General Questions and Information Thread

https://archive.org/details/comptiq...iq - Vol. 49 December 1988/page/n205/mode/2up
In the end, no prototype Mega Drives.


But we did get this. Which we might have seen before.

 

That little device next to the Mega Drive is the scrapped Floppy disk drive, right?

 

Re:Chain credits

Yeah, I also don't see it being a good idea to split up every version of the game into its own page. It's more manageable to be looking for a certain topic related to the game and have the different changes to that tracked on their own pages since some things stay the same with each update and some things are new. Some things replace older things and some things are just additions. Doubt there's anyone coming to Retro to find out "what was Chain Chronicle Ver.4.2.2 like, just in general?"

Can the date assumption be changed to where it first considers the date stored in the list first and then carries on to the previous source if that one's empty? I'd assume that's the most efficient way, assuming it's possible since I've got no clue.


Oh, and I just noticed the Roommania credit from earlier is New Roommania: Porori Seishun, I assumed it was the PS2 game when I first read. That's good luck to be the New game, it was the batch of credits I was working on before having to leave on holiday. With Japanese credits like that, rather than needing a Japanese keyboard, I use the OCR function Google Docs can do. Just gotta open an image and it writes down the text it can detect. Sometimes that gets bugged out, especially when you're dealing with the video quality on all the full video playthroughs of New Roommania, so I've always got Google Translate around to write/draw the characters Docs was blindsided by. So, that might be helpful for up-and-coming crediteers.

 

I think so.

There's a mystery box in the bottom row though - it goes "tablet, power base converter, ????, printer". Unless it's meant to be a CD-ROM drive of some description - one is mentioned in the description.

 

I don't know what's more impressive - the fact this book exists, or that we've managed to miss it for a decade and a half:

https://archive.org/details/the-mak...world-of-genius-programmer-kan-naito/mode/2up

Making of Landstalker Tensai Programmer Naitou Kan no Sekai
メイキング・オブ・ランドストーカー天才プログラマー内藤寛の世界

A book about how they made Landstalker. Pretty unprecedented for something like this to be printed back in 1992.

We already had access to quite a bit of magazine coverage, so there's scope to write a fairly detailed page on Sega Retro now. I've never really sat down with Landstalker so I'm not best to write it, but someone might be!

 

On today's episode of "Interesting Music Releases" we have three contenders:

1. CSK・SEGA GROUP 感謝の夕べ 名手たちの交響楽団による「第九」(CSK/SEGA Group - Evening of Gratitude: Symphony by Virtuosos Performing "The Ninth'")






According to this sold Mercari JP listing:

And then there's 2 & 3:







These are two releases by a quartet called Duke Aces. The album on the left is an EP featuring hit tracks such as "CSK Company Song", "Tokyo Rhapsody", "A Recital by President Okawa" and "My Wife Has a Beard". Given the format, it appears that the title of the album is just all of the track names put together (デューク・エイセス/大川功「CSK社歌/大川社長リサイタル 東京ラプソディー・うちの女房にゃ髭がある)

The album on the right is called Zukkoke Ondo (CSKスッコケ音頭). The album has a page on Discogs, and two tracks are up on YouTube: Zukkoke Ondo and CSK Company Song.

 

ding

CSK-Sega Group Kansha no Yuube Meishu Tachi no Koukyou Gakudan ni Yoru "Dai Kyuu"

usually this would be a contender for "weirdest page on a fan wiki", but with Sega... this might not even make the top ten.


I love the way CSK has a corporate song though. Shows there's some joy in what has always seemed like the most corporate of corporations.

 

Today on "stories I can't be bothered to follow up today", the life and times of "maybe TeleGenesis Baseball", the big title for the unreleased TeleGenesis Modem.

We think the game became Tel-Tel Stadium in Japan, but once upon a time it was just called "MODEM BASEBALL":


https://archive.org/details/comptiq... - Vol. 54 May 1989/page/n199/mode/1up?q=sega

I was enticed by the obvious hex codes, but turns out this preview was printed 18 months before the Japanese launch in October 1990. They were talking about modem-based baseball games as early as December 1988 - maybe even before the console's launch, so we could be talking a two year development timeline in total - really unusual for games of this era.

I think they struggled big time with the online bit, to the point where it might have taken down the whole US modem project. It certainly doesn't seem to be an art problem - this looks like baseball, and the shots are from Spring 1989.

 

I finally did a little multi-page change that's been bugging me for a bit, changing all (most) the "Sega of Japan" development divisions to be sorted into either "Sega Enterprises" e.g
Sega Software R&D Dept. 1 or "Sega Corporation" e.g. New Entertainment R&D Dept.. Hope that's all good.
Some departments spanned Enterprises and Corporation, though, like Sega Mechatro, so I guess something more like | division=[[Sega Enterprises, Ltd.|Sega Enterprises]], [[Sega Corporation]] would work there (and there'll be some departments that spanned Corporation and the Interactive/Games split. And whenever I find consistent official English translations of the post-2020 departments' names I'll add those (need to get back on that business cards site ted showed me).

It's also gotten me thinking about how many development divisions there are in the SoJ template. I made maybe even 20 new pages of departments last year and couldn't get at least half of them on the template, for a mix of 80's->90's timelines not fitting together well when the Sortware R&D Departments from 1999 determined the number order, and I'd sometimes get Expression error: Unexpected < operator, so that's just depressing.
It might make sense to go with something more like Sega Arcade Boards and split them up by 80's~2000, 2000~2020, 2020 onwards, get the departments that start those decades in number order and arrange the timelines from there (so a 2000~2020 one would look mostly the same as the current one and the 80's~2000 one would have a mostly different order. And the 2020 onwards one would look completely new because we're not covering any of those departments yet)

 

I just wanna make sure about this... is Pata's name wrong on his page?

