General Questions and Information Thread

I think it's secretly "three series of Games World", then a spin-off on The Computer Channel, then a reboot on Sky One in 1998. But because they're "rebooting" after only a short period of time (with many of the same faces), it's being classed as a series 4.

It probably doesn't help that series 2 has a completely different vibe to series 1, and that GamesMaster would radically change its sets every year. In a sense, especially when many of the faces are the same, a reboot doesn't feel like a reboot.

That and there's no surviving publicity for the thing - if there was hype, it's not in the gaming magazines. Supposedly the Murdoch press spent much of the 1990s plugging Sky, so maybe the answers lie in The Sun or The News of the World (or maybe Today for the earlier Computer Channel stuff) - there's a good chance that the rest of the press were actively avoiding talking about satellite after BSB died.

 

I haven't messed with Sega collectors in a while, and just in case you thought radio might be a little less complicated than TV, I made a trip to ebay and ran into this

https://picclick.co.uk/Sega-16-Weeks-Of-Summer-Promotional-Tour-T-186317163428.html

Did we have this covered? Yes: 16 Weeks of Summer, and we even have a photo of the t-shirt wait a minute



but there were nine radio stations listed as part of this promotional tour, does that mean...



...oh yes, separate t-shirts for each sponsor. Reeto.

 

I think what never helped with Gamesworld was the confusion over the TV listing graphics and even some of the presenters, like here where Will says it's time to head over to Watch GamesWorld but the title graphic on the actual show, was The Barry Show, only for Barry himself to say its GamesWorld?




My personal friends and then also every online member of an old import forum I used. Looked to hate on and take the piss out of GamezVille. I thought in the 2nd series the show was starting to find its feet, getting better all the time and 'boys' really came across as lovely kind and likeable people, the sort you'll like to have a drink with. I also think 'Games Guru' was Foggy off GameOver LOL

 

IIRC the guy playing the Guru was the show's producer.

 

Most prob given a lot of the grew was ex Game Over. He was called foggy or something like that on GameOver

 

The list is mostly based on when each game first appeared in the Game Machine newspaper, not necessarily when the games first went into operation. Apparently, there's some errors though

 

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out, I've noticed that quite alot of Japanese (also western, but at least those are easier to catch) retro-game books aren't too accurate. If they don't have primary sources then we should take them with a huge pinch of salt.

 

In all fairness, this one was written by the editor of Game Machine and is a companion piece to the larger Japanese AM history book they put out, but yeah even then there's a few errors. It's a good thing the newspaper itself is available to browse through

 

IIRC there's still some oddities yet to document with Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators, but this is new:


https://archive.org/details/micomBASIC_1994-10/page/n140/mode/1up

Once upon a time it was just called "The Pinball" (ザ ピンボール) and uh well


That's a totally different table to any in the final game.

 

Sega Retro has thousands of pages that say

Code (Text):

1. | developer=[[Sega]]

It could be more accurate - more often than not it's going to be a group or company working for Sega, or a division within Sega, that with a bit of pushing we can probably find. Maybe.

DreamFlyer is one such product. I think secretly this is a Sega-published piece of software developed by Colabo and ported to the Dreamcast by Gao... but I don't know for sure, because DreamFlyer doesn't work anymore. The software requires you to have set up an online Dreamcast account via Dream Passport, and there are limits to how much I'm willing to faff around with these things.

As nobody had really explored this disc before (look, a wallpaper!), I was hopeful of finding a list of credits with a trusty hex editor. No obvious luck, but I did find this:



Those are Adobe Illustrator files. Can I..?



Yes. Vectors from a 1999 Dreamcast game with no fancy GD-ROM extraction tools. There's no real reason to do this, and I'm sure proper tools would net you better results, but had you asked me an hour ago, I'd have said these kinds of file formats were too new for the Dreamcast. Guess not.

Code (Text):

1. %!PS-Adobe-3.0
2. %%Creator: Adobe Illustrator(TM) 5.5J 95.01.01
3. %%For: (Haruhisa Ishijima) (GAO Inc.)
4. %%Title: (ssegf001.il)
5. %%CreationDate: (99.10.29) (7:12 PM)

It also has all the metadata so you can find out exactly when the bits were made. What a thrill.

 

Here's a neat little broadcast I learned about thanks to Japanese Twitter:



https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm11493221 (This has the rest of the Super Hang-On Section)

https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm19060995 (Enduro Racer section)

https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm19061030 (Super League section)

*The uploader of the nico videos noted in the description that the poor quality was due to reception interference. Let me know if they need to be ripped if you can't access them

**I think this is the first time I've ever seen a deluxe Enduro Racer and a Super League cabinet in action so those are very interesting

These videos are reportedly from a program that Fuji TV aired in October 1987 called Game Center Emperor (ゲームセンターの帝王). This program was slated to be two hours long and showcased Sega products of the time (most of the program was dedicated to gameplay of the taikan games)

Some tweets I found with info:

https://xcancel.com/yog49/status/1404376691825274888

https://xcancel.com/shinyaman2/status/1327562982776160257?t=cl6_Sc9COWtN4VkqDw6a1w

https://xcancel.com/JfodxVSqgXSoeOY/status/1156503466287566848?t=r8Zkgk_Qdn5D5XpnsAOlxA&s=19

 

Thank you for that post, fab find

 

Today on "don't know how to document this" and "wouldn't it be nice if we had inter-wiki databases"



"Game Breaker" is a "VHS gaming magazine". There was one whole issue in released around March/April 1993... and it's here. There were plans to release new issues every two months at £6.99 a piece, but I'm not sure that amounted to anything.

