Also of value https://archive.org/details/sega-developers-conference-conference-proceedings-march-5-7-1996 https://retrocdn.net/File:DevCon96_ConferenceProceedings.pdf DevCon '96 was a Sega developers conference. Lots of technical information for aspiring programmers, but also... localisation! https://archive.org/details/sega-de...proceedings-march-5-7-1996/page/n312/mode/1up Details on some of the choices SoA made to their games when localising for Japan (and PAL regions). And with it, an answer to the old question of difficulty: In Bug's case, they increased health and lives on normal mode, resized some collision boxes and added more checkpoints, among other things. It also tells you Sega's analysis of European markets. Whoa slow down there. Swedish Pico games. That's something to look out for.
Its a shame the feature wasn't in the magazine itself as I still have all the Offical UK mag's stored in my mums garage
They did put a similar FAQ feature in some of the magazine's subsequent issues (below). But I think the earliest one they initially put on the website was a little different. https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:ODM_UK_19.pdf&page=111 https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:ODM_UK_20.pdf&page=95
Anyone want to do some data entry??? Following this topic, I finished off Hivebrain's system of music track credits. Now when you add credits to a track on a music page, they can be recalled later. So for example, After Burner 20th Anniversary Box is a six-disc box set of After Burner music. https://segaretro.org/File:AB20AB_Music_JP_Box1.jpg Individual track credits are listed in the CD inserts. Add them to the track listings on the wiki page and... Hiroshi Kawaguchi/Song credits They're automatically added here. Hiroshi "Hiro" Kawaguchi wrote most all of the music in After Burner, and so is credited dozens of times in one album (he also did OutRun, which means he gets the credit for 23 iterations of Magical Sound Shower). Previously his song credits were added manually, but... there's bazillions, and numerous Sega-related albums are released every year. This also ensures people are credited as they were in the original material, as opposed to how we think they should have been credited. So prepare for "arrengers" and "guiters". There's a slight issue with translations right now, but as long as the data is there, that's what's important. Hiro isn't credited in for individual tracks in the games themselves, only soundtracks and other later material. For that, the solution is going to be similar to Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island/Production credits, i.e. lay the sound test out and credit people that way. But I want to have strong references here - After Burner 20th Anniversary Box is a decent reference to for working out Hiro composed the music for After Burner (II) but be wary of arrangements and remixes and remastering or extra work put in specifically for the album. If it's a game like Sonic 3, where music was chopped and changed and recycled, there's scope to make poor assumptions (e.g. credit Michael Jackson for things). The "manual" lists I want to remove are in Category:Old song credits. That won't happen until the auto-generated lists are at least as good.
Omni templates just got a lot less annoying Code (Text): {{Omni | name=Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller | prereleases={{ReleaseWithDate|Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller Taikenban}} }} Template:CrazyTaxi3Omni aka soon many games will have dedicated credits subpages, and I didn't want to edit 4039280432043298 templates. Now it checks to see if pages exist and displays accordingly. Why didn't it do this before? Well, while ParserFunctions has an #ifexist: function, there's all sorts of caveats on performance, and more importantly, it would add "missing" pages to Special:WantedPages. Virtua Fighter is never going to have "maps", but it would be reporting two-dozen red links, which would get in the way of... actual red links we might care about. I only discovered a better alternative recently (I stole this from Wikipedia IIRC). And then forgot I discovered it. The old method of listing each page invidually still works, and is necessary if you want red links. The only thing you still have to add to Sega Retro Omni templates are pre-releases (and any optional bespoke sub-pages, should they be required). Can that be automated too? Well prototypes are, but we're talking demos and trial versions - the problem is that there's no guaranteed way to display them in the correct order (date ascending). Demos are less revealing about when they were built or released. Also it's more work and there's not that many of them, really.
