General Questions and Information Thread

Ah, I see. You'd have to use the debugger for changing the region in memory: https://docs.mamedev.org/debugger/index.html

And then pause and press Shift+P to advance frames until it reaches the one you need. Then F12 for a screenshot.

 

So this came up yesterday, and I did a silly thing last night - I thought about it.

The idea is that if you put a Mega-CD/Saturn/Dreamcast disc into a PC, sometimes you find extra bonus content like wallpapers and little notes and whatever. We're treating this as "hidden content", unless it's the "CD-ROM identifiers", which were supposedly mandated for all CD-ROM-based software. These aren't really "hidden" because you'd always expect them to be there.


I had a crisis of confidence though - lots of devices can read CD-ROMs, not just PCs. You are almost certainly going to use a PC, since they were ubiqutous and clearly what some developers intended for you to use, but strictly speaking you don't need a PC to see this content (and that's even beyond the "guh Macs aren't PCs" line). Anything that conforms to the yellow book standard can read these discs - they may not be able to do anything with JPEGs or TXT files or whatever has been left there, but they should be able to see that they exist.

Thus it's not really "PC content". Except it probably is. Except it technically isn't.

(this isn't anyone's fault - we've all called it that for years. And I haven't got an alternative phrase to hand)


Anyway before I got stuck in with this, I thought I'd better check to see if there are Mega-CD-specific bits of a disc we don't need to care about. After all, we have some official documentation:
https://segaretro.org/File:Mega-CD_Disc_Format_Specifications.pdf

Two pages in and I found something... awkward:


Apparently the Mega-CD can read CD-ROMs, just like a PC, if it has "the special cartridge".

(I'm not entirely sure what "SONY EB formatted CD disc" refers to - maybe this or that. But it's an extension to CD-ROM like those WonderMIDI discs are an extension to CD-DA - you just need software that can find the extra info)

I have no idea if "the special cartridge" was ever manufactured, but if it was, you could presumably see "PC content" on a Mega-CD.


While I'm here, another titbit. You know how if you put a Dreamcast disc in an audio CD player, a message will tell you to stop? The idea is that some earlier CD audio devices might interpret CD-ROM data as audio and make a horrible noise.

Well on the Mega-CD



totally fair game. You "can" put a message if there's no audio on the disc, but nobody's forcing you to. Righto.

 

So hey, Twitch has a thing called "Twitch Drops". It's little things devs can add to their games (like currencies or more items in gacha games) which basically means it's DLC that you can get from watching streamers that have the drops enabled on their channels. After that you can connect your Twitch account to the game and download them.

I found out that Endless Dungeon has Twitch drops. When did they start? Don't know. If they just started then I have 2/2 (out of 4) so far. These are tied to your Twitch account and don't go away after you've gotten them (I have Dorito Pope Among Us Mask from YEARS ago still in my account).

But then I thought...didn't Hyenas have these too? Ugh.

 

Yeah, EB = Electronic Book, it was supported by Wonder Library. The only cartridge I can think of that might possibly have supported Yellow Book is CD-ROM Multi Seminar Onsei Kaiseki Hakei Hyouji Cartridge which was used with the Linguaphone Education Gear (Multi-Mega).

 

This is unequivocally false.

https://docs.mamedev.org/initialsetup/mameintro.html

MAME is hardware documentation first, with the happy side effect of being able to play games. It also far and away the best debugger of any emulator out there.

These docs are notorious for their awkward translations. This is almost certainly "a special cartridge," implying software that can be created by a developer, not some specific item that would be sold at a later date,

It is likely referring to Mode 1, where the system is primarily run from cartridge and the Mega CD hardware is secondary. Since it uses Yellow Book CD-ROM standards, yes, "PC content" can be available to the Mega CD hardware.

Wonder Library, one of the few Mode 1 cartridges out there, can read EBXA discs, by the way.

 

I AM ONCE AGAIN ASKING FOR RELEASE DATES.

Our wiki states that Pier Solar and the Great Architects came out on 2010-12-10. GameFAQS says that it came out five days later on the 15th. To matters more complicated, Wikipedia says it came out on the 20th.

