General Questions and Information Thread

Someone find me the US release date info for Dreamcastnoid: 128-bit Wars

 

I had it down as the 9th November 2017 from "The Bit Station" store, which was probably the date on my invoice.

Going by their twitter account. It looks like they took orders between the 4th November and 9th November when they sold out.

https://twitter.com/thebitstation/status/926201410596818944
https://twitter.com/thebitstation/status/927730069132455936
https://twitter.com/thebitstation/status/928385949817548800

 

Thanks.

So the US release date was the third of November 2017. Sadly, the actual link to the US store page was never backed up (in fact, archived pages don't show up for the site until 2021 despite launching in 2016), so we'll never have a reference for the price.

The store page was located at https://thebitstationgames.com/store/Dreamcastnoid-p95434610 for prosperity.

EDIT: I did find a link with a price that matches the wiki, but also somewhat odd since the link is talking about Black Friday and is almost acting like the price is a discount when other tweets from eggfan specify that they sold out and any extras would be sold then.

EDIT II: This is also why I'm pretty adamant about having these aftermarket games have as many sources as possible.

 

I've been digging through the archives adding lists to all the AM and AOU trade shows Sega attended.



RE: it never ends


Somewhere in my travels long ago, I discovered Sega held a "Private Show" in 1997 to announce new (arcade) things. I was told it was a yearly event. And it was... sometimes.




Sega Private Show

Sega Private Show 2000 Fuyu
Sega Private Show 2001: Natsu
Sega Private Show 2001: Fuyu
Sega Private Show 2002: Haru
Sega Private Show 2002: Natsu
Sega Private Show 2003: Haru
Sega Private Show 2003: Natsu
Sega Private Show 2003: Aki
Sega Private Show 2004: Spring
Sega Private Show 2004: Summer
Sega Private Show 2004: Autumn
Sega Private Show 2005 Spring
Sega Private Show 2005 Summer
Sega Private Show 2005 Autumn
Sega Private Show 2006 Spring
Sega Private Show 2006: Summer
Sega Private Show 2006 Autumn
Sega Private Show 2007: Summer
Sega Private Show 2007: Autumn
Sega Private Show 2007: Spring
Sega Private Show 2008: Spring
Sega Private Show 2008: Summer
Sega Private Show 2009: Summer
Sega Private Show 2010 Summer
Sega Private Show 2012: Summer
Sega Private Show 2013 Spring
Sega Private Show 2014: Summer
Sega Private Show 2015 Summer
Sega Private Show 2016 Autumn
Sega Private Show 2018 Autumn
Sega Private Show 2019 Spring

other times they ran three events in a year.

These were press-only shows, and I suspect a lot of the reporting has disappeared from the internet (especially for the earlier ones). I collected some photographs and for years it always looked pretty much the same:

Green-ish building, tables and chairs.

Usually they'd save the big reveals for the big public shows, but there'll be value here. The problem is that even Sega didn't talk about all of them - the general public couldn't attend, so there's no point in plugging their existence. Which is probably why we didn't know they existed.


COVID-19 seems to have killed this idea off, but there's still more than two decade's worth of Private Shows to document.

 

Greetings! I believe we have another undocumented game: タッチde キッズ　サンリオキャラクター (Loosely translated as Touch de Kids: Sanrio Characters). Unfortunately, this appears to be the best image of the flyer online at the moment.

This machine appears to be a derivative of Touch de Uno! to which the machine prints out origami sheets of Sanrio characters (i.e. Hello Kitty) as opposed to basic check sheets.

According to the flyer: there were 6 characters or "designs" that could be printed onto 16 different origami shapes.

While the machine was printing, you had the option of playing one of five minigames that were controlled via touchscreen (hence the name of the machine).

 

According to recent issues of Amusement Journal, they did start holding these again as early as late last year (Sega Private Show Winter 2022 and Sega Private Show Spring 2023). It truly never ends.

 

Among these Sega Private Shows was an event that took place in January 2003. I'd have listed it, but I couldn't find its official name - what few references exist call it "Sega Shinseihin Private Show" (SEGA新製品プライベートショー), which loosely translates to "Sega new product private show". Except they all showed Sega's new products, so I don't know how reliable that title is.

Guess which game appeared at this event.

...

