Oh dear, if this is more like Satellaview and XBand than US Sega Channel, we may need to dump multiple carts to get SRAM data! Speaking of which...
I've got another consolidated parcel from yahoo auctions building up, so I slapped the minimum bid on that one too.
Thanks. Having multiple carts may also help us in case one of them is actually bitrotted or some dumb stuff like that. I'm really hoping there's some worthwhile ROM data to get out of this. It'd be great to compare it with the US Sega Channel, particularly since I don't recall the US one having any permanent storage whatsoever.
Yea, only EPROMs can bitrot to the best of my knowledge. Mask ROMs actually have the data physically present, similar to the way that pressed CDs have the physical bits where burnt CDs use dye reflectivity. SRAM might have something if the battery's not flat. I really think that getting JP Sega Channel menu ROMs is the main benefit to having these carts. From a software perspective, anyway.
Durr. Well, I'd suppose some other things could happen that would make the ROM data difficult to preserve (Besides it being, y'know, Sega Channel stuff.) Anyway, menus would be great. Even if we can only access them in tile editors and whatnot, it might be possible to restore what they look like when we combine the ROM data with the mysterious webpage screens. Perhaps less likely - but the most probable thing that would be in SRAM if it had any sort of long-term storage - would be an archive of data like news/announcements/reviews, similar to XMail that XBand had. Maybe even one of the smaller Sega Game Toshokan/Game no Kanzume games, although that'd honestly be kinda a waste for us preservation-wise.
Actually, I think electron migration might damage mask roms - but it probably would take a bloody long time to happen.
Well I have 2 now, so we should be able to dump something Is it possible to dump using this image If not, I'll have to ship these on to someone who knows what they're doing.
The frustrating thing is that we won't be certain if JP Sega Channel follows the same dumping rules as regular carts until we try (multiple different tools). A Retrode might be a good idea as well.
This may not be the place for this,,, but it does have info about Sega channel here on Sega's 1996 website. it even has a schedule of games including Sonic 3d blast demo. http://web.archive.org/web/19961220011146/http://www.sega.com/central/channel/
Super Street Fighter II (Limited Edition) would be the version with a cut character count, yes? Interesting list.
The cover for that seems a little different (the label ID is still there in the upper left corner). Can you do a quick check to see if there are any other differences? Might be different in the insides too... Was it a web crawler at least?
I can't tell how important this is at a glance, but some microchips appear to have different numbers between the carts. Some examples: Microchip PIC16C54-RC/P - 9416 vs. 9435 NEC D65650GDE67 - 9436WK702 vs. 9423WK700 The position of the Hyundai chip also appears to have swapped. The capacitor at L52 also looks different.
Those numbers are just datecodes. The boards are not different, it seems. Oh well, at least that's confirmed. Thanks for all the extra screenshots!
If these are identical then I'd assume they'd also be equal in their difficulty to get a ROM dump out of, huh? I hope this goes well.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh2aBY1OLo0[/youtube] This is all I got before it stopped working. Some translations of the menus could be helpful. In the first clip, I selected some different letter and number combinations (01A, 01B) with no effect, until 02B, which got me on to the sonic and tails animation. I got stuck there and couldn't get back to the first menu, and then it stopped working. It's probably my flakey hardware more than the software causing the issues.
Wow, that boot-up menu is already a pretty drastic difference from the US Sega Channel. O_O I'm gonna assume wildly that the menu you're going through is actually asking for a cable channel connection through some manual settings, rather than the US version's more automated "plug n' play" setup.