We don't have a reference and neither does GameFAQS, with Wikipedia's ref saying the game came out on the 21st (and the capture being from the 23rd): https://web.archive.org/web/2011082...ews/pier-solar-released-on-mega-drivegenesis/

So which is it? Who is right? This is why I've been putting a bunch of scrutiny on aftermarket games specifically because devs already do a bad job of it as is.

We know it has to at least be 2010-12 since all three are basically saying so though.

 

I guess it depends on what you consider the release date for mail order games. It shipped on the 14th, Maybe some people might have received it on the 15th?

https://xcancel.com/watermelongames/status/14555445112872961

Edit: Looking at tweets people don't seem to post about getting it until the end of December, so I wonder if they meant it was shipped from China then, which would explain the two week delay. Thinking about it, it would make sense to ship direct from China to consumers worldwide as international shipping is cheap from there and it would avoid any import tax issues for Watermelon. So maybe if someone in China ordered it they may have received it shortly after shipment, but other countries would have a longer wait.

Edit 2: Yeah, shipped from China, thread says on the 13th or 14th. I'd go with the 14th as the ship date per Watermelon's tweet, it's not really what I would usually consider a release date, but it's the closest thing for cases like this.

 

So aside from that tweet and just a few others, it seems an e-mail was sent out around the time the Watermelon tweet was made.

Anyone who pre-ordered the game still got their e-mail for it from 2010? I'm curious what it says. But for now I'm changing the wiki's date to the 14th.

 

There's a thought - we might need to start archiving old promotional emails.


...


So anyway, this has been my weekend:

I can't remember why I was here, but I was distracted by the big CREDITS button in Sega Casino, a Nintendo DS game that until yesterday, didn't have its credits listed on the wiki.

There's usually a good reason for this - around 2006/2007, the video game industry decided that credits sequences should be an ordeal, where we credit not just those who made the game, but those who manned every publishing arm in the world. So what was once a 30 second sequence now can take upwards of five minutes, and it's not pleasant to type this all out by hand.

Ideally you want to rip the credits straight from the game, but DVDs and Blu-ray dumps are still unwieldy, and there's no guarantee credits aren't encrypted or compressed up the bum. Nintendo DS games, however, mostly shipped on sub-100MB ROMs, some as low as 8MB, so it's manageable - you can open up the file in your hex editor of choice, search for instances of "sega" (or something you might see in a credits roll) and copy-paste any results. Formatting can take a while, and you might still need a YouTube longplay by your side to ensure everything is in the right order, but it's still quicker and less error prone than typing everything out from scratch.

...assuming the game stores its credits in easily readible plain text. But about half do, and that's the same for any cartridge or card-based system.


There's kind-of a problem though, in that most of what's left isn't actually in English. It's Japanese exclusives in Japanese. And now I'm going to teach you how to solve this problem because I have literally nothing better to do.

Until about an hour ago we had the credits for Baseball Advance but not its Japanese counterpart, Greatest Nine. The credits are similar, but they're not the same - I searched "Sega" in a hex editor and oh look:


Those look like credits. Or at least part of them... in reverse.

Most of this is katakana, but because the data is being interpreted as Unicode, it comes out as gibberish. How do I know? Because I've started to get a feel for the patterns and can see it's Shift-JIS, but you can stick it in an online converter and find out
https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/hex-to-ascii.html



Strip out the hex 00s because Windows doesn't like copy-pasting the results of that and

Format this noise and hurray, a list of credits. No special hacking tools, no special hacking skills.

Code (Text):