Until fiddling with the templates above, I haven't really been curating music on Sega Retro - others seemed more interested, so I left it in their hands. But I have a question - S.S.T.Band is meant to be Sega's "Sound Team" Band. As in, its members were part of the "Sega sound team". Not all of them have pages, but since it's possible to automate credits, I figured I might make some. Except... uhh. We have these people listed as members: Koichi Namiki ("MICKEY") Jouji Iijima ("GALAXY") Kimitaka Matsumae ("HARRIER") Shingo Komori ("BURNER") Masato Saito ("TURBO") Hiroshi Miyauchi ("HIRO") Takenobu Mitsuyoshi ("R Saburo") Takehiko Tanabe ("THUNDER") Hisanori Kumamaru ("SPLASH") Koichi Namiki did loads of stuff. Thunder Blade, Galaxy Force and Super Monaco GP, mainly, and seems to have been the front man? idk Hiroshi Miyauchi (now Kawaguchi, aka Hiro) has been writing music for Sega for neigh-on 40 years, and he could have retired on OutRun alone. I mean Christ, Retro adopted the Space Harrier theme as its own. He's a big deal. Takenobu Mitsuyoshi is also a big deal, because he's the voice behind Daytona USA (and Sonic Mania's competition mode, if "composed almost every 90s Sega arcade game of note" wasn't enough for you). But that leaves six others. Drummer Hisanori Kumamaru has been brought in to play on a couple of soundtracks, but the rest... have no Sega credits outside of "members of S.S.T.Band". Now obviously Sega made a lot of games in the 1980s and didn't start crediting its developers properly until 1992/93/94, but it's odd that they haven't turned up in... anything. Even their pseudonyms haven't been mentioned - there is currently no evidence that two thirds of the S.S.T. Band ever worked on Sega games. Which makes me wonder... was this done on purpose? Did Sega pay a bunch of random musicians to pretend they were part of their team, so as stop other employers poaching their talent (see also: not using their real names in performances)? They disbanded around the same time Sega dropped its policy on credits - is this a workable theory? (I imagine the story has been documented elsewhere - there's a bunch of albums and the later ones have linear notes... albeit in Japanese)
There's also a history to S.S.T. Band that Sega don't want to tell... because it doesn't have much to do with them. Like that one time Formula One drivers Gerhard Berger and Riccardo Patrese released singles to promote the 1992 (Japanese?) F1 Grand Prix. ... okay they only appeared on the covers, but S.S.T. Band provided some sort of official soundtrack to F1 events between 1990 and 1992. 30-year-old Japanese Formula One coverage isn't a hole I plan to go down right now (p.s. it was 1993 when a different part of Sega started sponsoring the Williams team). You might think this is a bit random, and... okay it kinda is, but it's not entirely without merit. If you're European, Formula One has been a thing since the 1950s, but in Japan, the sport didn't start picking up traction until the 1980s, when Honda started making engines that won things. By the early 90s you had Japanese engines and drivers on the field, winning points, and the domestic audience started caring. So this is right at the point where F1 became mainstream in Japan, but before it became too expensive for Sega to get involved in. I have no idea if anyone cares in 2022. In the UK (and presumably elsewhere), F1 started locking itself behind pay-to-view channels about a decade ago, and because the cars are so big and similar and "safe", it's a lot harder to overtake. Not like the old days where cars used to explode (though I suppose it's good people don't die anymore?).
You can't stop the music. Nobody can stop the music. Something I didn't realise, because the documentation was little more than "THIS EXISTS": The Super Shinobi & Works, one of Yuzo Koshiro's early albums from 1989, contains the "original" soundtrack for The Revenge of Shinobi. That is, rather than being played through a Mega Drive (possibly because in 1989, that wasn't much of an option), it's coming through a PC-8801 FE, which means you get a little more clarity on the samples: Mega Drive | PC-8801 FE Strictly speaking his Bare Knuckle soundtracks don't come from the Mega Drive either, but the differences there are pretty minor, as presumably Koshiro had a better understanding of the hardware by then. What's a PC-8801 FE? Don't you read my topics?? It's one of the lesser PC-8800 series computers that took more away than it added. As said in that topic, there are only three "generations" of NEC's PC-8800 computers worth caring about - this is a cost-reduced PC-8801 mkII SR (i.e. the "second" generation). I imagine it was expanded to produce better music, since by default the sound hardware is less capable than the Mega Drive's. It also means that vinyl album from 2016 isn't offering the best possible version of the soundtrack. (Although it was never going to, vinyl fans - digital-to-analogue, Nyquist–Shannon and all that). To be honest this might be a well-known story, but sometimes I just like to fill in the silence.
