There's always one. We've got a couple of 0GDTEX images for "First Kiss Monogatari". ...but this game wasn't released for the Dreamcast. Its sequel was, and NEC Retro has a page, but it's a no-show on Sega Retro. Or so I thought. Turns out the big box "Genteiban" version of First Kiss Monogatari II: Anata ga Irukara includes a Dreamcast port of the first game. It was the only way to play this version - it wasn't sold separately, nor was it included in the standard version, and so isn't listed by Sega. And of course scans are crap, and all the auction sites I've seen manage to only show two discs, even though this package came with four. So hurray, secret Dreamcast game. Too bad it's... this.
https://asia.sega.com/SonicSuperStars/th/ AFAIK Sonic SuperStars was the first Sega console game to get localised in Thai, along with the first to get Thai physical releases. Sonic X Shadow Generations will be the second. https://asia.sega.com/SonicXShadowGenerations/th/ So along with the standard Asian English, Chinese (are there separate simplified and traditional physical releases?), and Korean releases, we now have the occasional Thai release too. Incidentally, I think the first Sega game to get a Thai localisation was Saka Tsuku Shoot! for mobile which got a Thai release on 2014-12-03. Sega Asia publish physical releases of some smaller Japanese publishers in Asia, not always in English. We're not fully up to date on those, although some are on the wiki. But looking at Sega's Taiwanese store I was surprised to see some games from western publishers being sold there. I'm not sure what the deal is with that, my best guess is that Sega is the distributor for those in Taiwan. The back of the boxes have stickers with "Sega Corporation" on them and give a Sega Asia email for customer support.
I'm not sure how helpful any of this is, but Sonic Superstars' web manuals indicate a differentiation. The screenshots in there use different characters: Same goes for Sonic Frontiers and Sonic Origins.
There's a simple reason why: I don't know how to translate the titles. 說謊公主與盲眼王子 Shuōhuǎng gōngzhǔ yǔ mang yǎn wángzǐ Ideally we'd want the page under its native name, rather than a literal English translation or the original Japanese. There's a (probably outdated) list on the Sega Retro TODO page with more.
Looking on their website they do show different covers for the Simplified Chinese version, it drops the "Traditional Chinese" label from the front, but looking on Taobao.com I can only see Traditional Chinese versions, so I'm not sure if the Simplified versions ever got released physically. The Asian releases support Simplified anyway, so it's expected for there to be a digital manual. Traditional Chinese: Simplified Chinese: Asian English: Korean: Thai:
So the question literally nobody was asking: are any of these 0GDTEX images interesting? ... no. I thought we might see some prototype holdovers, but about half are just scans of real discs and the rest are mostly boring. Only a few developers recognised that the image could be anything, and thus could be fun: Otherwise you're just comparing actual disc designs, and most of those aren't anything to write home about. The Japanese Crazy Taxi 2 gets some points for looking like a record. The only other interesting one is House of the Dead 2, because presumably the middle part is never seen. But I haven't actually checked. Worst award goes to Sega Bass Fishing, because they only had MS Paint.
Hey Dreamcast and/or compact disc fans I've found three of these in the space of an hour - on the CD readable portion of some Dreamcast discs, there's a 690KB DAT file padded with 0s. What does it do?
one 0gdtex image is of note this render of cotton is only seen twice, in one of the loading screens that's hard to see and in here this is actually a render of cotton running: a feature that got scrapped. while it's not concrete, it's speculated that because according to andreas scholl (remaster dev) by running on foot you would've been running into volcano lava and machines in certain levels where there's big gaps of deadly floor that you could just fly over you can trigger the mode on dreamcast. https://archive.is/Ymxgp https://xcancel.com/andreasscholl09/status/1824375585092624747 https://archive.is/HoZt3
Wanted to share this semi-recent video that this tech youtuber did about the Sega AI Computer. Very nice breakdown of the hardware and packaging, and there's a quick overview of the personal diary program. smspower's article on the AI computer got shouted out in the description.
