General Questions and Information Thread

Cybernet was a brilliant show, but for me, the best gaming show at that time, was GameOver on SKYs .TV channel. They would get some great features for a show made on a tiny budget

Loved their they're little tour of Imagination Technologies where one got to see the NA@MI 2 board for the 1st time.



Also really liked how this early footage of MSR looked, the car models looked better IMO at the cost of the backgrounds that looked so much better in the latter builds

 

I received the Megamind LaserDisc and as a nice bonus it also included a single sided disc with volume 1 along with the double sided disc featuring volumes 2 & 3. Unfortunately it doesn't include the "sheet supplied" or any other documentation, but I think I have a better understanding of what they are now;

https://www.karaokeshack.com/megavox/

They seem to be aimed at karaoke gigs, where they would be used for pub quizzes etc, so not really meant for the consumer market. The format and limited replay value (only 150 questions/volume) make much more sense in this scenario, and laserdisc was another popular karaoke format. Now I just need to find that bingo game ...

Edit: Whilst I couldn't find anthing else about the Megavox bingo game I did come across this ...

Rap de Bingo!





A Japanese consumer CD+G game from 1992, and not just standard CD+G, but CD+EG (extended graphics), which the internet seems to think was never used in a commercial release. This one also lists compatible platforms, including PC-Engine Duo, PC Engine CD-ROM², Mega Drive (I guess they meant Mega CD), and Wondermega, so possibly makes it in scope for retrocdn.

CD+G supported 16 colours, whilst CD+EG supported 256 colours. I'm not sure if there are any other differences, they don't ever seem to have publicly released the documentation for these formats. Mega CD only mentions CD+G support, whilst Saturn also mentions CD+EG support. As CD+G players should be forward compatible with CD+EG discs it's unclear whether Mega CD would display 16 or 64 colours when playing a CD+EG disc.

This one doesn't seem that rare, so hopefully I can obtain a copy and dump it at some point.

 

We might live in a world where a CD+EG disc has never been tried in a Mega-CD. I assume Sega must have put one in a Saturn since the logo's on the box, but this is the only commercial disc I'm seeing in searches.

Not that "CD+EG" is an easy thing to search, mind you. And of course there had to be a record label to mess me up even more.

 

Okay I think I can explain this - Wikipedia's reference points to an article from 1995, and Discogs doesn't even have a category for CD+EG.

Ignoring the fact that Discogs is probably missing a bazillion Japanese releases, I have a theory:

After some novelties in the 1980s and early 1990s, most CD+G discs were made for karaoke in the 2000s, and a good chunk of those were put together by Disney. Is 16 colours sufficient for Hanna Montana? If there's backwards compatiblity and support across a bunch of karaoke players, do these discs secretly tap into the CD+EG standard? Because as Disney DVD will tell you, that company didn't like paying for logos. In fact, most CD+G discs of the time don't seem to bother with official branding.


It would amuse me if it turns out the Sega Saturn is one of the best ways to sing karaoke to The Jonas Brothers.

 

I just bought a CD+EG disc;



There's also a series called "Victor CD-Graphics Station Hit Box", the latest I found was #24 from September 1996, but as I've only seen a handful the series could go quite a bit higher.

 

So this has been humbling - turns out Cybernet is, to date, the longest running video game centric television programme in the UK (if not the world), airing between 1995 and 2008. Wikipedia lists 29 different countries that also broadcast it, so I guess any hopes of documenting a full set of episodes is out of the window.

Its obscurity comes from the fact that ITV aired it in the early mornings. But it's worse than that - apparently it aired on The Children's Channel first, so to get the original airings we'd have needed people to be recording UK satellite transmissions in 1995. Uh. Erm.


So again for anyone born in the last 30 years: satellite television existed in 1995 but it was a niché market, and "you" probably didn't have access to it. This is why we talk about the UK only having 1/2/3/4/5 television channels - yes there were more (at least from 1982 onwards, or if you count the regions), but the vast majority of households weren't connected. It was also in the BBC/ITV's interest to pretend these services didn't exist, so yeah, tricky.

