General Questions and Information Thread

Looks like Judy Toyoda chimed in on the Mega Drive video:

I took a moment to look at the video itself with the translated captions (which is imperfect, and ofc machine translation can only give you so much), but I think he's referring to this part of the video where the "teacher" mentions that the Mega Drive was sort of rushed after Sega heard the news about the Super Famicom's specs. As a result, there wasn't as much software at launch (to which Space Harrier II, Super Thunder Blade, Altered Beast and Osomatsu-kun Hachamecha Gekijou were all name dropped), and there weren't enough titles that could stand toe-to-toe with the Super Famicom and Super Mario World when they launched in 1990.

I'll admit I'm not the most informed about the history of the Mega Drive, but I think I'd like to read up on Yosuke Okunari's book or do some digging into what other Sega employees to see what they had to say about the console's development...

Edit: Ah, it looks like some of that history is here on the wiki: History of the Sega Mega Drive

 

There's a good little-known interview on it with Masami Ishikawa and Taku Matsubara in Harmony 1994-08 that could be translated too. Ishikawa and Hideki Sato have said a fair bit about the topic in other Japanese sources (Sato's oral history, Famitsu etc) as well.

 

Ummm... This is a little delicate, but there is currently a vtuber playing Rez with a Trance Vibrator on youtube.



Purely for educational and historical archiving purposes only... <.< >.>

 

I've been adding magazine article links from the Gamest magazine today, and saw that their second ever issue has a huge Sega retrospective, covering the 70's works up to 1986. But there's one game on page 21 (under combat games) that I don't think we have a page for, sandwiched between Tac/Scan and Future Spy: Space Fortress (スペースフォートレス).

It's one of only a couple games the articles doesn't have any images for, but the description is still pretty specific.

Translated

 

Werid things that turn up on Archive.org, episode #5430952

https://archive.org/details/shop-tv...e-autumn-winter-1989/page/280/mode/2up?q=sega

A catalogue. We do technically care about these, even if there's not much "Sega" in it, but that isn't why this matters - this is for "Shop TV", an early attempt at online shopping through the UK's Prestel service.

Prestel was a proto-internet run by the Post Office between 1979 and 1994 - hook your TV up to a phone line, and you'll get a Teletext-like interface to do... stuff. Basically nothing of Prestel has survived and very few people seem to care - there's a bit of noise on the internet about its launch, but with so little documentation or coverage, you'd be forgiven for thinking the thing only lasted 15 months rather than 15 years.

I'm going to guess there was something Sega-related hosted on the service at some point. I know there was "Computer Games".

 

Prestel quickly became pretty business orientated, the main consumer service on there was Micronet 800. In 1990 I was hoping to get an Amiga for christmas (I got a Mega Drive instead!) and would read quite a lot about the various online services that were available, I filled out the "for more information" form on a Micronet 800 ad (or was it a freephone number? I forget) and BT sent me this brochure which gives an overview of what was available at the time. There's some demos of the service available here from 1989 and 1991. There were computer game reviews, so maybe some Sega games got reviewed there, but there doesn't seem to be any console specific stuff then. In October 1991 BT closed down Micronet 800, pushing current subscribers towards Compuserve, but Compuserve was really expensive to access back then, so I doubt the majority went there. Some staff from Micronet 800 then set up a spiritual successor in "Silicon Village". There's a demo from 1993 which did have Sega stuff thanks to Europress having a presence there with Forcefield Direct. Europress also did some teletext gaming sections on satellite TV around the same time, so I wouldn't be surprised if they shared content across the services. They went out of business not long after though, just before the internet boom.

 

https://segaretro.org/List_of_SC-3000_games_in_Japan

I made pages for all of the SC-3000 type-in games in Micom Basic magazine, but as I don't speak Japanese the transliteration probably isn't perfect on some of them, especially as some may have titles that are not grammatically correct which conversion software struggles with. So any Japanese speakers feel free to fix any errors on my part.

https://github.com/fabiodl/sctape

This software converts SC-3000 BASIC listings to tape and Disk images (and vice versa). Instructions the developer gave me;

I chose a small single load game with no SC-3000 specific characters, typed it out in notepad, converted it and voila;

https://segaretro.org/3D_Car_Race

It works!