The page we have for him is called Yasushi Takeuchi, and that's also what he was called when VGDensetsu talked about his death in 2021. It's translated as that on all sorts of fan-run developer databases like MobyGames, Giant Bomb and IMdb.
But, Yasushi isn't the only way you can read 靖. It can also be Kiyoshi.



Now, sometimes Japanese magazine mess up the translations for the people they're interviewing. Recently I read one with Takeshi Matsuura who got translated as Takeshi Matsuura. But "Kiyoshi Takeuchi" has shown up in games before, in both Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium and Nihon Daihyou Team no Kantoku ni Narou! Sekaihatsu, Soccer RPG. And, the alias Takeuchi used in Defenders of Oasis, which could be a play on Kiyocthi or something.

And how many times has Yasushi been used? Once. In a special thanks in Royal Stone: Hirakareshi Toki no Tobira.

It seems more likely to me that his name is Kiyoshi, but I don't know. So many of the credits where he uses his name are Japan-only games with Japanese credits. Even Panzer Dragoon Saga only has Japanese credits in the English version, far as I know. Most of the links to Yasushi Takeuchi just come from the Sakura Taisen franchise. Y'know, Japan-only.

 

Someone sift through this noise. It's a gambling machine from Sammy:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/8jWf_AW0TjQ

https://sp.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm16690063
http://sp.pachinkoslot.jp/open/machinespec.php?t=s&mc=1347
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Heart_2

 

I find it interesting how Sega sometimes names its press files: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth's are "Elvis", Unicorn Overlord's "Pony", Samba de Amigo: Party Central's were named "Shake".

In a weird way, I think they make sense, just don't expect me to explain it.

 

it's amazing what weird rabbit holes I fall down. I just mapped out "all" of SG-1000 game C So!. I didn't realise it was a Compile game.


C So!/Maps
sure seems like it.

The SG-1000 is such a simple machine that you can whack up Action Replay cheats in no time: 00C018:XX will set the level, as long as XX is between hex 01 and FF. It technically has 255 "rounds" but only a couple dozen maps - clearly they never expected anyone to get further than 255 (or even 99, since it can only display two digits) - level 256 breaks the game - it loads a endless series of empty maps which you instantly win, and eventually your score counter maxes out.

As for C So! as a product... well, it exists. It's fine enough on the SG-1000, but it's not on the same level as say, Lode Runner. The most remarkable thing it does is not have a standard position for the HUD, which means values can be spread all over the place and get in the way.



it's rare to see a game where the first challenge is "find the score counter"

 

Company page stuff again.

I was talking with Joe Gillian about Sega Sapporo Studio (which we still need a page for oupasoops) and about capital (so, the money a company needs to do things and get bigger) and it came up that I knew the capitals for the 2000's subsidiaries.

In the Dreamcast Magazine articles that profiled them at their debut, they had a range of things to mention. Some things that I wanna add later, the board of directors, the etymology of their names and logos, their development philosophies, etc., but a quick add was that capital. And, paired with that, number of employees.



This is the one for OVERWORKS, showing it has 100 million yen and 82 employees as of July 1, 2000. Other stuff it mentions are its role as a business is to research and develop game software, its board includes CEO Noriyoshi Oba, director Shoichiro Irimajiri, Shunichi Nakamura (中村 俊一) and auditor 道中 祥久, and has the comment "we have 82 employees, but if you count contracted employees, currently we have a staggering 180 people".

You might know thought SEGA-AM2 wasn't founded at the same time, so we wouldn't have statistics from this magazine article. Fear not! Most of these companies had one or both of these details listed on their website, both in AM2's case. And these websites would get updates, maybe, mostly just in 2003 when a lot of restructuring happened (like the Smilebit <-> AMUSEMENT VISION staff swap). Thanks to that it gives some idea of how many were joining or leaving these companies. Aforementioned Smilebit vs. AMUSEMENT VISION, SB went from originally 105 or 106 employees down to 60, while AV went from originally 48 to a whopping 112.

For the 2000's subsidiaries, I added these "Company statistics" sections, noting down the capital and number of employees with the different offered numbers across time, but this also feels something that belongs in the CompanyBob. Probably a complicated addition, but what do I know. It would definitely have to be similar to {{headquarters}} though.

 

Lot of production credits getting added recently that have never been written down before, and one of the was Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz. This started out as just adding a music credits breakdown, since a certain person has been doing a lot of research into the individual composers for that.

I've never been quite sure with the ID field, if that should exclusively be song IDs, which I don't think are a thing anymore, or if they can also encompass the filenames for these songs since it's always felt like the more modern equivalent to IDs. I used the filenames for this one just in case, see if it's appropriate.

 

I had sound tests in mind when I wrote that template, but you're right, modern games won't have those.

The ID field isn't used when generating lists of track credits - it uses "name", or if that doesn't exist, "description". Either way it looks fine to me.

 

Today's undocumented mystery:
https://archive.org/details/disc-magazine-i-vcd

I've seen that proto Sonic Adventure footage before... but I can't remember where it came from - a VHS? Either way, now you've got it on a VCD.

I don't know if this magazine was a one-off, or a series.

 

Its so sad to see that version of SEGA Rally 2 featuring much better debris and mud trails compared to the finished DC version. That for me , was what really letdown the DC version and that was the poor debris effects.

 

Okay, I had *assumed* I had it somewhere, but Windii's channel went kaput three something years ago and my Google-fu was failing me.
That same clip is from here. I've tried my damnedest to find where I thought it was from (I recall there being a Dreamcast-focused video disc for the Saturn from... 1997-1998?) but no dice.

 

This one, probably, but that doesn't run at 60FPS.