The internet is exceedingly good at documenting the history of our terrestrial channels - you can easily get TV listings dating back decades, so you can track of virtually everything ever broadcast through the airwaves, but satellite? Well I could only find one day's listing for The Children's Channel, which confirms Cybernet aired on 17th December (twice - I assume it's the same programme). To hell with the other 364 days of the year, and indeed other years.

The solution isn't appetising - I think in order to get semi-decent listings, someone's going to have to scan old magazines. Satellite Times might have answers:


There we go, the first broadcast probably happened after 7th June 1995.

Ooh look, Sweden is giving us "An American Buttman in London" sounds lovely.


tl;dr the full history of Cybernet is probably not going to happen any time soon.

 

Bought a thing:

Well over half of this is spares for Williams pinball machines and other assorted guff, but the first 70 or so pages on Sega stuff have some curiosities.

Several machines there that we didn't think released outside of Japan.

Plus it confirms Sega treated Deith Leisure Spares as one of their own businesses for some period of time - "A member of the Sega Group", as it were (and there are tiny Sonics on every other page). Do we reckon this is worth sending off to the big debinding scanner in the sky?

 

Everything is worth scanning, though I can't imagine this will be as super duper interesting as other catalogues of the era.

From what I recall, "Deith Leisure Spares" was technically a separate company from Deith Leisure (or at least housed in a different place), but it was an awkward one to track down.


I've been watching new old Play Meters come through in real time - it too has been highlighting games we had listed as Japanese only, which makes me think we know far less about the arcade industry than we thought.

Like GP World (arcade) - when a game isn't particularly successful, it only gets mentioned once or twice.

 

At least all of those international "versions" of Cybernet are just dubs of the original, so we don't need to worry about 30 different review scores. It's possible that the original season later got broadcast on some ITV regions, or overseas, but about 1/5 UK households had cable or satellite then so it's not impossible that they show up.

The earliest it shows up on TV listings in newspapers is Saturday September 2nd, where there are multiple sources, looking at the previous week there's nothing, so should be the first episode;



Incidentally, I used to subscribe to Satellite Times (along with What Satellite) back then, but they all got thrown out many years ago.

 

Personally I'd scan it without debinding it, but that's just me.

 

Watch out everyone...besides Game Machine, we've got another Japanese amusement industry publication incoming...

Meet Monthly Coin Journal (月刊コインジャーナル): https://archive.org/details/coin-journal-september-1992/Coin Journal September 1992/mode/2up

These were large magazines with hundreds of pages. According to Japanese Wikipedia, this magazine started in 1976 and would later transform into Amusement Journal sometime in the 2000s.

Expect to see more scans of these in the future...

 

Yes I went exploring a bit this morning - turns out we already tangentially knew about this:

Sega Arcade History has a section in its credits for references, which lists Coin Journal and Amusement Journal, plus a bunch of stuff we'd already noted down.

It also lists two books, "The Best Game" (ザ・ベストゲーム) and "The Best Game 2" (ザ・ベストゲーム2) which... have also been scanned! One two. In addition to talking about... "the best games" there's an attempt to list every Japanese arcade (video) game ever released, which means the entirity of Sega. There are some tiny differences compared to what's on Sega Retro - some of the dates are wrong, but there's a few games I don't think we've accounted for:

1975 ダッキーシュート GUN
1978 シークレットウォー
1979 与作 ACT

Actually finding information is a challenge. There's a "Duck Shoot" from 1968 but I can't find a "Ducky Shoot" from 1975. Marvel is stopping sensible searches for "Secret War", while "Yosaku" is claiming to be an SNK game. I was, however, led to another book that not only lists Japanese games, makes an attempt at listing American ones too. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's lining up similarly to what I'm seeing in the Play Meter scans coming through.

 

I can't really remember TCC ever showing Cybernet funnily enough, the channel shut down in March 1998 and the website remained online for about 10 years afterwards!

