Exceptional Italian Studio by Sega and Espacio - totally unknown arcades. There's also an "Amuse 21" which might have become something else. This classical European-style architecture is a far cry from their later efforts PAINT IT BROWN
Amuse 21 was in the En-Joint scans - Sega ran it and another arcade inside of SPACE WORLD, "the world's first space theme park". They apparently made it under licence from the actual U.S. Space Camp and everything. The park closed altogether a few years ago, and though there's little trace of them now it looks like the arcades changed hands at some point and were neglected. All of those custom-made Space Harriers, UFO Catchers, and spacey trappings don't appear to have survived. (edit) And another future that never really happened: The text indicates that this was some of the first concept art for what Sega imagined their amusement theme parks to be. This quickly went out of the window for a more Disney-like design, and in the end we instead generally got a bunch of mini-parks embedded inside of larger shopping centres and the like.
Question for the wiki gurus, I'm looking at filling in a bunch of comparison screenshots for the Sega PC stuff and have been pondering what to do about options when the options screens have effectively been replaced by a windows menu bar. It'd be nice to show them somehow because the customizability (or lack thereof) is often the main difference between the console version and its port. But it's obviously tricky when you can't open all the sub-menus at once. I threw together this POC for Comix Zone just to get the point across (it could be tidied up a bit, I just cut things out with MS paint). What do we think? An alternative would be to literally cut out the menus without showing the game in the background at all.
is how I did it for the cheat menu. A period-correct operating system is probably a better way to go, because there could be quirks modern Windows doesn't intepret properly. Also this was before pretty borders and drop shadows, so cropping is super easy.
Thought I was going nuts Apparently not In those photos, Michael Jackson and Hisashi Suzuki have the same company profile (!).
ohshi--! I paid a little over JPY 20,000 for that booklet, which was a bit expensive, but man, it's now worth a whole lot more to me. It looks like he's looking at the Amusement page featuring the AS-1.
This sounds like a typical U+D/L+R thing - should be able to replicate in an emulator by toggling on the option to allow pressing both directions at the same time.
Issues of Mega Play are coming through - here's really early Dinosaurs for Hire. In the final game, Cybano isn't playable. Archie and Lorenzo were also given bigger guns. A genuine opportunity to dig through the final ROM to find dinosaur remains.
Ding - it was indeed. Neither Kega Fusion nor Gens emulates this behaviour, but it works with Regen and probably others. Makes me wonder if there are other games which can't cope. The later revision fixes this bug, but it's broken in the Japanese version too.
I recently picked up the "Marugoto Sonic Fan Book," a companion booklet to Marukatsu Mega Drive #7, and it had some interesting bits about Sega Sonic Arcade. I wrote about it a bit on twitter.
Apparently some people are completely fine with posting scans of old company profiles like they're nothing on social media every so often, as not only did an incomplete part of Sega's from 1989 surface on Twitter last year, Yosuke Okunari put 1988's in its entirety on Facebook several years ago. Both are inevitably very compressed, but at least they're proper scans (unlike these). And this beefs up the new and improved company profiles page on Retro a bit more.
Devoting a page to the Sega AI Computer in 1988 is... unexpected. Though I notice the internet's moved on a bit since I last spent time researching the subject. When Sega Retro started, the AI Computer was an unknown, save for perhaps a post or two on SMS Power pointing out its existence. We had a list of software that supposedly came out between 1986 and 1988, but that doesn't necessarily paint a picture of successful hardware - if Sega are still talking about it two years after launch, it must have a bigger deal than we thought. Somewhere between 32X and SG-1000 levels, as opposed to (what I assumed was) some throwaway experiment that didn't go anywhere. There's a fair few photographs and bits of promotional material online now too. It's still super rare and not well documented (and most of the photos aren't that good) but it's apparently not a complete mystery anymore.
Category:AI Computer games And then we became the best AI Computer resource on the internet. Nearly. I've been looking at the AI Computer all wrong - it's less of a one-off gimmick and more of a predecessor to the Pico, albeit one that doesn't seem to have ventured too far from classrooms. Virtually all the software is aimed at younger audiences, such as... This English language learning tool from 1989. With help from your good friends at Linguaphone - wait This has come up a few times recently - what gives? Linguaphone was formed in 1901 to teach English around the world, capitalising on those new-fangled Edison cylinders. It found itself particularly useful in post-war Japan since when you're occupied by Western powers, suddenly knowing English was a useful skill. And in the late 1980s and early 1990s... Sega owned the Japanese arm... for some reason. The business seems to have been largely separated from Sega proper, so it's perhaps no surprise that it was sold on in the mid-90s(?), but they came together for projects like the Linguaphone Education Gear (the CDX/Multi-Mega) every now and then. So another strange twist in the tale that is early-90s Sega of Japan. Problems communicating with their American counterparts, despite literally owning a company that teaches English.
There was a task to turn Sega Retro:Todo/Merchandise into something front-facing and useful. Sega Mega Drive/Merchandise is what I've come up with. The idea of buying "console" merchandise is a relatively new thing, but we're also getting to the stage where traces of older merchandise are disappearing from the internet. We've never had a "good" plan for handling merchandise and toys and models and whatever - this isn't necessarily a good plan either (really it needs someone to become an expert and lead the way), but it means we can at least dump things somewhere.