Retro tries to keep as many of its sources in-house, so we create references on our wikis that don't need to be constantly maintained. You should have noticed the huge library of magazines on Retro CDN by now - it's glorious and wonderful. But there's a lot missing. I make a point of regularly going around the internet looking for reference material that is useful to Sonic, Sega or NEC Retro, but it's getting to the point where there's too much tedious, mostly undocumented stuff for one man. Sysops used to be able to upload things more efficiently than regular users, but those powers are gone - I have to use the same wibbly wobbly upload forms as everyone else, and often I'm not sure my bandwidth is up to it. Time to spread the load. So rather than have these get lost in the TODO page, I'm going to make posts in this topic in the hopes it might inspire some helpers. Or at the very least, remind me at a later date when technology on my end catches up. Alternatively, because so much of this is mysterious to English speakers, people might be able to answer questions and find things. The general rule is always "we want all of the things". Anything related to Sonic/Sega/NEC is within scope. Get nice PDFs (or nice JPEGs and turn them into PDFs), upload to Retro CDN. We can probably solve any problems after that if you're struggling. To start: Game Hihyou (ゲーム批評) https://archive.org/details/gamecriticism?sort=titleSorter https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2019/12/23/game-hihyo-game-criticism-magazines/ Japanese gaming magazines are among the most important resources out there. The story behind this one seems to be that it had an opinion, and that's apparently rare. Determining whether Japanese games are considered good or bad lets us understand the market over there a little better.
I/O Magazine (アイ・オー) https://archive.org/details/iomagazine I mirrored a few of these last year, but there's a decade's-worth of issues all clocking around 400-500MB each. Japanese home computing through the 1970s and 80s is, for all intents and purposes, undocumented (even in Japan, honestly). Over the years I've tried to make sense of bits of it, but the language barrier is too strong. While it's obviously true that the Famicom was the main driving force behind the Japanese video game industry at the time, it was in-turn being shaped by events in the home computer space. I would imagine most JRPGs and adventure games stem from home computers - they're a really big deal, but nobody knows much about them. This is mostly a NEC Retro task, but somewhere buried in here will be details about Sega's SC-3000. There's not a lot of known history about that machine - "it existed" is about as much as we can confidently say.
https://archive.org/details/superjuegos https://retrocdn.net/Category:Super_Juegos_scans Super Juegos, alongside Hobby Consolas, was one of the main Spanish gaming magazines of the 1990s. https://archive.org/details/todosega https://retrocdn.net/Category:Todo_Sega_scans Todo Sega, meanwhile, was one of the Sega-centric magazines from the region. So quite important. The quality of these scans aren't great. For one, most of the pages need cropping, but as long as all the pages are there and in order, they remain "usable", even if they're not ideal. I had grand plans once to clean these up before uploading, but spoilers: that never happened. I'm unlikely to get around to finishing the job - it's a task for someone else. Incidentally there are other Spanish magazines, both off and on-site which exhibit similar issues. https://archive.org/details/gamemagazinesspanish But there's 1700+ files in there to sift through, so again, need to share.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=micombasic https://retrocdn.net/Category:Micom_BASIC_scans Micom BASIC was pretty influencial for its time. Several prominent Japanese developers got into video games because of this magazine, likely as the amount of stuff in here is insane. Each issue could probably support a dedicated wiki of its own, and this is ten years' worth of content. Unlike I/O this starts taking an interest in video game consoles, particularly the PC Engine and Mega Drive.
Well... someone has to do it ... discussing how blue Sonic is has some degree of awesomeness, but has no effect on our wikis so... let's stack some "Game Hihyou" mags...
https://archive.org/details/@kitsunebi77?&sort=-publicdate&page=2 https://retrocdn.net/Category:Shared_book_scans Japanese video game books. We have the smallest of small handfuls already, but we have hundreds missing for Sega alone. Sega Retro is exceedingly good at documenting the existence of games, but less good at documenting said games' contents. Books can help with that, particularly if features haven't been described properly in manuals or whatever. There's a Sonic Jam strategy guide out there that's proven valuable to Sonic Retro. Very likely some of these could be just as useful to Sega (and NEC) Retro.
https://sega-interactive.co.jp/special/#interview https://web.archive.org/web/20050909060129/http://sega.jp/community/creators/home.html http://archives.sega.jp/segaages/interview/index.shtml https://segaretro.org/Category:Japanese_interviews It's not all about scans - there are online interviews that need mirroring before external sites explode. I gave up trying to format interviews a long time ago - I tend to just drop the text onto a wiki page in the hopes that there'll be a better solution some day. If you have working Ctrl, C and V keys, this shouldn't take long. Translation is another issue, but that's going to be an issue for most things I post here. In some cases Sega Retro doesn't have the answers yet. If you've genuinely got a better plan to handle interviews like this, we're all ears. In fact, feel free to make stuff. Do whatever.
This will take some time... an error occurred while processing the files... currently uploading mag #3... again... wish me luck...
