General Questions and Information Thread

Interesting



It's being called "GetBass Blast City Type" in this flyer.

Sega do acknowledge its existence:
https://www.sega.jp/history/arcade/product/9020/

98年のブラストシティ版では、稼働時間に応じてバスが成長する隠し要素があった。

Apparently the fish grow in this Blast City version depending on operating time. So presumably if the cabinet ran for years, all the fish would be huge.

 

Woah, I saw that flyer from after but assumed it was the normal version. The fish would really get blasted big(?).

 

Mr. Culture, I saw your Virtua Fighter/Bugs page and thought I'd hunt down a better screenshot. Because if Kage really does fade into the ether when winning, that would be pretty fun (I think I've seen it before? I've seen a lot of things).

And uh... well... hmm.


Even though I own a physical copy of this game and have played it a few times for Sega Retro, I've never "tested" it per se. I know the floor is always disappearing and the camera is buggered, but on a standard Akira arcade playthrough, it's mostly okay. Kinda. Maybe I should have been documenting some of the jank rather than just accepting it.

I fired up a two-player versus game in an effort to get Kage to glitch, and... I couldn't replicate that issue. But I could recreate other issues!



Turns out as soon as you take Virtua Fighter out of its comfort zone, weird things happen. For example, it doesn't like two characters being at opposite ends of the ring.


My gut feeling is there's too many variables in play. I think camera position matters, the selected stage matters, the characters probably matter, and you might get radically different results depending on what happened in the previous fight(s). I also can't rule out dodgy emulation (though I imagine Mednafen is pretty accurate with this one).


So yes it's a bug, but it's probably part of a wider bug... and someone more qualified might have to work out exactly what that bug is.

 

This recent influx of Japanese arcade magazines means I've been able to update one of my less sensible ideas: Sega Retro:Todo/Sega Prize. Because as well as making the UFO Catcher machines, Sega made the stuff they put in them. And the contents changed regularly.

One of my previous unsensible plans had me go hunting for Kids Amuse games - exceedingly rare Japanese prize games for kids. Now the two have converged in the most unlikely place:


https://archive.org/details/CoinJournal-1996-08/Coin Journal 1996 08/page/122/mode/1up

Turns out there were Kids Amuse-themed prizes, and that is indeed Bananas in Pyjamas, a television show I've not thought about in at least 25 years.



christ almighty

 

Bananas in Pyjamas was 2D animated? I've only seen a 3D version I assume now is a reboot. I must've had the wrong BIP in my head any time I heard a reference to that.

 

No, it was live action!


only the intro was animated. But I didn't want to traumatise you all too much.

 

https://archive.org/details/CoinJournal-1997-03

This one looks to be the Sega Bandai merger issue. Also some reportage on Tokyo Joypolis following it breaking the 1 million visitor barrier and some undocumented "Fantasy Amuse" Disney prize machines that Sega don't talk about now:

 

It's crazy to think that after nearly 15 years of Sega Retro, we're still finding undocumented Sega "games". Mogura no Ghost Mansion is another one that turned up in these recent scans... which got me learning about the history of whac-a-mole. I'd always associated it with US-style ticket redemption machines, but nope, Japanese invention from the mid-1970s.

And then you wonder how much of this stuff was patented. Does Critter Crusher use a screen not because screens are cool, but because they couldn't make a real cabinet?

Is the reason you can't construct the Egg Carrier from Sonic Adventure not because of "physics" and "technology", but a licensing issue with the whac-a-Sonic minigame??

 

I saw a lot of new Gamest issues added. Nice to see. Topical:

Over the holiday I'm going through Mega Drive Fan issues and noting down which pages all the games show up on, cause Mega Drive Fan's articles generally didn't get added to the Magazine articles pages (I was adding a couple last year but was far from finished). There's more unreleased games constantly listed across the Release Calenders that I'm noting too.

So far with a year's issues passed, there's also mentions of TV shows SEGA sponsored like RPG Densetsu Hepoi and Tune Up Shonendan (see 1990-12 p60) or Ultra Q The Movie that SEGA made with Tsuburaya Productions (see 1990-5 p85 and the promotional material on p100)

Nobody mess with Mega Drive Fan.

 

As I've said before, if something turns up on the Internet Archive or YouTube or whatever, I let it push and pull me around.


