General Questions and Information Thread

https://retroarquivo.wordpress.com/2024/06/07/catalogo-top-games-97-playstation-1/

https://archive.org/details/topgames_97/



Translated from the original RetroArquivo post with Deepl translator:

"This Friday we have another Ecofilmes catalogue digitised thanks to the generosity of Tiago Ti, who lent us his collection of promotional material linked to this company. This time we're looking at the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64, at a time when the company responsible for Sega Portugal was starting to focus on other platforms.

In around 16 pages we have a presentation of all the new games that Ecofilmes had for ‘97, including the following games for PlayStation 1:

Agent Armstrong;
Air Race;
Atari Greatest Hits;
Command & Conquer: Red Alert;
Dragon Ball Final Bout;
Duke Nukem;
Fighting Force;
Herc's Adventures;
Lethal Enforcers;
Marvel Super Heroes;
MDK;
Mortal Kombat Mythologies;
Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey;
Peak Performance
Red Asphalt;
Resident Evil Director's Cut;
Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha;
Tennis Arena;
Tetris Plus;
Toca Touring Car Championship;
Tomb Raider II;
Wargods;
WCW vs the World;
Wing Over,
Yusha: Heaven's Gate;
We end with F1 Pole Position 64, the only game in this catalogue for the Nintendo 64, which is a bit strange considering that all the others are for the PS1.
You can find it here by following this link.

See you next week with more Clube Sega material, until then!"

 

Today on "don't know how to handle this":

https://archive.org/details/x-68000-ii-x-basic-1988/mode/2up
X6800 Katsuyou Kenkyuu II (X68000活用研究 II) is the second book of a trilogy helping you to program X68000 software. It was published by Dempa Shimbusha... who also had the rights to publish Space Harrier for the X68000. This means there's a Sega game on the front of an X68000 programming book - it's technically within scope, but also not really.

(although maybe some of the code examples came from Space Harrier?)



part 1 is interesting for other reasons...
https://archive.org/details/x-68000-x-68000-usage-study/mode/2up

 

There's quite a few type-ins for Sega game music on non-Sega platforms in Micom Basic which seem to have Sega's permission, so could be something similar there.

Edit: Or more likely just promoting it as there's a two-page ad for Space Harrier X68000 inside, which does bring it within scope, but as we already have the same ad from Micom Basic then not really much need for it.

 

Still within scope though.

 

Hey remember this:

because I didn't.

https://archive.org/details/sony-dd-10-bz/page/92/mode/2up?q=sega
A DD-10BZ manual came through overnight, and the best source of information is... us.

I didn't know how best to cover this back in 2018... and I still don't know how best to cover it now!

 

Nice catch! That one was still on my internal todo list along with Taiketsu! Columns from Sega Game Toshokan. We could just class it as an LCD game.

 

I was at a retro game trade fair a week ago, where I saw a Tomy game called Sonic Mountain Quest. I wanted to buy it, but €120 was too steep for me. It doesn't seem to be covered on Sonic Retro.

 

It is, but it's buried: Merchandise/Tomy.

I think it had a page once upon a time, but as there hasn't been much enthusiasm to cover Sonic merchandise, it was easier to group it all.

 

Ashens even did a video on it!

 

That is a rebrand of a toy called kongman... classic

 

I like a good box art oddity:


Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun uses this art for its cover, a piece (called "Dragon's Lair" of all things) made in 1982 for... something. Maybe this issue of Dragon magazine, idk.

You can tell it was made in 1982 because there's a big fat "©1982" on one of the steps. How do we solve that problem for the game??


You mask off half the image and cover it up with a Sega seal of quality. Except when they forgot to do that. Or weren't in the US.

And yes it does mean the artwork has nothing to do with the game, because it pre-dates it by ten years.

 

Clyde Caldwell ...

 

https://segaretro.org/Sponsorships/Motorsports





"O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all of us command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free!
From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee"

 

I noticed an issue on the Sega Mobile page - if you use the CompanyHistoryAll template (which is what we want), it lists a whole load of cack: Japanese mobile releases from when I tackled them x months/years ago.

The reason it does this is because companies have been mislabeled - if you don't specify a platform the system assumes "all platforms", thus Sega Mobile is associated with Japanese produce. But the fix kinda sucks right now - for non-Japanese mobile games, we're categorising all of them as "J2ME games" (Java 2 Millennium Edition), and while this isn't "inaccurate", in practise it's about as useful as saying all console games are "C++ games".

The old Sega Mobile website said as much: it grouped by suppliers. If you had a phone from Sprint, you couldn't download games made for AT&T phones. The website is more vague than its Japanese counterpart, and wasn't always kept up to date with the various storefronts, but we probably ought to follow its lead. I mean maybe there was a way of moving applets around between completely different phones, but that likely wasn't an intended use case.

I made a list going up to the end of 2004 - I have very little knowledge about the American mobile phone market of the early 2000s, but it's a start.