Maybe? I feel the more simple explanation is likely just that for live shows they wanted more people to handle more instruments and thus hired external hands.
SST Band was just a band put together to arrange and perform Sega's game music. Members were not required to have worked on Sega games. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.S.T.BAND
I think it might be from one of Sega's old jukebox catalogues - I was sure I uploaded the cover, but I can't find it. I don't think I'm getting confused with this, but I might be.
https://www.yomogi2017.xyz/entry/2019/08/11/144017 Hyoe Koyokaku (兵衛向陽閣) a prestigious and long-established hot springs hotel in Arima Onsen, Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture... the photo is apparently from the 1960s... Edit: https://www.yomogi2017.xyz/entry/2019/07/24/221007 Kinjyokan (金城館), another hot springs hotel ... this time in Atami City, Shizuoka Prefecture... and... https://www.yomogi2017.xyz/entry/2019/08/28/224840 Okutonekan (奥利根館) an hotel in Minakami, Gunma Prefecture
At least Sega's graphic design was consistent back then: Also now seeing noise about FSG News, the magazine that interviewed game company sound teams. This will hold some of the answers about the S.S.T. Band but good luck in locating copies.
This one has eluded VGMdb Panzer Dragoon SMF Music Data Panzer Dragoon music... released as MIDI files on a floppy disk. I was vaguely aware of this practise, but thought it wouldn't apply to Sega Retro. Guess I showed myself. Why would you want this? Erm... uhh... I can only see it being useful as as some sort of learning tool, i.e. if you had a keyboard that could load MIDIs off a disk, maybe it could teach you how to play. Although given the box talks about MS-DOS and Macintosh computers, that's not what the developers had in mind. MIDI files was a viable way of getting music in the early days of the internet, if you were after approximations of the real thing, but 1995 in Japan? Not sure. Maybe people just wanted to give their Roland GS devices a work out, idk. Interesting thought though - what would have been more common at the time, computers with a Roland Sound Canvas to get the most out of this product, or with a CD drive that could play the OST?
Neat, I wasn't aware of this format, it seems like a missed opportunity. I looked on the Internet Archive, there's a decent collection of them, including this 1996 catalogue which along with Panzer Dragoon has a Phantasy Star release too, and also a few other game music ones which probably aren't relevant for us. There's a surprisingly large number of them, including western releases. Quite a few of them are karaoke disks which also displayed the lyrics. I guess it was popular enough that there was still a userbase in 1995/6. It seems to have outlived the CD based "Hyper Audio System" at least. Edit: https://twitter.com/gosokkyu/status/943453896134889472 By Rittor music, who were also responible for the "Hyper Audio System".
I believe I added support to ReleasesMusic for "physical-digital" releases (DVD-ROMs, SD cards, Mega Drive albums and such).
