These sets of huge books are kinda gorgeous. I don't know why, but I just like lookin at them. Wish I could read em too.
I wasn't looking for Sega-related things, when I found a Sega-related thing https://archive.org/details/io-198105/page/n142/mode/1up April/May-ish 1981, Sega puts out an advertisement in Japan: "Give us game ideas. You might win some money, but ultimately THE GAME IS OURS". "TV game" suggests they were thinking about the home market. Two years before the SG-1000 launched.
This very topic came up just recently in Gaming Alexandria's Discord server - one member there has very kindly been providing translations of articles from Game Machine: https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19820201p/page/n1/mode/1up To sum this up, Sega scammed a 14-year old so that they could make Super Locomotive. They got away with this under the pretences of a game idea competition, where both "winners" didn't even receive the top cash prize and only one of the two ideas was eventually commercialised. Because why bother letting the later creator of Pokemon have his game made? https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19810615p/page/n2/mode/1up https://www.flickr.com/photos/onitama/albums/72157649902000395 I have a feeling this would not fly today
Not sure if anyone in Sonic Retro is young enough to remember the iDog, but I just found out that Sega (or more accurately, Sega Toys) had something to do with them (with Wikipedia claiming that they invented it). And most importantly, it’s not on Sega Retro.
It is, but it isn't. https://segaretro.org/Sega_Retro:Todo/Toys/Sega_Toys Very little of Sega Toys' output is on the main wiki, but there are TODO lists waiting for someone motivated to start writing coverage (hint hint).
Another one; There is a quest where you have to gather some antiques for a demon and one of them is called a "TV-Game Combination" upon getting it, and when he inspects it it turns out to be a console called a "CX-1000 II", an obvious reference to the SG-1000 II.
It never ends... Anyway, maimai has an anime now. Started airing on the 5th of this month. Title, credits for the first episode, and a bonus picture at the end: The name is Irodorimidori (イロドリミドリ) and its description is as follows: "At Maigahara Music College Affiliate School Maigahara Senior High (abbreviated as MaiMai) that gathers the most promising musical talents, there's a rumor circulating among students. "If you give an amazing performance at the school festival, you get special extra credit (or so they say)." Serina's grades are not very good, so she immediately believes the rumor and decides to form a band." The studio behind it is called Akatsuki and it is of the slice of life/music genre. It is one of those three minute anime, kind of like Go! Go! 575 of years past. Two episodes have aired as of this post.
I believe it's based more around Chunithm (where the characters and series actually originate from), and the MaiMai abbreviation is just an in-joke for the fans. Remains to be seen whether there's any references to Ongeki in there too.
Going through that big PC-8801 archive, and found that there are 20 disks dedicated to Lode Runner maps. Because apparently the game was popular over in Japan. One of these is labeled "SEGA_CHP", and after a whole two seconds of research, I deduced that yeah, some versions of Lode Runner have different maps, and I guess someone spent time re-creating levels from other ports in the PC-8801 version. Bespoke maps? Who'd have guessed. I've just uploaded all 80 maps from the SG-1000 version of Lode Runner. I still have Championship Edition to do, but whatever. There are no known level skip codes for Lode Runner, so I used Kega Fusion's cheat finding feature to deduce that 00C010:XX sets which level is loaded next. So replace the XX with any hexadecimal number between 00 and 3F, and you'll load up the level of choice. I haven't compared these maps to other versions but I'm sure someone can have fun working out what all these letters mean: What happens when you try and load a level that doesn't exist? You get this screen. Presumably a leftover from another version that shipped on cassette - I'll let someone else do the digging. Lode Runner was ported to a lot of platforms though, such as apparently this fan favourite: The Enterprise Sixty Four. I had forgotten this existed until this afternoon, and will probably forget again.
