik is pronounced as "seek", not as "sick". Tech Member
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    Welp, andlabs ran the ROMs through a script and the first question was answered:

    • 00.010: Tel-Tel Stadium
    • 01.010: Tel-Tel Mahjong
    • 02.110: Nikkan Sports Pro Yakyuu Van
    Now the question is what happened to 07 to 32...