music, makes the people, come together So this has been my focus for the last few days/weeks: Takenobu Mitsuyoshi has had an incredibly active career at Sega, and not only is credited in a bazillion games, but a bazillion soundtracks. My aim is to remove all manually-maintained lists from developer pages, which in this case means removing 70+ "song credits" subheadings in favour of an automated version. It's not super perfect yet, but it's working. More automation means less faffing and more accuracy - Sega Retro can do this, many other sites and wikis can't. Hurray, etc.. Handily for video game soundtrack CDs, song credits are often really easy to find, because after about 1993/1994, the musicians involved are credited in booklets. We didn't have any booklet scans on the wiki a few weeks ago - now we do. I've sourced them from wherever, and many are surprisingly high quality (unlike video game manuals), which is a plus. The only issue I'm having there is that OCR often fails on lower resolution Japanese scripts, and it's can be a nightmare trying to correct it. However I'm noticing not-so-great trends, and it's a good example of why projects like Sega Retro are so important. Sadly the blame usually likes at the door of VGMdb, by far the most comprehensive video game soundtrack database. So here's some talky talky things: 1) VGMdb hides content. To get the most out of VGMdb you probably have to register an account, and while sure, humans can cope, it's an obstacle to crawlers such as the internet wayback machine. It looks like booklets mainly(?) are hidden behind this wall, which means, if VGMdb went down, there are unlikely to be mirrors. Problem is, it's not obvious to the outside user which parts of the set are missing, and even if the wayback machine could find the files on the server, it wouldn't have the context to tell us what they are. Case in point, we've got a few references that point to pages like these. We shouldn't be referencing VGMdb in the first place, but this is the sort of problem that can come up as a result of the above policy. There can be legitimate reasons for making this decision (mainly bandwidth), but that's why mirrors are important - so no one site takes full responsibility. 2) VGMdb makes assumptions. Not massive ones, but much like you see with MobyGames, there are users that like to fill in the gaps when they probably should leave things alone. This is mainly an issue with credits, which I fear may have leaked onto Sega Retro (and many other sites). Case in point: the Galaxy Force album from 1988. This was released at a time where the answer to "who composed this music" was always "SEGA" and the actual credits say as much. All the people who produced the album get a mention, but the actual musicians who made the songs are grouped under the vague "S.S.T. Band" moniker and the customer is left guessing. VGMdb has more detailed credits anyway: What's their source? Well there isn't one, really. A lot of this is probably correct, but it's information inferred from other (later?) albums and interviews. For this specific album, many of these people weren't credited, and we ought to reflect that. It helps confirm, for example, that Sega didn't actively credit their musicians until after 1988 - you wouldn't get that impression from the VGMdb page alone. It's about documenting "what's actually there" as opposed to "what you think should be there". 3) Everyone relies on VGMdb. And while theoretically that's not a problem because VGMdb is usually correct, it means, should they make a mistake, others echo that mistake. It's the same for Discogs (and maybe even worse there) - the expectation, much like Wikipedia, that things must be fine. But spoilers: VGMdb do make mistakes. For example, its policy is to name its database entries after how the albums are presented on their covers, whether that means CAPITAL LETTERS where you wouldn't expect it, or ~wacky~ --punctuation--. You also get wonky Japanese -> English translations in an effort to aid searching - none of this is necessarily what was intended by the publishers. Video game example: Wipeout is sometimes written as wipE'out'' because that's what the cover says. But some manuals say WipeOut and other sources say WipEout - what was actually intended? Sega flip-flop between "OutRun" and "Out Run" (and "Afterburner" and "After Burner") all the time - you've got to be careful not to misrepresent the product. (Sega Retro makes the choices it does through a mixture of "most used name", "most sensible name" and "I'm not typing ® every time I want to write 'PlayStation' (or PLAYSTATION®3)") Anyway point is, video game music people - try not to rely too much on one source, and open your eyes and read things. Also point us in the direction of bits we're missing - I'm sure there are tons.