 

From Amusement Journal with the date of 20030118 in the URL:

Ding Ding Ding!

 

The "2000 Winter" show took place in November, while the "2003 Winter" show took place in January. That'll be why I couldn't find it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030416000623/http://am.sega.jp/utop/news/event/p_show030117.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20030415141257/http://am.sega.jp:80/utop/show/pshow_0301/index.html

But I've found it now: Sega Private Show 2003: Fuyu. I'm wondering if they scrapped this Sanrio machine before it made to market - it's not mentioned in Sega's own coverage (though Soreike! Anpanman Popcorn Kojo 2 is only mentioned in the "report"), and this machine is proving elusive.

I've handled 2000 to mid-2005, and there a few games we haven't covered, most of these are exceedingly rare.

Although I love the way we managed to miss 15 gambling machines

Granted I think some of the earlier ones are Sammy-branded but usually I run into these sorts of things accidentally.

And yes they are a bit miserable, with their 2005 Flash game aesthetics. Can't imagine there'll be many of these left in the wild.

 

Adventures in brief private show press searchings

In the first issue of Sega Jack, a report from "Sega New Machine Festa Summer 1995". What's a New Machine Festa? Seemingly the immediate predecessor to what we've had since 1997 or so:

I expect there were at least a few more of these, yet perhaps unsurprisingly, the only other remnant I could find of this one was a few other photos of Indy 500, a lucha libre with a microphone (again), and I think AM1's Takao Seki?



Because of the big gap between Sega Jack and Sega Magazine, we're probably missing whatever then happened in 1996. But as the subsequent private shows were first and foremost press events for the game and amusement industries, there is inevitably a fair share of coverage starting to be scanned in for these. Even including some shows as recent as 2014, from Famitsu:

This and a 4Gamer piece tell us a bit about the projection map sand game using Kinect being unveiled there, a pre-release appearance of Wonderland Wars, and some new things about K-On! Houkago Live!!. We have the PS3 and PSP originals documented, but turns out the latter was also made into one of those innumerable kids arcade trading card titles:

It's "K-On!! Houkago Rhythm Selection" (けいおん!!放課後リズムセレクション), and in fairness it apparently didn't last very long at all.

 

Available here, along with 200+ reviews. There's a few missing where the supplement containing it hasn't been scanned, and it seems to have probably skipped a couple of weeks here and there, but those are all of the ones I could find.

 

The latest in undocumented rarities:

Pocket Monsters Crayon Kids (ポケットモンスターくれよんキッズ)

Another set of products Sega doesn't seem keen to discuss: the "Crayon Kids" series.


Somewhere around 1999-ish, Sega seems to have developed this "colour in the thing" machine, which was sold in a bunch of different flavours. Banpresto put out a Pokémon one in 2001(?) which means it's another not-really-Nintendo game on a Sega system.


None of this is well documented, but here's the Soreike! Anpanman flavour, and oh look, it's an ST-V cartridge... which likely means in a very roundabout way, Pokémon for the Sega Saturn.

... I mean sure we already had that, but now there's two. And this one has Generation 2 Pokémon.

 

Once upon a time the Sega System SP page was called "Sega Aurora".

Question: why?

Was there ever actually a source for "Aurora" or did someone make it up - just because I'm thinking of scrubbing the wiki of that name. "System SP" appears in the manuals so we know that one is legit, but I'm not seeing "Aurora" in any obvious documentation (and it's a tricky thing to search for).

 

I vaguely remember that I had read once that some System SP models use the same individual CPU and GPU chips as the Dreamcast/NAOMI, and later models use the Dreamcast System on a chip - Renesas SH3707. I think this works out, as early models of the SP were available (or just location tested?) in 2004, and the SH3707 was announced as available in the first quarter of 2005. Given this information, I had supposed that maybe the early models could possibly be the "Aurora" and the later models with the SoC were "System SP," but this is pure speculation.

I've always wondered why people didn't get more excited about the fact that a Dreamcast SoC exists (or once existed). Dreamcast mini when?

 

"Aurora" does feel like a fitting name for the debut game, Love and Berry: Dress Up and Dance!, but I haven't found the name actually mentioned in relation to it, and SEGA ARCADE GAME HISTORY still just says it runs on SYSTEM SP.