 

https://retroarquivo.wordpress.com/2024/06/14/catalogo-sega-saturn-a-realidade-faz-sempre-sofrer/

https://archive.org/details/sega_saturn_jogos/



Translated from the original RetroArquivo post with Deepl translator:

"Continuing with our series of Clube Sega material lent to us by Tiago Ti to digitize, today we have another Sega Saturn catalog. This one promotes all the advantages of Sega's new (at the time) console in terms of technology, but also a selection of games and accessories.
You can count on:
Technical features of the console in detail, with an explanation of the importance of the components and how they work;
Promotion of the Video CD cartridge, demonstrating its usefulness and specifications;
PC games now coming to consoles - Sim City 2000 and Myst;
Other titles such as Bug, Robotica, Cyber Speedway, Wing Arms, Virtual Hydlide, Shinobi-X, Mystaria: The Realms of Lore, The Mansion of Hidden Souls, Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Fighter Remix, Clockwork Knight 2, Panzer Dragoon, Digital Pinball, Virtua Cop, Thunderhawk II, Johnny Bazookatone, Ruins, Rayman and Descent;
It's also important to note that Ecofilmes finally gives a voice to some game developers, including excerpts from interviews with Yu Suzuki (Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop) and Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Sega Rally) who talk about their respective projects.
New from Electronic Arts, Crystal Dynamics, Interplay, Core Design, Time Warner, Infogrames and JVC - High Octane, Theme Park, Gex, Casper, Tomb Raider, Primal Rage, Chaos Control, Solar Eclipse, Deadly Skies and Victory Boxing;
The now classic racing games Sega Rally Championship, Daytona USA and F1 Challenge;
In the sports section - International Victory Goal, World Series Baseball, Pebble Beach Golf Links, NHL All-Star Hockey, NBA Basketball, FIFA Soccer '96, Olympic Soccer, Olympic Games Volume 1 and 2;
Here's a list of all the games available at launch, including the ones I've already mentioned and a few more;
We finish with a list of accessories already available, such as the Virtua Stick, Arcade Racer, Back-Up Memory, Photo CD Playback, Six-Player Adaptor and Control Pad;
On the last page, the catalog closes with the slogan "And You Thought It Was Just a Game" highlighting how the console could be used as a media center supporting Photo CD, Video CD, Audio CD or even Audio CD+Graphics (CD+G).
You can check it out here, just follow this link.
See you next week!"

 

Time to bang on about the fickle nature of online platforms and how they impact Retro again

For the past week and a bit, Niconico and some other internet things owned by Kadokawa have been placed in eternal emergency maintenance downtime purgatory because of a massive cyber attack. Niconico is apparently not likely to come back up for an entire month or more, and most if not all website archive tools have never saved its videos directly, due to them usually being locked behind accounts.

Though easy to ignore in the West for those who care little about the big new cultural exports or obscure old stuff out of Japan, Niconico being almost completely locked off for an extended period of time is, of course, genuinely like if YouTube in its entirety went down for us. The amount of media stretching back years hosted on there that is currently a lot less accessible - or available at all - is pretty massive.


This is naturally relevant to Sega in ways that aren't immediately obvious, and just keep adding up. For example - unless one found its rare CD release on Service Games 01, this little-known song (made by Shiho Miyaoka, Eiichi Takahashi, and Takenobu Mitsuyoshi to celebrate "Sega no Hi" (i.e. Sega Day), ritually held on the 23rd of each month at some Sega locations in Japan for a while) can't be heard anywhere else.

Purely off the top of my head, tons of fun promotional videos for Tokyo Joypolis featuring "Giroppon" singer Nezumi Senpai besides the one we already have are also only immediately playable there (more used to be on YouTube too, but were weirdly privated by Sega at some point). Countless gameplay videos documenting the older Maimai games are as well, thanks to its own direct uploading functionality with the platform.


And a number of credits referenced on the wiki wouldn't be known at all, if it wasn't for Niconico uploads of varying quality. Case in point: one in this video that I inadvertently discovered just before the whole platform went, for the original version of Sengoku Taisen. This would apparently only play after completing specific single player content, and is annoyingly clipped off by an account dedicated to that entire part of the game on YT.

Haven't tried to tackle correctly transcribing all of the staff roll yet, as the quality indeed isn't great and will probably make it less straightforward than just using OCR or Google Lens and calling it a day... but I did grab some screenshots, just in case. They're all here if anyone wants to have a go.


Anyway - all of this is as good a long-winded excuse to give that ever relevant reminder of backing everything up yourself.

 

There's a whole load of videos on Nico Nico that we probably ought to mirror... although it's a similar situation with YouTube - you know the quality is compromised during the upload process, so you'd be spending time knowingly uploading crappy versions. That and the wikis don't handle video as elegantly as they could so there's less incentive. And there are size limits.

But a crappy version is better than no version at all.

 

I know that the videos that I uploaded for Sakura Pocket, or maybe the GameBoy games were ripped from NicoNico using an online downloader specifically for it that I never saved the link to, sadly.

So SOME exist.

 

I did try to find one to download the Sengoku Taisen video with its credits, but none either would work at all or get me past the five minute mark (i.e. nowhere near them) - was kind of weird.

 

I made a terrible mistake of following my YouTube recommendations, and ended up watching the strange British localisation of Urusei Yatsura. That's little Britian's Matt Lucas providing the voice of lead character Ataru Moroboshi... just in case you thought it was unfair that David Walliams was turning up on this board so often.

(it's surprisingly not terrible. I mean it probably lost a lot in translation but who cares)

Anyway having learnt a tiny bit about what I was looking at, I went filling in some blanks on our wikis about Urusei Yatsura, its creator Rumiko Takahashi, and production company, Kitty Films. And hey, we haven't had a Video CD mystery in the last five seconds:



Rumiko Takahashi's other big seller, Ranma 1/2 had a TV series and for reasons I can't quite fathom, Sega were involved in distribution when it was put on Video CD.

Slight issue: it was a long running anime and Video CDs suck.




https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/w1091833101/

...so there's at least 38 volumes. Each with four discs. That's 152 discs if you're playing at home.


Did Sega sell other anime series on Video CD?


...yes. That's Maison Ikkoku and Yawara!. There's also Miyuki, and potentially others in the range.


At first glance, Sega don't appear to have been involved in VHS or LaserDisc or DVD versions, but it's hard to tell.