(now you know why I've been holding back) https://archive.org/details/gamestmagazine https://retrocdn.net/Category:Gamest_scans Gamest was the biggest arcade-centric Japanese magazine of the 80s and 90s. I was on top of this for a while, but then someone started uploading their collection, with each issue being ~1GB each.
Wow... that's a lot ... I'm currently downloading "Game Hihyou" #5 which is 466 MB... and takes a lot of time... but it's fine...
https://archive.org/search.php?query=famitsu&sort=-publicdate&and[]=mediatype:"texts" https://retrocdn.net/Category:Weekly_Famitsu_scans There are quite literally thousands of issues of Famitsu (Famicom Tuushin in the early days), and that's before all the supplements and spin-offs and what-have-you. Retromags have a growing collection of these as well - there's been a realisation in the last couple of years that as a society, we should probably start caring about this one. However, given the weekly nature of this publication and the fact new issues are still being printed, it's also the least likely to be fully archived. But we can try! Famitsu was originally a Famicom-only magazine, and I don't quite know when the switchover to multi-platform was. Earlier magazines aren't much use to us right now, but we might want to upload everything anyway. Someone else can make that decision.
https://www.youtube.com/user/chirikun/videos https://segaretro.org/Category:Television_advertisements Television advertising is important. The channel above has some Japanese ads in 60FPS (which is a novelty) but the real source is "all of YouTube". Essentially every Sega-related advertisement on YouTube needs to be housed on Sega Retro, preferably in the best quality possible (although anything is better than nothing). It's a subject I don't fully understand myself (not through lack of trying) - I've used online YouTube -> MP4 converters in the past, but I know higher quality sources exist... somewhere. This gets particularly messy when you consider that in Japan, you can get an hour's worth of game commercials on VHS. The Sega Video Magazine tapes also have adverts. Also we need to mirror those tapes. Also I'm aware Sonic-related cassette rips that have been posted on these boards, but I can't keep on top of it all - that's why I've got PUT IT ON THE WIKI in big letters in my signature. Also they used to put special adverts on commecial VHS cassettes. Perhaps you'll need to rip some LaserDiscs too. Video archiving is complicated.
https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/archive.html https://retrocdn.net/Category:TheGameMachine_(JP)_scans (The) Game Machine (ゲームマシン) was a short magazine for the Japanese arcade industry. It's often our only source for Sega's produce during the 1970s. Asagoth uploaded every issue from 1974 to 1978, but more have been made available since then, taking us up to the end of 1996. The problem with these scans is that, while they're PDFs, the page numbers don't line up, and there's some wacky formatting things going on. The pages need splitting and recompiling - the issues are short, but it's still a faff.
https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=51&page=presentation https://retrocdn.net/Category:Consoles_+_scans Consoles + was one of the big French gaming magazines, and we have loads of issues. But there are big gaps (around the 1997-1999 mark), because the scans out there... kinda suck. Again I had plans to work up some fancy cropping system, but it never happened - I gravitated towards issues that weren't going to give me problems and conveniently forgot about the rest. There'll be others on that site that need similar treatment.
https://archive.org/details/@zaltys?and[]=com+club https://segaretro.org/Com_Club Com Club. Archive.org is full of smaller publications like this, most of which tend to be ignored because in this case, if you're not from Finland, you probably won't care. There's no "new" information in Com Club, just opinion pieces and clues to what may have been available to Finnish Sega owners. Important, but not as important as the Japanese, American or British video game mags that usually break stories first. And that's exactly why they need to be highlighted. Someone has to care. Reviews also allow us to use science to determine the best games.
https://archive.org/details/VFPCdemo PC demos. No really. Sega used to offer downloadable demos of PC games in the late 1990s. There may be archived versions on the wayback machine (among, no doubt, other free things provided by Sega's old websites) which might be a better starting point than this link, but either way we'll want to build up a collection so these things don't get lost. This is less about massive file sizes (given that most of these were being offered to dial-up users) and more about the time needed to find genuine, original copies. I have thought about setting up Windows 3.1/95/98 VMs strictly for the purpose of documenting old Sega PC games, but I might not get around to that for months, if not years. In many cases we don't know what the demo versions offer - are they based on prototype code? Are they secretly full versions with a few flags set differently? Do they have completely unique content? Are they set on the moon?? Incidentally there are old web games which probably need some horrendously dated version of Flash/Shockwave/Java/whatever to run. It's hard, but we have to care. (I made a list before starting this topic - we've now reached the end of it, but there will be other areas I'm forgetting. All Sega related things must go on our wikis.)
A small thing I've been meaning to do: I've done The Gamesmen catalogues up to the Summer of 2002... https://retrocdn.net/Category:The_Gamesmen_(AU)_Scans ...but there are more up to 2016 https://www.gamesmen.com.au/old-catalogues I'm not sure if they have much Sega content during this period, but there is bound to be at least a little bit.
