Sony ported Columns in 1991 to their line of "Data Discman" Electronic Book readers, building it in to a couple of models. Confirmed in "DD-10BZ" (1992), and "DD-202" (1997), but I don't think that all models had it. DD-10BZ was released in Japan and Europe, not sure about North America though. I'm not sure how we would define that "format" on the wiki.
It's built into the bios ... the Electronic Book format wasn't really capable of games beyond "choose your own adventure" type stuff.
We'll probably want to give it its own page (rather than cramming it into the current Columns page). I have no idea how it will look. Although to be thorough, we would probably want photographs of every Data Discman that has it built in. I don't think there'll ever be a clean way to handle fringe cases like this.
Yeah, it's pretty crowded, we could probably split out the home computer versions too. I went down the "EBXA" (Electronic Book format supported by Wonder Library and Sega Saturn Denshi Book Operator) rabbit hole this afternoon. It was primarily a Sony format, but also supported by Panasonic and Sanyo. "Mini CD" in a caddy, which could be removed (presumably how it would be used on Mega CD and Saturn). "EBXA" supported Text, Graphics (low-res black and white), and Sound. Prior formats EB (Japan), and EBG (West) didn't support sound. I'm not sure what the difference between EB and EBG is ... probably incompatibilities between the differing text encoding for Roman alphabet and Japanese which should have been fixed with EBXA players which I presume are backwards compatible with both variants. "Data Discman" released in Japan in 1990 (EB), US at the end of 1991 (EBG), and 1992 in Europe (EBXA). A few dozen titles were released in the west, mostly reference titles such as encyclopedias, dictionaries etc. Maybe the only title that could be considered a game was "Adventure 101: Intro to Tourist, Traps, Dwarfs, and Chivalry", a "choose your own adventure" book published by Sony Electronic Publishing in 1991. Sony Electronic Publishing published quite a few of the western titles. I wonder if they were responsible for for the Columns port? I don't think that Sony had any other developers at the time. Anyway, "Data Discman" didn't really take off in the west, it was expensive and clunky, and it seems to have died in 1993 with the last software and hardware releases, which probably explains why the US release of Wonder Library is so rare (X'Eye released in April 1994). In Japan it was a bit more succesful, lasting until 2000 with several hundred titles getting released, and seeing another couple of upgrades. EBXA-C was pretty minor, just containing Chinese language support, possible only used by one title, a Chinese-Japanese dictionary. S-EBXA seems to have been more substantial, but releasing in 1998 it was largely superceded by the internet, and the format seems to have ended in Japan in 2000.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXiRJAKC4w (for those who don't have the right YouTube subscriptions) There are a lot of versions of Columns, and yeah I would like to split them... I just don't know how. Because the problem is, much like Tetris back in the day, most versions of Columns are subtly different from one another. The SystemSoft ports are the only versions that appear to offer the same content - every other version is pretty much unique. There are a lot of really obviously unanswered questions with how the wikis are organised right now. The rules for every verison of Columns will be the same, but there's no clean methods of "sharing" paragraphs of text across multiple pages (not to mention the Columns page on NEC Retro).
And I haven't even bothered with the Sega Channel releases yet, which seem to be quite different to the retail release ... We need a Columns expert, or someone prepared to become one at least.
This was always broken at Arcade Infinity when I wanted to play it... There will be no fact checking, as Sega and Nintendo of Japan will keep their secrets to the grave. We will never fully realize the console wars, just what we've interpreted from them.
I like to highlight things Sega Retro does better than anyone else: Frogger/Comparisons Want to see what every Sega-licensed version of Frogger looks like? Here's a 21-way comparison. Or at least, it should be one day. Spoilers: I tried classic Mac emulation many years ago - my younger self got very angry, so don't expect much on that one.
>tfw you are looking for info on Game Gag 1P Comic Sega-hen without trying to buy the book but every single webpage and even eBay descriptions list the exact same thing you yourself put as the description for the Sega Retro page Jesus Christ I'm gonna have to buy this, aren't I?