Only part of this tape is Sega-related, but it's also a video magazine (albeit an unsuccessful one), which we've not really had to support so far.



There were others which we've been avoiding. "Fuse" here is actually important because it has prototype footage of Sonic Adventure. There's probably more out there, particularly in Japan.



And because I want you to have the full experience - there's a bit cut from the start of that Game Breaker rip. It may be triggering to people of a certain age:



I am fascinated with wonky as hell 1980s CGI. Pointless motion, shapes rotating around in space and haunting jingles are almost certainly a result of everyone copying the Channel 4 idents from 1982. You don't see as much of this outside of Europe, and by 1986 I'd expect costs to have fallen enough for smaller companies to make their own.

 

So someone quietly uploaded a previously unknown version of The Manhole for the Teradrive. Supposedly uses the MD's FM synthesizer for the music. Puzzle Construction was the only known software to use the MD hardware until now. As it was obtained from the HDD it's possible that this was unreleased, or maybe the standard DOS/V version supports Teradrive (Manhole and other DOS/V games were advertised along with the Teradrive), but maybe just maybe there's an obscure Teradrive specific release of this that has flown under the radar.

 

I think is this is the DOS/V version with a couple of extra files. I'd verify that but there doesn't seem to be a copy of the DOS/V version online - maybe it did always ship with the Teradrive extras, who knows. But it does work in DOSBox.

There's a regular IBM PC version from 1989 which runs in 16 colours(?). The 1990 DOS/V release uses 256 colour VGA graphics and adds Japanese language options. It also plays music which the 1989 version doesn't do - someone might have to explain that since it's meant to be compatible with a few sound cards.

(although I think it might be auto-detecting hardware rather than offering a setup menu, so I'd have to mess around with DOSBox settings to emulate specific builds and I can't be bothered right now)


The main exe is "MT.exe", but there's a "MHT.bat" batch file which calls "ATFM.exe" first. I'm going to guess that if it detects a Teradrive, ATFM intercepts the audio and throws it at the Mega Drive's chips - DOSBox doesn't emulate any of this so it's hard to know without documentation. I'm also curious to know whether ATFM works with other games - if it secretly means "Adlib to FM"... that's a lot of software that'll suddenly become "Mega Drive compatible".

 

Here's the DOS/V version, disks specifically mention PS/55 (IBM models DOS/V was originally targeted at and released with Nov. 1990) and Teradrive (which IBM was also involved with). So it looks like it may well be the standard DOS/V version that this came from.

Now I wonder about other early DOS/V titles. A Teradrive brochure had information on the first party releases Puzzle Construction, Auto-Net S, and Page Pro-S. There's probably no need for the latter two to use the MD side, but they also covered two third party DOS/V games. Janou Touryuumon II, which seems to be the only "official" third party Teradrive game, in that it has a Sega third party T-code, DOS/V Teradrive logo, and Sega had some other involvement as they're on the back of the box. That one should definitely be investigated more with what we now know, I couldn't find any dump of this when I created the page. The other one was Princess Maker, but I couldn't find anything Teradrive specific when I looked about 18 months ago. There is a dump of the DOS/V version on the Internet Archive, but there doesn't seem to be any Tera Drive specific files on the disks.

 

I was going to write a post about what I've learnt about DOS/V in the last hour or two, but after double checking some things, now I'm even more confused.


The way DOS/V was marketed was that it was an operating PS/55 machine (the Japanese equivalent to PS/2). So as a developer, you can make a nice assumption - you should be guaranteed a 386 and VGA graphics, which is presumably why The Manhole got an update. No need to support up to nine years of old IBM PC hardware - for all intents and purposes, that stuff doesn't exist in Japan.

We're not really reflecting this in the lists of "non-Sega/NEC versions" - DOS/V is kind-of its own platform. Except it isn't. Except it is. Except my head hurts.


However... the Teradrive has a 286.


This means it presumably won't run all DOS/V software (although this will be complicated by the fact that it will probably "try"). But were you planning to ship DOS/V software that'll happily cope with a 286... you could argue it's a Teradrive game. It's below the de facto minimum DOS/V specs - The Manhole could be said to be a Teradrive game first and a DOS/V game second.

But then there might be a lot of that - DOS games couldn't afford to only target 386s in 1990 - I would expect most Western produce to work fine on a 286, and thus the Teradrive, and good god.

 

Those games were featured in Issue 0 of Tera Magazine (1991-10), Issue 1 (1992-03) featured the following games;

Best Play Baseball (This has Teradrive files too!)
Flight of the Intruder (Couldn't find dump of DOS/V version)
Manhole
Drakkhen (Couldn't find dump of DOS/V version)
Janou Touryuumon II (again)
Princess Maker (again)







Best Play Baseball Teradrive files;



Best Play Baseball link

 

For what it's worth, I can't even find a photo of DOS/V Drakkhen.


Unfortunately I did find Princess Maker:



There's not a single DOS/V logo to be found - it's just listing specs. The internet told me they didn't release the IBM AT in Japan, which makes this even more fun.

 

But it does specifically mention Sega Teradrive compatibility. Now the question is, where do we draw the line on the wiki? Software which actually have Teradrive specific stuff should probably be in scope, but what about titles that just mention compatibility?