Yeah, Lode Runner had a level editor, even SC-3000/SG-1000+SK-1100 supported this, with levels being savable to tape on the SR-1000, which is surely the reason for the TAPE LOAD screen. It's explained in English in the western manual. So I guess those disks are fan made levels from the level editor. SF-7000 used the cartridge port, so games couldn't be saved to disk on SC-3000. I think I've seen that Sega level before, maybe copied from SG-1000/SC-3000 Championship Edition?
I just finished uploading the Championship Edition maps - great minds etc. It has its own custom levels, but some clearly shared with other versions. (I can't get the PC-8801 version of Lode Runner to run, so I can't check things)
It's funny that SG-1000 had an external save system, which neither SMS or MD did, and which wouldn't be seen again until the Mega CD. I guess that Mark III could have theoretically supported this, but to my knowledge never did. Sega did tout FDDs for both SMS and MD though ... so maybe that was planned at one point ... I think that some MD games may have been intending to use that at some point early on.
Okay turns out if you don't mash buttons like an idiot as the game loads, it'll freeze on the title screen. Get past that and you can load up the editor, swap a disk, and load up to 150 extra maps.
Well this is a thing, the SG-1000 manual for Championship Lode Runner (which also supports saving to tape)... ...tells you how to manually turn the reels with a pencil. Am I dreaming.
I've added a little "non Sega versions" table to pages where there are non-Sega versions, because it seemed like a good idea an hour ago (although maybe it's a bit messy - let me know if it needs a rethink). We will want comparison pages between versions where applicable - this will at least give some clues as to what to look for. But it's kind-of... wrong. Because I didn't think it through, there are two methods on Sega Retro of converting a "format code" into a... format. e.g. "MD" = "Mega Drive". Template:Code2Format Template:CodeFormatTable - this has database calls so is probably better, but caching can be a problem, so idk They're both incomplete - I want to merge these somehow so there's only one list, and now that NEC Retro is active again, we can't really get away with just saying "PC88" or "PC98", especially when there are multiple PC-9800 versions of games (which spoilers: there are). There are two things we may need: 1) people to identify which formats are missing or are incorrect b) ... we'll need icons. We borrowed most of ours from here and here but I mean realistically who's going to do one for the SAM Coupé? the Thomson TO7?? the Tatung Einstein??? (of these we only need a SAM Coupé but even the current set could be more consistent) I'm going to have to learn the difference between the FM-7, FM-77 and FM-77AV - it'll be a blast. But yes, an opportunity to have a say I guess.
I've been working through the scans in my todo folder, and I just thought I'd highlight this scan of the 64 page retrospective book that came with the iam8bit Rez Infinite Vinyl Soundtrack. https://segaretro.org/File:Rez_Infinite_LP_Book.pdf
Something that I've never particularly looked into (because the tech wasn't really refined at the time) was the emulator used in the PS3 (and by extension X360) version of Sonic the Fighters. Plugging the decrypted ELF executable into a disassembler has been eye-opening. Not only are there labels to functions in the game (unreferenced in the executable, but they are there!), the entire framework of the executable seems to be from code originating from the RingeWide port of Daytona USA which became Sega Racing Classic! So if Sega was so inclined back in the day, more Model2 ports could have been put into the RingWide system. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! This framework/emulator has been trickling into the Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio works such as Yakuza Kiwami 2's Virtua Fighter 2, and assumingly Judgement and Lost Judgements other Model2 games! When comparing the main launch options of the emulator in both Sonic the Fighters for PS3 and the dll file for YK2's VF2, they match 1:1! They are built from the same code! Unreal. Sega theoretically could port any of the Model2 line to anything at this point. EDIT: MOREOVER, WITHIN THE SEGA RACING CLASSIC HARD DRIVE ARE THE ENTIRE MODEL2B CONTENTS, ALL ROM DATA, OF FIGHTING VIPERS Actually this has to be a dirty dump of the game, so I can't trust the contents. Oh the modified dates of both the Daytona content and the Fighting Vipers content are consistent with SRC release, so... yeah, that's a thing...