I spotted this. It's a ROM that's been dumped for years, but this isn't a title screen we had on the wiki. We have...


Two revisions of Winter Challenge. In its original(?) IBM PC guise the game was called "The Games: Winter Challenge", but it looks like the intention was to drop the prefix, as all the boxes do that

I guess very early prints didn't get the name change memo. Unless we're secretly looking at a prototype?


The internet provides half an explanation - Winter Challenge is an Accolade game, and was originally released without an official license, thus these two ROMs represent "before" and "after" Sega's blessing. Except I'm not sure that's true, as both dumps have this string below the headers:

Granted, they might have forgotten to change this text, but it looks like there was a six month gap between Winter Challenge's release and the third-party licensee deal, so plenty of time for a second revision. Also this was designed to capitalise on the 1992 Winter Olympics in February - I can't see them having a long-term plan with this one. I can, however, see the IOC getting jumpy about the "The Games" name.

Don't know if there's other differences between the versions.

 

There we go
https://archive.org/details/Consolemania-007/page/n25/mode/2up?q="winter+challenge"
The April 1992 edition of Console Mania has a screenshot of the newer Winter Challenge logo. Earlier reviews like this January 1992 one from Mean Machines use the earlier title screen, so I would guess the ROM was swapped within the first couple of months of launch.

It's also not, as some sites suggest, a US/EU thing - both had the same ROMs.

 

I saw your edits yesterday... and i also had no idea that there was a ROM of this game with a totally different title... pretty cool I must say!...

 

Always good to post this every now and then:

https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=Special:UnusedFiles

We passed 3000 unused files again - if any of this needs deleting, can we mark them with

Code (Text):

1. {{delete|reason=Insert reason here.}}

Some of this has been hanging around for nearly 15 years now, but I don't want to start chucking things that can be useful.

Many of these files were originally uploaded just give them a home - there a a few press kits in there, and documents mirrored from Sega that we still don't fully understand, so I don't expect this list to disappear. It's more, "did you upload something and forget to use it?". There might also be some false positives because of fun technical reasons.

And if you can find a use for any of this stuff, please do.

 

Some were uploaded by me... baby toys that neither I nor anyone else here has probably heard of in our lifetimes (apparently it was supposed to put them in baby cots... they had a soft belly which, when pressed, played music)... we even have patents for them... these were sold by Sega before Sega Toys was a thing, but they were manufactured by third parties... the problem is knowing what to do with them... sometimes we know what to do with something... sometimes not... This line of toys was called "Capriccio" ...

 

I discovered by accident that Bubsy II once had a (another) subtitle: "Bubsy II: Lost in the Amazatorium". Apparently it was taken to ECTS Spring 1994 with that name.

So I did a bit of digging and sure enough, Mega-Tech ran this game as a cover story in their July 1994 edition:
https://archive.org/details/megatech-31/page/14/mode/2up

Mega-Tech was run into the ground once it was bought by Maverick Magazines. Can you tell??

"This is the exclusive first look at the FINISHED version of Bubsy II"


"Pre Release Copy, 5/15/94"

the final, for reference:


From the sounds of things there's a few prototypes of Bubsy II floating around for various platforms, but nobody's thought to dump (and share) any of them.

 

I saw Yuji Naka interviews being migrated from Sonic to Sega Retro:

https://archive.org/details/nights-nice-night-tours_202412/Nights Nice Night Tours

oh look, another

NiGHTS Nice Night Tours got scanned. Titbit of the day - when Sonic & Knuckles was doing its weird MTV Rock the Rock Alcatraz island promotional thing, Yuji Naka looked to the skies and saw some angels, and that's why NiGHTS has a paraloop move.

(if you mirror this, watch the page numbering)

 

It only took a little over 30 years...

July 1993 - Sega Takes Aim at Disney's World
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/04/business/sega-takes-aim-at-disney-s-world.html

December 2024 - Sonic 3 crushes Disney's Mufasa at the box office.

 

*if you ignore the "only Joypolis parks are in Japan and China now" part

 

Looks like one of those old warez CDs with Mega Drive (and Super Famicom) games got uploaded to the internet archive;

https://archive.org/details/scarlet_sfc_md_rom_cdr

I'm currently overseas with just a Chromebook, so can't dig that deeply for a couple of weeks, but there may be some prototypes on there, will probably require converting to standard roms. The disc seems to have been created 1995-01-06.