If anybody has the December 1988 and January 1989 issues of Beep! Mega Drive, they respectively contain a preview and a walkthrough of an uncut version of Osomatsu-kun: https://mdshock.com/2018/09/16/osomatsu-kun-the-bizarre-story-of-the-mega-drives-most-infamous-game/ I've always hated this game even though I love the anime, but now I'm really curious about this supposedly better version.
Apparently, episodes 17 and 18 of The Zone feature footage from the "prototype" of the Model 1 Star Wars Arcade, which was only located at the George Street Timezone Arcade in Sydney during August 1994. This doesn't line up with the game being released in Japan a whole year earlier though.
I wouldn't say so. We've gotten recent "tell-all" interviews from people like Hideki Sato: http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33506-Hideki-Sato-on-the-Sega-Saturn-(incredible-new-interview) And the interviews quoted in Collected Works with people like Hayao Nakayama. These go a long way to showing the Japanese perspective (and showing that a lot of the claims in Console Wars are questionable). I think I may have worded that poorly. The preview and walkthrough are for the final 3-stage version of the game. As far as I know, there has never been any documentation of an uncut version, which may not have ever existed.
RE: comparisons of things: https://segaretro.org/Category:Comparisons Swamping Sega Retro with unfinished pages because questionable life choices and Christmas. Some of them are starting to take shape: Golden Axe (home computers)/Comparisons There's a lot of potential here... but we really need more people to come in and write some prose. Most games are represented, but most representation is just "THIS GAME EXISTS". Feel free to take some screenshots and fill in the blanks too. The plan is to document as much as possible, but this is time consuming stuff.
In the latest episode I've uploaded of The Zone, there was a preview for The_Flintstones_(Ocean) at 10:08. Bev didn't specifically mention if the footage was for the SNES or the unreleased Mega Drive game, is there a way to tell the difference?
Hmmm, interesting! Let's analyze what we have. Slightly different logos with different sizes (both in a similar aspect ratio). One of them lacks the translucent halo but there's also other elements that haven't been implemented yet. However, the less colorful and detailed pieces of land make me suspicious of a Mega Drive version being shown. But they could have just been altered afterwards. Also, even though the used fonts are just different (and they may have wanted to switch to a fixed width afterwards for whatever reason), some of the letters which may have the same pixel width look a bit wider in the SNES version, so the prototype may be using the Mega Drive's higher resolution mode. Well, this is odd. I think they may have zoomed in the picture to avoid showing the top and bottom PAL borders, so the picture looks squashed and crops the sides. Let's try to align the background, since the camera seems to be placed at a slightly different position: Except from the added/tweaked elements, the graphics and their colors seem to match... but then again, the SNES version kinda looks like a Mega Drive game. The gradient in the background looks blue instead of purple as in the SNES but that could have been changed at any time. It does seem to have some dithering in it but... the SNES version is filled with all kinds of dithering everywhere, so... Not sure. EDIT: Oh, if we go back to the title screen and resize it to remove the PAL squashed aspect ratio, we get this: The first screen grab now shows a more or less perfect circle, with the second one stretching it due to not adapting the graphics to the SNES' lower resolution. Now I'm more suspicious that it's a Mega Drive prototype... Outside of the menu, the prototype may have switched to the Mega Drive's lower resolution mode, matching the SNES' display. EDIT 2: Yep, looks just like the SNES logo would in 1:1 pixel aspect ratio, with more space to the sides giving away the higher resolution used in the prorotype:
I think it's Mega Drive footage - I can't see them bothering to change the menu text for any other reason than the SNES running at 256x224. You can see glimpses of the blue background in Mean Machine Sega's coverage of the game. The impression I get is that this was originally designed as a Mega Drive game before being brought to the SNES - that seems to be a common workflow for the time.
Sort of further confirmation that La Russa Baseball 95 got a "PAL" release in Australia from the preview featured in episode 22 of The Zone (time = 14:03)
