ICEknight, on 27 May 2018 - 09:41 AM, said:
I feel that this may get some better traction in its own topic.
I agree!
We are working towards fully documenting region coding for Sega games. The focus right now is more on the Mega Drive and 32X, but games vary between regions and we want to know how.
We're making region coding sub-pages for games on Sega Retro:
https://segaretro.or...y:Region_coding
and by using those templates, we can generate definitive lists:
https://segaretro.or...e_region_coding
Anyone who grew up in PAL regions will know that Mega Drive games are really bad at this. Sonic 1 runs on anything but is unoptimised in PAL regions. Sonic 2 runs on anything and makes a bit of an effort with the music. Sonic 3 is region locked, so there are three separate ROMs. There is no reliable documentation to say exactly what most Mega Drive games will do when running on the wrong unit, so if you were planning to import something, or were about to write an essay about the quality of Sega's official emulation, you'd have to do a bit of ROM testing for yourself.
However, there are over 1000 Mega Drive games. So we'd quite like to share the responsibility a bit. I know you kids have emulators - the job is to just to open things up and take clean screenshots. Or in some cases, document how horribly broken games are.
Here is a big list of missing pages. Note also, some lock screens are the same.
The other reason this is worth doing is because Sega pulled stupid stunts like this:


The sort of minor changes between ROMs that nobody normal would ever notice. This sort of thing has never been documented either.
In addition to Mega Drive and 32X games, some Game Gear and Master System games adjust themselves to suit different regions. And while Saturn and Dreamcast games lock discs off at a BIOS level (i.e. they're not going to work well with those tables), we still want to be able to record what localisations have occurred. I'm particularly interested, for example, in how many Saturn games bothered to tailor themselves to PAL systems - I hear it's just as patchy as the Mega Drive, and the old Sega Saturn Magazine used to complain all the time.
So uh yeah, help pls.
This post has been edited by Black Squirrel: 27 May 2018 - 10:37 AM