And yet apparently Dinosaur King is the game it's most associated with? At least, that's what the page disambiguation is named after and there's plenty of mentions of it online, but just from other wikis and some YouTube gameplay videos. The earliest mention I saw was this review from SEGA MAG.com, apparently dated 2008/09 from the text (but the publishing date is 06/13/2009)

I saw this post in the Emu-Russia forum where the person, _MetalliC_, seems pretty confident "Aurora" was never actually used (in their opinion), but also mentions SP had the codename "Spider"? And there's like a dozen emulation-related sites that attach the name "Spider" to it.

 

I found it.

https://elinux.org/Tech_Conference_2005Docs

https://elinux.org/images/0/08/CELF_Plenary_Meeting_2005_demo_posters.pdf

https://elinux.org/images/9/96/3DG050126rev12.ppt





Renesas was the company that held the rights to the SH-4 architecture in 2005 and SI Electronics was a subsidiary of Sammy holdings who had previously worked on the Atomiswave. These two demonstrated the "Aurora System" to this Linux conference in 2005. These specs and the use of Linux 2.6 kernel would seem to form the basis of the System SP.

According to the comments in this article, it's possible that Sammy produced a board called the Aurora that was different from the System SP and also based on this technology, but it was used exclusively in Pachinko and other gambling/redemption machines, I couldn't find any evidence of this though, but it's not like pachinko machines are well documented. I think this could be another misconception though. I think these slides show that the Aurora was the codename for the system internally at SIE while it was in R&D, before it got picked up by Sega and used in the System SP.

 

It's worrying that when I try and find more details the best result I get is... us.

Anyway there you go, now we're the best in the world. Although we still don't know much. Rejoyce in the knowledge that it's now Dinosaur King (System SP) instead of "Dinosaur King (Aurora)".


Fun fact: I was going to post a Sleeping Beauty reference to be witty and clever. Turns out if you search for individual Disney Princesses in Google, the top results are colour coded. Aurora is pink, Princess Jasmine is yellow, Ariel from the Little Mermaid is cyan - I don't know why this is a feature but I love that it is.

 

Another SEGA-published MMORPG we don't have documented yet: Saint Seiya Online.

https://www.siliconera.com/sega-bringing-saint-seiya-online-to-korea/
https://mmoculture.com/tag/saint-seiya-online/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SaintSeiyaOnline
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/955714-saint-seiya-online

It feels even more likely that AM Plus had something to do RF Online from before, because I found out about this through AM Plus member Shigemi Ohmori on LinkedIn. Just like like with SEGA-RaceTV, he was design leader and helped with outsourcing to other developers.
Except that doesn't really make sense, since those other sources say it released in 2013 and SEGA got involved in 2015, well after AM Plus was gone. But it's very clearly in Ohmori's AM Plus section with Psy-Phi and SEGA-RaceTV, and the order puts it before 2011 releases StarHorse3 and StarBoat. I might ask him in a Twitter DM about this. (EDIT: I did ask him, but he wants me to keep what he said secret. It's kinda complicated.)

 

Extra, extra! Read all about it! Sega ran a Japanese newspaper called "Sega Times" which covered all types cool stuff from the late 90-early 2000s!

Not sure how frequently these were printed, but I'm listing them based upon what I can make out from the images:

Issue #1 (September 1997): https://neokyo.com/en/product/yahoo/w1109300332

Issue #2 (October 1998): https://neokyo.com/en/product/yahoo/p1106790459

Issue #4 (April 1999): https://neokyo.com/en/product/yahoo/m1106778517

Issue #6 (December 2000): https://neokyo.com/en/product/yahoo/n1109292312


There's also "Sega Digital Times", which looks like a one-off from an expo, though I'm not sure which one.

Sega Digital Times 1997: https://neokyo.com/en/product/yahoo/n1108300840


I've embedded the covers here, but here's an album featuring all of the images I've ripped from these auction pages

https://ibb.co/album/7kKjJL?sort=name_asc


EDIT: Of course I forgot that issue #1 had another auction page with better images: https://neokyo.com/en/product/yahoo/t1106774681

Ripped images for this one: https://ibb.co/album/Qjk3Ps?sort=name_asc

 

That would be Sega Saturn Digital Circus 97