Today on Things I found accidentally™: VHS cassettes of Japanese professional wrestling. Because nobody says Sega like bare-chested men pretending to slap each other.
BRITISH VIDEO GAME HISTORY 101 Charlie Brooker (yes that one) was originally a cartoonist. Then a video games journalist. Then a television presenter. Then a television producer. In the early 90s, he drew some advertisements for Mega Drive games available for sale at Tottenham Court Road Computer Exchange. There's quite a few - they're usually violent, back when advertising was fun. One day Sega Retro will have a collection of this stuff. What became of this shop? Well now a chain spreading across Europe, because that chain is CeX. The one that pronounces itself "sex" after the 9PM watershed. Charlie Brooker is one of the several men who founded CeX, so is at least partly responsible for all those red buildings selling old iPhones. It's a weird world.
https://picclick.com/SEGA-GENESIS-Console-System-Model-1-123839830466.html Here is an early(?) Canadian Sega Genesis. It has an extra Sega logo. It's easy to go around thinking all Mega Drive consoles are the same, but they really aren't.
That's in very pretty condition. Too expensive for my blood though. Also has the new NiGHTS Dream Wheel trademark in Japan been mentioned anywhere yet? Translated blurb from here via NeoGAF:
There's a seller on Yahoo Auctions with a big Sega Press (セガプレス) collection and Dream Information (ドリームインフォメーション) collection. Not sure if they would contain anything interesting.
I've got a decent collection of both, and honestly: they're not really that interesting. Also a bit of a pain in the ass to scan, as some fold out into a giant flyer.
Ladies and gentlemen, a Dreamcast memory card that also doubles up as a PlayStation one. Because you want that. Terrifying!
Weird. Would that have been usable for Bleemcast! at all for carting saves between a PS and DC? I never used it myself, just curious.
Today in "why we need to actually read the texts we collect"--when reading this feature on the Master Gear Converter, the following passage jumped out to em: "もともとゲームギアには「ゲーム ギアモード」と「マスターシステム モード」という2つの動作モードが あり、マスターシステムのケームも 動<ように作られていたのだがカー トリッジスロットが違うため、その まま使用するのは不可能だつた。" Basically, during the Game Gear's development, there was originally going to be a "Game Gear mode" and "Master System mode" but the cart types wound up diverging.
It's also extremely difficult to read the way the wiki works. You can not actually read page 125 without opening the entire file and navigating to page 125... Observation on the Model2B board: Book: My Virtual-On (Sonic the Fighters CPU) board: 1. The Motorola 68000 processor (for audio) is socketed. 2. The ROM board has top backplane connectors 3. Above and below the i960kb CPU are sockets soldered to the board. They almost seem like the Cyclone PCI80960 evaluation board sockets to place a different CPU onto the board... I am not saying these did never happened in retail units, but I do own 3 Model2B CPU mainboards and ROM boards and none of them are configured like this.
Board revisions is something we ought to be better at. It's just that... not many people have access to 20 year old arcade hardware That Sega Arcade History scan is gloriously wonderful, but because there are two-page spreads I can't reference things properly. I'll have a look through to if we're missing anything though.
Undocumented Sega arcade games go go go: - Cosmic War (コズミックウォー) - Zig Zag Block (ジグザグブロック) - 3 Way Block (スリーウェイブロック) - Upset Block (アップセットブロック) - Basketball (1979) (バスケットボール) - Sundance (サンダンス) - Tailgunner (テイルガンナー) - Lunar Lander (ルナランダー) - Targ (ターグ) - Fire One (ファイアーワン) - Armor Attack (アーモアアタック) - Wanted G7 (ウォンテッドG 7) I stopped looking after 1984. The internet doesn't recognise most of these (or at least, Sega versions). The only knowledge of Wanted G7 is that it's in this book. This book only covers traditional arcade games, so it's missing electro-mechanical games, medal games, pinball, jukeboxes, weird one-off stuff - all the things that are hard to document. But I still count it as a big win. I can't translate all of this - we need some experts.
Yeah, I kinda knew that needed fixing. My free tools on linux are too painfully fiddly to sort that out. I'm going to pony up for a Nitro Pro license at some point (I use it at work for similar historical archival purposes, and it's amazing), but I'm a bit skint at the moment.