 

Cybernet started out life on ITV I would say, also I don't think it was right to say Sattlite TV wasn't popular by 1995. Loads of us got it in the late 80's just to watch WWF Wrestling and by the 90's it was becoming a joke of how many council estates had those old white SKY dishes

The only issue for Cybernet for me was it was on at 3:AM in the morning in Wales, but we would also get Games Master a day later and at a different slot to our English mates with CH4.
EDGE did a little feature on UK gaming shows at one stage and here's the Cybernet team




I'll always have a soft spot for Bad Influence and the 1st series of and Games World (they were the best) but really loved watching Game Over, Game Pad, Gamer.TV, Thum Bandits and was gutted when ChallengeTV cancelled Videogame Nation I loved Mr High Def, High Five - John Robertson. That show was really getting better with each series and going places.

 

Cybernet part deux

I went off to learn about 80s and 90s satellite and cable TV - I stand by the fact most people didn't have it, not just because of personal experience at the time, but because very little of its history seems to have been written down. Where's all the photos of News Bunny meeting Tony Blair??

Anyway The Children's Channel rebranded itself as TCC in (I think) September 1995, and given others are reporting programming changes around that period, I'd hazard a guess that Cybernet was commissioned as part of that rebrand. So for the pedants, strictly speaking it's a "TCC" programme not a "The Children's Channel" one.

On TCC it aired at 9:30 on a Saturday, with repeats at 9:30 and 13:30 on the Sunday (though I think it repeated on early weekday mornings as well). This seems to have been the case for 1995 and 1996, and while I can't speak for 1997, the channel closed on 3 April 1998, so any episodes broadcast after that date probably originated elsewhere. I say "probably" because there were other iterations of TCC including a Nordic variant which could be picked up in the UK... though I'm guessing an English language program intended for UK probably didn't air in Norway. But you tell me.

The earliest ITV spotting of Cybernet I've seen is December 1997 (although I don't have access to a bazillion newspapers). My guess is that the programme moved from TCC to ITV at some point in 1997, and remained there until 2008.

The problem is that on ITV, the programme was expendable. It did not have a regular time slot, and was pushed around by all the regions. Case in point, Wednesday 1st July 1998:

Carlton (aka London) got to watch Cybernet a whole five minutes earlier than (some) other regions.. of which The Times here only lists 6 of them (out of 15). It seems to have been broadcast on Wednesday* at some slot between 2:00 and 6:00, but supposedly one rogue franchise aired it in the middle of the day (which meant Cybernet couldn't feature any violence).

(If you were wondering, like I was, what the numbers in brackets are, they're VideoPlus+ codes. More old technology I knew nothing about.)


Cybernet seems to have moved to Thursday by 2001, though sometimes there were repeats on Wednesday(?). I also spotted a listing on the Sci-Fi channel in 1999 - that might be something different, but who knows. And even though regionalised programming became less of a thing in the 2000s, it's tricky to get full ITV schedules from that period (though I still think it's doable right now, versus TCC which will require effort).



*Here's another quirk in television - due to a legacy of not having 24 hour broadcasting, Wednesday's programming finished on Thursday. In TV terms, the day begins at 06:00 - I don't know yet if that'll affect our wikis.

 

Last TCC broadcast: 1997-01-26, first ITV broadcast: 1997-05-03

 

In my case there was always some dreamt up reason as to why we couldn't record Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog when it aired at like, 3 in the morning. The VCR-uh "video" was my Dad's thing, and I think he recorded by time - I barely ever touched it.

One of our old PCs sat next to a landline with a Mercury button for years and I never even noticed it, let alone understood the whole "alternative phone network that still sponsors music awards despite not existing anymore" thing. It's amazing how quickly something can leave the public consciousness - I had to explain what Captain Scarlet was to a younger colleague a couple of years ago.

 

My 1st ever job was in Curry's back in the early 90's and the Amstrad Sky Satelite step-up was one of our biggest sellers. In my school, we were all watching the likes of DJ Kat , WWF and more importantly the Simpsons which was only on SKY TV back then
Soccer Saturday and Soccer AM were big deals in the 90's and many of us boys used to love Sky Sports News for all the nice looking women presenters as sad as that sounds back then. SKY TV was hardly niche IMO. I also seem to remember the BBC making fun of SKY and saying 24 hour news will never last or take off


It's funny how times change people today no doubt can't remember the likes of Dixons on the high street or how we used to have the likes of TV rental shops given how expensive VHS and TV's were back in the 80's and early 90s

Just because that wasn't documented well doesn't mean they weren't popular.