1. ==Production credits==
2. {{creditstable|
3. *'''{{rolloverText|ディレクター|Director}}:''' [[Takaya Segawa|瀬川 隆哉]]
4. *'''{{rolloverText|企画|Kikaku}}:''' [[Tomoko Hasegawa|長谷川 朋子]], [[Tomoharu Suzuki|鈴木 智治]], [[Satoshi Igita|異儀田 諭]]
5. *'''{{rolloverText|デザイナー|Designer}}:''' [[Katsuhiko Sato|佐藤 勝彦]], [[Akio Sakai|酒井 昭郎]], [[Aritomo Saeki|佐伯 有朋]]
6. *'''{{rolloverText|プログラマー|Programmer}}:''' [[Manabu Ishihara|石原 学]], [[Hiromasa Kaneko|金子 博政]], [[Eiji Horita|堀田 榮治]]
7. *'''{{rolloverText|サウンド|Sound}}:''' [[Teruhiko Nakagawa|中川 輝彦]] ([[WAVE MASTER.INC]])
8. *'''{{rolloverText|パブリシティ|Publicity}}:''' [[Osamu Sato|佐藤 修]], [[Mamoru Kodama|児玉 守]]
9. *'''{{rolloverText|ライセンス|License}}:''' [[Tetsuya Hotozuka|保戸塚 哲也]]
10. *'''{{rolloverText|スペシャルサンクス|Special Thanks}}:''' [[Yoshiaki Kitagawa|北川 慶明]], [[Yusuke Nakahira|中平 裕介]]
11. *'''{{rolloverText|プロデューサー|Producer}}:''' [[Takayuki Kawagoe|川越 隆行]]
12. *'''{{rolloverText|エグゼクティブプロデューサー|Executive Producer}}:''' [[Tetsu Kayama|香山 哲]], [[Shun Arai|新井 瞬]]
13. *Created by [[Smilebit]]
14. *Presented by [[SEGA]]
15. *Original Game © SEGA CORPORATION
16. *© Smilebit/SEGA CORPORATION, 2002
17. | console=GBA
18. | source=In-game credits
19. }}

and then you wiki it all up.

And now we have a list of credits for a 21-year-old Japanese baseball game nobody has ever cared about.


And as a bonus, a little further down is a build date that wasn't documented so you can be even cooler.

 

How would we go about that though?

 

I have absolutely no idea - save the email as something, and uh... do another step.

You can "print" an email to a PDF but it's going to have your personal contact details on it. I don't know how much of a faff it is just to get the useful information.

 

Very nice stuff. I forgot the two games had separate pages, I almost added those because I saw they weren't on the Baseball Advance page, haha.

I did see some of the translated names were wrong, though, like Satoru Igita being Satoshi Igita. Google Translate? Some kanji combos can have a bunch of ways to read them, so it gets confusing when one option's already being given as a page link, and actually isn't fact-checked. Could lead to cases like Ken Kobayakawa where a page gets made with that name. Best to leave them without a link in those cases where a reading hasn't been used for real, methinks. I know there's some games, like in the Sakura Wars series, with some BS names. (and I remember making BS in the early days for Soul Reverse Zero).

On the plus side, 中平 裕介 has been bugging me for a while from Hundred Swords and all his sports games, but I actually decided to dig into it (I usually go through a list of results on Hi!Penpal to search for accurate names) and saw that Yuusuke Nakadaira's been mentioned in Baseball Advance and Jet Set Radio. Page-making time!

 

Google translate + educated guesses. My Japanese knowledge is little more than "I can recognise some katakana symbols"

 

I can read katakana and hiragana. Can't read Kanji, though.

 

I can mostly read katakana and hiragana at this point, but can only write so much. Kanji, er, I can recognise some ones in names I see a lot and see "ah right that's which bit of the name it makes up".

I always appreciate a simple 中川 力也 (Rikiya Nakagawa)

 

I know plus 300 words in Kanji. I rejoice every time I can read a full sentence. Then I realize that newspapers are a thing and doubt my methods. I should probably focus more on vocabulary and grammar or join a course or something.

But learning them is fun. It just looks super crazy doing it and is wrong and full of mistakes.

 

Cool Herders

Reference for the date please. Price is probably wrong too since the ref is 10 years after its supposed release.

 

Mostly did it for the heck of it, but also not something to leave unchecked.

When making this page for Takeshi Ando, I found his profile as given by CEDEC. Since he's worked on several soccer games, they listed his favourite soccer teams, and as I remembered the soccer logos Black Squirrel, I decided to include those logos for the heck of it. But, it feels weird to just include the logos in the prose.

https://segaretro.org/Takeshi_Ando

 

So, PAPRIUM. Did anybody order this in the initial shipment?

I'd like a picture of the e-mail telling you to check out for the wiki since it says the release date for the game (December 16th 2020) in it.

 

So nazox has just casually dropped another one of these Sega News price guides:

There's a 'hold my beer' joke in here somewhere about the R360's price, and then the AS-1 costing even more not long after (i.e. nearly 40 million yen). Check out all those other machines as well though - Dream Palace going for 2 million, because it's a massive eight player UFO Catcher that spins around like a carousel and that's what you pay for one of those.