Hello, Nicolaas Hamman hierso. I didn’t have a Sonic Retro account before yesterday and definitely didn’t know about this thread, Ted918 shared it in the SEGA Forever Discord’s Sega Retro research channel. I hope it’s not a problem that I wrote a lot to try and explain some concepts in the post focused on VGMdb, I’m worried it’ll come across as aggressive. (although I was legitimately angry for a while that I had to luck myself into finding a place to spout concerns/provide context/learn ground rules) Disclaimer: I’ve been a Sega Retro editor since 11 November 2019 and a VGMdb editor (later Staff member) since 19 June 2019. 1. First is a thing I thought "I'm clearly being addressed about without being named", although apparently that's a different link to SEGA SYSTEM 16 COMPLETE SOUNDTRACK Vol.3 than I added to Wrestle War? This is something I should have definitely tested more thoroughly (testing is something I'm bad at), but I've tried to link directly to the full-size media hosted on media.vgm.io for VGMdb pages I reference hoping they wouldn't be locked behind needing an account. (for that particular reference I did it wrong and linked to the Covers View instead so it definitely requires an account). I think I planned on replacing some of the VGMdb links I've used whenever the scans were added to the site (fyi I haven't made my own as, though I assumed, I wasn't sure if the scans were taken from other sites or not, so if this was all newly created scans I didn't want to be the person breaking that streak. Also I haven't made many PDFs at all), but certainly there's been some PDFs added that I could use for references I've forgotten about. In hindsight, it was a terrible plan and I should have waited for them all to be added first (or even helped add them myself) 2. Yes, some content is hidden for bandwidth reasons. No idea on any mirror situation with VGMdb, surprisingly. I think there's an unsolicited site that mirrors VGMdb's pages, but with a lot of info missing like editor credits (my turn for guessing, they seem to do it via crawl, so it's probably only mirroring what you get without an account). 3. There’s definitely some composer pages with “song credits” that are just a list of community-made song titles from games the composer worked on. I’ve definitely avoided making those, but also I've been scared to remove them unless they were explicitly incorrect, like listing the GOLDEN AXE music on Tohru Nakabayashi’s page. The only songs in his Song credits section that have been explicity credited to him, song by song, are the ones from Thunder Blade. 4 The credits for the linked GALAXY FORCE album are interpreted from the booklet commentary, where composers give commentary on specific songs or assorted songs, and the arranger Kunimoto is mentioned in the general album commentary (ironically the linked VGMdb page links him as uncredited unlike the composers, that would be the yellow asterisk in the artist links.). Credits within commentary aren't eligible for the track lists then? I must have misunderstood, since that conflicts with the mission statement of a certain thread linked further below. But yeah, you need a VGMdb account to verify a lot of information, not convenient for other sites. I actually occasionally link Sega Retro (mostly just for scans, while it's not on the blacklist of websites deemed untrustworthy, sourcing wikis is still discouraged) Ramble Spoiler I've dreamed of having some way to better archive the text present in the scans, sort of like Alternative Text. Even if was crudely done, alt text on one of Internet Archive's scans of SEGA MAGAZINE did show in a search result and thus helped with tracking down the issue on Sega Retro that made it possible to create the Saeko Segawa page. 5. Another benefit to having a VGMdb account is you can check the album history. In the past year our admins have added that all edits require you to have a comment sourcing your edit, especially recommending links, which are automatically submitted to WayBack Machine for further preservation of the info, I’ve mentioned this to the SorachiJirachi, the only person I can recall asking me to correct some of my editing decisions. Have they become a mentor figure? Anyways, I asked if Retro could also automatically archive submitted links. It already checks for new links added to trigger a CAPTCHA, maybe amidst that process it could be done? Ramble Spoiler Since I didn't have a Sonic Retro account before and didn't see anything to indicate it would be very helpful for understanding the new movements at Sega Retro, I didn't see Operation: Better credits | Sonic and Sega Retro Forums. Exciting, I'd like to do more with that if I don't screw it up as well without being told. I actually thought, when adding Toshiyuki Kaji to Zoom 909 if should list him in a way that explains (from the GAME WATCH article) that he only worked on the starry background. Is it alright if I try that? Finally I can ask for permission (maybe). 5. There'll be a lot of VGMdb alternatives with some scans to reference, and others which don't do scans. Me personally, I do definitely rely on VGMdb for scan references, sometimes I check the links which are provided for a lot of scans taken from other websites, but a lot of the times in-depth booklets are originally scanned by VGMdb users or are taken from piracy websites (in which case it's been asked that users not link to those), publishers aren't usually going to provide more than front/back covers and maybe some disc scans. I still think it's more helpful to users fact-checking pages or building their own wikis that the scans and other images include links to where they were taken from (otherwise I and probably many others assume they're scanned uniquely for Retro). But other than scans there's other official sources with expiring searches, like a frequent source for the manual credits: 5.1 JASRAC Works Identification Database (a lot of the times they correspond to albums which don't include the credits on the release itself, or there's cases like Super Monkey Ball 2 and Virtua Cop 3 where there weren't albums. I think links to specific songs don't expire nowadays, but I've only today heard of this when rereading the VGMdb thread about it and I only briefly tested (did I mention I'm bad at testing?). JASRAC also provided katakana and romaji versions of song titles.) https://www2.jasrac.or.jp/eJwid/main?trxID=F00100 There's some other copyright websites which I've forgotten about since I don't use them as frequently. I know there's one where some credits for Spencer Nilsen can be found. 