Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Insalubrious - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

To start off, so there's no confusion. I am going to romanize まぢん as "Madin" in this post because, even though it's pronounced almost identically to Majin (まじん), they are different, and that difference (and similarity) comes into play here. Second: I am not familiar with Shenmue (yes, it's relevant), so I might use some terminology that differs from the official English translation.

Anyway. Some quick Googling led me to a post from 2002 on the sega.co.jp BBS with a link to an interview explaining the appearance of Madin in Shenmue. The actual link is dead, but fortunately an archived copy of the page exists here.

The interview, by someone named NOZX, starts by introducing the question: two items, labeled "Madin Milk" (まぢん牛乳) and "Madin Magazine" (まぢんマガジン), can be found in the Tomato Mart in Shenmue. So what does Madin mean? Is it—as some people have assumed—a play on the word majin (魔神, demon god/devil)? Or perhaps "margin"?

NOZX asks someone named Mami, who was apparently responsible for designing the objects, what the word means. She responds: "Mr. Nishimura told me to make them, so I did."

So NOZX then goes to speak with Masato Nishimura to ask him:

Quote

That's all the relevant information in the interview. There's nothing that mentions the use of Madin in Sonic CD, but the same Masato Nishimura was also on the staff for that game, so I think it's safe to assume it has the same origins.

However, I have run into a (very, extremely) loose possible connection between Masato Nishimura and that image. This tweet from 2011 posted by someone named まぢん (Madin, though his account name is Mazin__, another possible romanization of the word) mentions まぢん画 (the text in the Sonic CD image) in response to a comment (presumably referencing the creepy face of the Sonic ice cream) that says, "Sega Japan does have that wallpaper..."

Mazin__ is also (at least right now) using an icon with the Madin Milk graphic from Shenmue and his profile hints he works at Sega (specifically, it says, "I do not speak for Sega," which I've noticed is pretty common on staff Twitter accounts). So it's a lot of speculation, but it seems to me like Mazin__ is probably Masato Nishimura's personal Twitter account, and he at least acknowledges the existence of the Sonic CD image, though he doesn't say anything about having made it or having had anything to do with it.

Dario FF, on 11 January 2012 - 09:01 AM, said:

Dunno how much use this'll be to you, but I was looking at a few of the .pfd files, out of curiosity, plus the "arfiles.txt" documentation that came with ar0unpack and ar0create. One thing I noticed: the value at 0x0C—0x00000800 in the pfd files—appears to be the file alignment, though arfiles.txt describes it as an unknown value. In the ar files, contents are aligned to multiples of 0x00000040, and the value at 0x0C in the header is 0x00000040. However, in the pfd files, they're aligned to multiples of 0x00000800.

Both ar0create and MainMemory's editor align files to multiples of 0x00000040. MainMemory's editor correctly assigns that value at 0x0C, but ar0create, assuming it to be an unknown value, leaves it as 0x00000800 while aligning to multiples of 0x00000040. On the other hand, MainMemory's editor loses a lot of the unknown header data preserved by ar0create (though, given the ar files generated by it seem to work, I doubt that's an issue). Changing the value in the file generated by ar0create to 0x00000040 didn't work—I got stuck loading the level forever—but it might be worth testing whether aligning the data to multiples of 0x00000800 solves things, since that seems to be the standard used in the few pfd files I looked over.

Aside from that, nothing really stuck out at me, but—like I said—I was just fiddling.

Chimera, on 15 November 2011 - 04:28 PM, said:

ボードエリア後 would be "after the board area" (pretty much what Google gave you) presumably referring to the first section in the level.

Chimera, on 14 November 2011 - 06:30 PM, said:

A little help with the Japanese: トラックエリア means "truck area," and トラック壁走り地点 is the "truck wall-running point." 壁下り前 means "before descending the wall."

Steam ID: BlackDragonHunt

I just finished the game, and I'm gonna start trying some speedruns now. I figure it's more fun not being the only one on my list, so I'm adding everyone on the first post to my friends list. :D I don't expect to break any records, but hey.