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General Questions and Information Thread

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Andlabs, Aug 25, 2011.

  1. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    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.
     
  2. Pirate Dragon

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    Yeah, I've been putting this off but ... CD+G;

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    And there's a ton more of that series of discs from some Dutch company.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    And a ton more of those from some US company.

    Or how about these from RCA;

    [​IMG] [​IMG]

    No Turbografx-CD love though ... oh wait ...

    [​IMG]

    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.
     
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  3. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    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.

    [​IMG]
    I also can't work out of "DOS/V Fan" magazine was ever printed.
     
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  4. Pirate Dragon

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    ^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.
     
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  5. Asagoth

    Asagoth

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    wiki stuff... and a beer... or two... or more...
    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)...
     
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  6. Pirate Dragon

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    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.
     
  7. Asagoth

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    wiki stuff... and a beer... or two... or more...
    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 :) ...
     
  8. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    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:

    [​IMG]

    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.
     
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  9. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    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

    [​IMG]
    Teradrive version of Drakkhen was set to be released by Sega themselves? Maybe it never made it to market.

    [​IMG]
    Sierra games. I don't know what "FM" means in this context.

    [​IMG]
    And then a bunch of games that work, but don't support Mega Drive sound.
     
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  10. Pirate Dragon

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    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.
     
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  11. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    I found a couple. First:

    [​IMG]
    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.


    [​IMG]
    https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/s841616805/

    Super Daisenryaku DOS/V. Yes it's called that

    [​IMG]
    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).
     
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  12. Attached Files:

  13. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    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:

    [​IMG]

    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)
     
  14. 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
     
  15. Xilla

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    Big feature on videogames in this episode of CBBC's Newsround, with a good chunk of SEGA goodness

     
  16. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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  17. LocalH

    LocalH

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    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.
     
  18. 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.
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2024
  19. Ted909

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  20. Overlord

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    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.