5.2 A source which I don't know how to handle is credits for digital albums, with no possibility for scans, and they are displayed differently depending on the site (like some sites might have Music and Lyrics, maybe even Arrangement, and others have Written instead). I don't know the details of how they work, but VGMdb has some automated tools to help take credits from somewhere behind certain sites. I've only added to a couple like GOLDEN AXE THE MUSIC (or Golden Axe The Music), but I don't know how to let people know the source efficiently or what standards there would be for which credits to use or if they would all be added or if digital re-release credits should be added to the original physical releases and, if not, how to note with identical track lists that one has track credits and the other doesn’t. Ramble Spoiler There’s another tool in the VGMdb Discord that’s somewhat relevant, the OCR tool, as you mentioned the failings of OCR. I know it’s a much-beloved OCR that pulls from 2 separate sources, although I don’t use it much as I’m used to OCRing via one of its sources, Google Docs, and then going through the text to check for mistakes, as VGMdb admin nstz requests users do. Well, sometimes I don’t go over them when I’m in a rush and it’s a high resolution scan I expect to be near-perfectly accurate anyways and they’re not to be used on a database site. 7. I don’t understand that equation of "most used name", "most sensible name" and "I'm not typing ® every time I want to write 'PlayStation' (or PLAYSTATION®3)". How do different people figure out what’s most sensible? And I don’t believe that it’s usually researched what the most commonly used way to write titles is, every page I know just uses Title Case. Probably, if VGMdb had a page, it would be called Vgmdb. Certainly that’s how I’ve made pages before, whereas when I’m making product pages for VGMdb, I research game covers, album covers, manuals, flyers and websites to see what the most commonly written title is (and source them in the comment). Surely we should take advantage of redirects and always represent text as it's presented? Ramble Spoiler Oh by the way, the OutRun 20th Anniversary Box has a page for nearly every game in the series, and it can be seen that every game before OutRunners spelled the title as Out Run, so the series name probably changed with OutRunners. Don’t know the reason (also I won’t say there aren’t typos in that booklet), and it’s not like there’s an official statement about this (I assume?), so guesswork would be involved to create a “sensible” title, if I assume sensible has anything to do with what the involved individuals intended. This post was developed over roughly 4 or 5 hours across 2 days. Thanks to Ted918 for sharing the thread, and to MykonosFan for activating my account. Sorry again for saying so much after so little. I've been staring at a wall of text for so long. EDIT: I didn't notice at the time how much both my reply and the original are fueled by "they made it harder than necessary to find out the info I need to cease being confused".
(I really wasn't trying to single anyone out individually - it was just things I had noticed in my internet travels ) I'm still learning how best to do credits. My currently feeling is, if a release came with a list of credits, and then elsewhere started talking about other people not mentioned in that list, that would constitute two creditstable templates (and a third for those who weren't credited at all). It's not clean, but it is more accurate to "separate" them. There is a trap (and one Sonic Retro originally fell into too) of having "standard" roles. Template:Track has "composer" and "arranger" and "lyrics" fields, which generate consistent headings, but I've deprecated those because the "raw" credits can be more revealing. Little things - if "arranger" appears above "composer", it might subtly suggest one was considered more important than the other. And you also get situations where the roles are "MUSIC" or "WORDS", and then we're shoehorning things into categories and it gets messy. You also get roles specific to one album, so maintaining that in templates is a faff. Best to list credits "as they are" and let someone work out the meaning later. I think with Retro's naming system, the idea is to be "mostly right". It's a case-by-case thing - we want some level of consistency, and we want it to be readible (VGMdb doesn't have this problem so much - most of its page lack prose). We're also limited by the software in some cases, namely square brackets and # symbols (and "-" could theoretically screw with search results). It's mainly Japanese titles to blame, where they're very relaxed on punctuation and letter case, although yes, a lot of it has been dictated by who made the page first. Challenge things if they're horrendously wrong, but we're probably past the stage of replacing all the "Sega"s with "SEGA"s.
