Probably the same solution as those photo CDs - make a list. Maybe a something similar to how we're handling third-party AV cables, or those "references to Sega" pages, where we acknowledge they exist but don't dedicate articles to each individual game. Scans on Retro CDN. I can almost guarantee there'll be weird edge cases. Although I guess the Teradrive is the very definition of a weird edge case.
Yeah, I've been putting this off but ... CD+G; And there's a ton more of that series of discs from some Dutch company. And a ton more of those from some US company. Or how about these from RCA; No Turbografx-CD love though ... oh wait ... Well at least this one's interesting, CD+G and CD+Midi on one disc, I wonder if the recently dumped Wonder MIDI is compatible with the CD+Midi format? This seems to be the only one with both formats that Warner New Media released, and the only CD+G I've seen which mentions TG-CD.
Mega Drive Fan had a monthly segment across 1991 called "Teradrive Fan" https://archive.org/details/mega-drive-fan-18-July-1991/Mega Drive FAN 7/page/108/mode/2up (thumbnails are dead on Retro so here's an archive.org link) There's a whole bunch of games mentioned from the likes of Accolade, Bullfrog, EA, LucasFilm Games, Maxis, SSI, Sierra and Spectrum Holobyte but I can't find a single one online. DOS/V games from this period are just stupidly rare I guess. I also can't work out of "DOS/V Fan" magazine was ever printed.
^There was also Tera Communication in Beep Mega Drive. https://azuco.sakura.ne.jp/column/hw_devsat/ Machine translation; So this was known about on the Japanese internet. It's interesting that the distributor Ado Electronics (亜土電子工業) had a close relationship with Sega, and would eventually get bought out by CSK with Isao Okawa becoming president. Right, I can't find a single image of the DOS/V version of BestPlay Baseball, but plenty for the PC-98 and FM-Towns versions. This seems to be the source for the dump of that; a 1993 Taiwanese BBS warez CD. Incidentally, Taiwanese pirates also used to sell these types of CDs for console warez BBSs, which is where we got quite a few prototypes, but as they would generally replace the prototypes with the retail roms when available there's probably quite a few prototypes still missing which were included on older discs. For example, as you discovered here, Funcar Rally is on Volume 1, but it's replaced with Combat Cars on Volume 3. There's lots of other proto stuff you can see were on those discs. I tried searching for those CDs before, but without success, it was a pretty small market after all.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970217093414/http://www.crossprod.co.uk/pricing.htm I knew I'd seen the name of that company somewhere (see bottom of the page)...
Yeah, Cross Products were actually British, but as Sega acquired them in 1994, then it's entirely plausible that ADO just had a distribution deal with SoA. Or the author may have just been mistaken. Edit: Ah, I see that you were referring to ADO, nice recall! I thought the name looked familiar too, but didn't remember that.
Of course it's plausible... I'm not trying to contradict you ... I was just wondering if the "ADO" company described on the Manhole box was the same... and indeed it is ...
There might not be much movement on Teradrive-specific things, but this exercise is highlighting holes on NEC Retro. And Wikipedia. And the world. Like The BestPlay Baseball - this originally came to the PC-9801 in 1991, before being ported to DOS/V and then the FM Towns. It has licensed players in though, so as the latter edition came out several months after the original (and has different box art), that one could technically be a different game. It's actually part of a series that dates back to 1985 with Best Nine Pro Yakyuu. The Japanese Wikipedia lumps all the games on one page, but it's missing one: There was a July 1992 update. My guess is it just updates the players, therefore if there's a DOS/V version of this somewhere... there might be secret Teradrive support. But I've no idea if there's a DOS/V version - I can't find any DOS/V versions of anything (at least from this era). The best part of this story is that it appears that some branch of IBM provided the statistics for these games. So searching "IBM" is likely to net you the PC-9801 versions.
There are at least two "issues" of Tera Magazine. Neither are scanned, but this one was photographed for an auction: https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/b1126310036 Teradrive version of Drakkhen was set to be released by Sega themselves? Maybe it never made it to market. Sierra games. I don't know what "FM" means in this context. And then a bunch of games that work, but don't support Mega Drive sound.
I think the "FM" in that case is referring to Sound Blaster compatibility. The funny thing is, Teradrive couldn't power the Sound Blaster, so Sega had to offer a fix at a cost of ¥8000. We can also see the "Ad-Lib TERA-FM compatible" note for Manhole, we could really do with full scans of these. I think it says Drakkhen is already released, although that can't necessarily be trusted. With how rare these early DOS/V titles seem to be then there may well be a Sega branded copy of Drakkhen to keep an eye out for. Edit: In this Teradrive ad they give the Drakkhen distributor (which Google translates as the generic "Computer Software"), so probably just an error putting Sega in there.