So Junichi Terashima is a pretty fascinating fellow. Yet his Sega Retro page is completely blank. I stumbled upon him while working on my recreation of Sonic 1's source code. Specifically, while getting the source code for the Mega Drive's initialization function. In my first iteration of the project, I had used Nuclear Rush's initialization code. But I wasn't totally satisfied with this, since Nuclear Rush was developed in '93. And I figured if I could find the source code to a game that released earlier, then that would be closer to the startup code Sonic would have used. So I found that NHL Hockey, a game released in 1991 also had its source code released. Ironically enough though, NHL Hockey's startup code is newer than Nuclear Rush's. Since Nuclear Rush's is dated June 6th, 1990. While NHL Hockey's is June 21st, 1990. What NHL Hockey had that Nuclear Rush didn't though was a bit more info on the people behind the Mega Drive's startup code. What it tells us is that the first iteration of the start-up was created November 30th, 1989 by R/D 5 credited to someone named "Terashima". It didn't take me too long to find the Terashima this was likely referring to. Everything else regarding the name Terashima related to Sega either had to do with a Sega World location, voice actors, or musicians. There was a sole exception for a hardware designer for the Mega Drive version of Virtua Racing, Junichi Terashima. I was curious what else he's been up to, and it turns out he invented 2 karaoke devices that Sega holds patents for too, which were filed in the late 90's. Beyond that I can't find anything about him, what he looks like, or the such. But here's the guy you have to thank for most Mega Drive games being able to boot up at all, and for having a hand in making the SVP.
Hey, do you have too much money? https://picclick.com/seller/discountgames101/?q=sega+slide Because a whole bunch of promotional slides from "CES" 1993 have turned up on ebay. Context: in the days before digital photography, promotional screenshots and photographs would be distributed by Sega (and others) as physical slides. You can then use fancy optical tricks to copy them onto your magazine or whatever. Like this.. This is probably the best quality version of that prototype Sonic Chaos screenshot you're ever likely to find. And it's not the only one - here's Bounty Hunter, a game that never happened.
I have a folder of some of these CES press packs with slides I saved 8-9 years ago, uploaded here if anyone wants to do something with them; https://imgur.com/a/QzHBbeg
I suspected that Sega's Japanese pre-web online presence Sega Game Station was linked to Sega Fax Club as many of the sections had the same or similar titles. Now I have confirmation; Infact, even the Sonic head logo seems to be an ASCII representation of the Sega Fax Club logo; But when viewed on Saturn through the Pad Nifty software Sonic gets horizontally squashed, with vertical scrolling required to see the whole "page".
Yeah. Just take pictures of the descriptions once a DLC has been clicked on. The most important for our needs are sussing out what used to be DO5U DLC before the name change, which in turn will help me to determine what names used to be on the PS3 side of things since the PS3 store still lists things under Ultimate but did change names once Last Round came out.
I've dug up a couple of extra The Zone episodes from the depths of ancient youtube Episode 1x02: https://retrocdn.net/File:The_Zone_(AU)_s01e02_07-May-1994.mp4 Episode 1x23: https://retrocdn.net/File:The_Zone_(AU)_s01e23_01-Oct-1994_complete.mp4 (previously had an incomplete clip of this episode) Also found the first in a series of Sega Ozisoft commercials https://retrocdn.net/File:Sega_Ozisoft_Commerical_May_1994_No1_(AU).mp4
Where can I upload the screenshots I took? I've got the first batch of about 50. There's WeTransfer, but that's used to send to e-mail addresses.
At one point around 1992/1993-ish Sega of America gave up trying to be coherent and ran this advertising campaign. Lots of drums and screaming and whatever - a classic. Too bad there's no decent quality versions on YouTube. But great(?) news! I found the soundtrack. This is the (probably NSFW) album "Torture Garden" by the band Naked City. It's certainly a thing.
Can I ask about this? from first glance, I thought this was Atari v. Sega, but that one features a horizontal scrolling patent. Is this a different case?