Next I'll work out how to deal with Japanese and SC-3000 specific characters as most games use those, but for now I'm quite pleased I got it to work, some of the larger games look quite interesting.

 

That's beautiful. I can't wait to try that out myself.

 

RetroArquivo, a game preservation group based out of Portugal, recently obtained a collection of material that was sent out by Clube Sega in the early 90s. One of the things they obtained were a series of letters that were "written by Sonic" :p

It looks like these have been mirrored on Sega Retro already, but here's the original IA page as well.

in their post, they also mention that there's more to come throughout May and June.

 

I think Sega Retro should host uh... "pre-typed" type-in games, though I wasn't really sure how best to do it.

Do we put the full source (in text form) in "xxx/Technical information", or do we offer some sort of loadable tape file and just link to the magazine? Or both?

 

It would be nice to be able to put the source under technical information, but the problem is how to represent the non-standard characters;

https://www.smspower.org/Development/SC-3000Font

There is a Windows font on that page, so you could point people to that to display it properly, but I'm not sure the code would still work then. There's a work around with the conversion software linked above;

https://segaretro.org/Triangle_Vader

This game uses the spaceship character which is located at hexadecimal position FA in the font, so inputting \xFA for the character results in it getting converted correctly. The same should work with the katakana, so I'll just use that method as I don't have a Japanese keyboard and most of those games don't use that much. Again, I don't think the code will work if we did this either. So I'm at a bit of a loss how to do that.

 

Yep... we know ... I was also a member of Clube Sega at the time (well... basically every kid in Portugal who had a Sega console was)....

 

The special characters don't need to render correctly on the wiki - it just has to let you copy and paste the text without the underlying hex values being changed. When loaded into an SC-3000, it should look fine (and a good chunk is ASCII anyway so it's not like the code will be completely unreadable on Sega Retro).

But having looked into this... I'm not sure it's doable, because $80-$9F look like they're reserved for Unicode control characters. If we were using Windows-1252 it would be alright - the special SC-3000 characters would show up as accented As and Es or whatever, but apparently HTML doesn't let you change character encodings mid-document.



If this wasn't a wiki you could do something funky in Javascript to let you copy and paste in exotic ways, but I'm not sure there's a clean way around this issue.

 

Could you just upload the text as a .txt file to download, rather than pasting the text into the wiki?

I'm assuming we'd upload the .wav file as well anyway, so the text is more like the source code rather than what you would run to play the game.

 

Not all games use those characters, so we could still just put the unaltered text on a technical page for those. But thinking about it, even if you have the text, you still need some other software (such as posted above) to do something with it, so why not just leave it up to external software to deal with it. We could just post the code as above, noting which non-standard characters are used (it would help if we made some thumbs for them such as with buttons), and what they've been replaced with in the code listing ( "\xFA" in the example above).

That tool converts to the tzx format (works in MAME), but there are other tools which can convert that to wav if required.

 

https://segaretro.org/Sponsorships/Football



Captain Günther Jerabek ...

 

If you like a time capsule, just slap Sega on it. I'm not into soccer, but my stepfather is a football coach and always got these kinda club magazines. I remember liking the maps depicting line-ups and player positions. They were just red and blue dots on soccer fields. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

It's an excellent historical document... the club wasn't at its best financially at the time (debts, unpaid wages, some players left the club mid-season, the club almost closed down)... but the club still managed to win the Wiener Stadthalle Tournament that season with Sega's sponsorship... it's a humble club but with a lot of history in Austria... and here's Sega Retro to preserve this moment in the club's history ...

 

https://twitter.com/onionsoftware/status/1791095378382901500

Some catalogue photos of Hi-Tech Land Sega Kanda, including a pic of Sega Chan.

 

Yep... @Ted909 already posted that here ...