I found a couple. First: TANK ASCII put red labels on their boxes listing compatible hardware, and Tank lists the Teradrive. There's scope for other ASCII-published games doing a similar thing, but finding good photos is a challenge. https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/s841616805/ Super Daisenryaku DOS/V. Yes it's called that I found an disk image of this one - there's no obvious Teradrive enhancements (though I think it came from a Taiwanese print so take it with a pinch of salt).
https://archive.org/details/segaferie_manual_20240428/mode/2up This manual came through overnight - a special version of the Ferie that we didn't know about. So obviously I went looking for answers, starting with "what's Toyo Suisan". Apparently they mostly make noodles, and worked with Sega on an arcade game in 1997: Maru-chan de Goo!. Okay. Also a special VMU for the Dreamcast. Oh and look, another one: JOMO is a brand of petrol stations. It's worth noting that "Atsumete Godzilla: Kaijuu Dai Shuugou", this VMU with a pre-loaded Godzilla game, pre-dates the Dreamcast launch by a few months (30th July vs. 27th November). We could be looking at two more releases of the thing. (I don't yet understand how this person got their hands on a Dreamcast-branded Zip Disk - that's another quest)
More Japanese media goodness! https://twitter.com/Joe_kara2019/status/1784446362932969790 A kid gets trapped inside a Hang-On, which for some reason turns into a virtual getaway for the villain... This clip more than likely comes from Episode 17 of Jikuu Senshi Spielban (時空戦士スピルバン) titled A Maze Gamezone (迷宮のゲームゾーン) from August 1986. The full episode does appear to be on Amazon Japan and other Japanese services, but alas I'm geo blocked lol
Any Apple fans in the room? https://archive.org/details/apple_t_shirts_1997_1997_pdf__mlib/page/50/mode/2up?q=sega (yes that is an entire book dedicated to T-shirts)
Found in MacWEEK volume 7 number 26 (June 28, 1993 publication date), on page 23. There is no accompanying imagery, so I'll just quote the relevant text. I have located a copy of the MacHack 1993 CD-ROM via discmaster. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have a copy of this submission included.
Don't you just love those mornings where you go down rabbit holes and stumble across something rather timely? This was uploaded yesterday: This is a segment from a TV Asashi program titled Shikujiri Sensei: Don't Be Like Me!! (しくじり先生 俺みたいになるな!!), the main title could be translated in English as "Failure Sensei". This appears to be a variety program in which a celebrity is brought on to "teach" students about different failures (individual and/or organizational) and how they can learn from those mistakes. There were at least three episodes that covered Sega topics (to which they've spoken to employees for info). The one linked above is about the Mega Drive (thankfully YouTube has a method of translating Japanese captions into English). The other two were about Sega's arcade history (no viewable links unfortunately, just episode info I dug up): Episode 1: https://www.tv-asahi.co.jp/shikujiri/backnumber/200831/ https://www.4gamer.net/games/999/G999905/20200907062/ https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1272701.html Episode 2: https://www.tv-asahi.co.jp/shikujiri/backnumber/200907/ I found two overviews of the second episode; the first of which shares some interesting details about the Making Club Series: https://times.abema.tv/articles/-/8623246?page=1 Here are the main points from the article that I machine translated: It doesn't end there. Toylets. https://www.j-cast.com/2020/09/08393768.html?p=all And if that wasn't enough, here are some more wonderful official Sega tweets that share info and dev photos of this wonderful machine that I hope you enjoy today. These aren't exactly NSFW, but proceed with caution: https://twitter.com/SEGA_OFFICIAL/status/1302993566986190849 https://twitter.com/SEGA_OFFICIAL/status/1302993716223733760 https://twitter.com/SEGA_OFFICIAL/status/1303247277071294464 Absolutely legendary stuff here today folks.
That second Toylets photo there has already been one of my favourite Sega things of all time for a good while now. There's an incredible, indescribably unusual type of energy coming off of it. Mention of Aroma Club again reminds me of a couple other things that got posted in the wake of that show's airing - @SEGA_OFFICIAL saying how the scented oils for it were imported from the UK, and this clip interviewing Aika Hirano of AM4.
I think that aircraft carrier bit was on one of the things for Sega Test - either the test itself, or one of the videos leading up to it. I know I've heard that anecdote before.
