General Questions and Information Thread

At least I've never had such a thing happen to me (but of course I'm speaking for myself)... and our fellow tech member @Clownacy is a person of respect here... so I don't smell any "foul play" here... it must be one of those usual (maybe unusual) wiki tech errors...

 

Looking in a hex editor they're interleaved, I guess .SMD (Super Magic Drive) format. Should be able to convert them with uCON64.

 

It was looking like a slow news day... and still probably is, but

https://archive.org/details/Power.Play.N058.1993.01/page/14/mode/2up?q=sega

This preview for a game I hadn't heard of, "Timet the Flying Squirrel" looked familiar. Turns out it became Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad... which means Ocean's "sequel" to Mr. Nutz probably entered development before Mr. Nutz was even a thing.

This was set for an April 1993 release on the Amiga, with Mega Drive and SNES ports to follow, but the deal fell through. But had it gone to plan, the first flying squirrel on a Sega system might have been this Timet character, rather than SegaSonic Arcade's Ray.

Useful knowledge I'm sure.

 

This is more for my own curiosity than anything, but do we know when Sega stopped promoting the 32X? I've been watching through a bunch of 1995 pro wrestling shows, and some of the videos in my collection still have commercials from the era. I'd grown used to seeing the 32X "Stick it in your Genesis" commercials, and I wasn't expecting to see anything for the Saturn until like 1996 or *maybe* late 1995.

Imagine my surprise when I'm half-paying attention to the 1995-05-20 WCW Worldwide and yep there's another over the top 1990s commercial, but this one ends with... a Sega Saturn logo?? I rewound the video and watched it's this commercial. I knew the 32X's time was short-lived, but is it even shorter than I remembered? Had Sega already effectively given up on it before a full year had passed?

Edit: Got through all of the shows that aired that day (Saturday had SO MUCH pro wrestling back in the mid-90s!), no more 32X commercials but I think I've seen this Saturn ad like 10 times now.

 

Oh they were bored of the 32X within six months - that's why it was so infamous. It was the greatest thing ever until it wasn't.


Anyway here's a tedious wiki story:


This is currently the screenshot used for Jet Set Radio's title screen. Can you tell what's wrong with it?

Spoilers: It doesn't say "Set".

Not that we don't want the US title screen as well, but I figured the main one should match the page name. JSR is also a rare breed among Dreamcast games in that its title screen doubles up as a rolling demo - ideally we want screenshots of all the versions in a similar place to help with comparisons, while also not looking like total arse. That screenshot above is positioned pretty well so I thought I'd try and match it.



Turns out that's really awkward! The game picks a random character, and doesn't "naturally" show the "press start button" text until it reaches shortly before this point. You can make it show the text earlier by pressing start... so in order to match that US screenshot, you have to hope the game picks the correct character (a 1/10 chance), and make sure you pressed start on the right frame.


Unfortunately for Sega, they're up against me.


I'm a few frames too early, but it's good enough.

Actually that's a lie.


Because it looks like (in the Japanese version at least) the characters share the same demo inputs, despite having different physical stats. Which means some miss their targets and get lost. So for me, Tab didn't get to that position - he fell off and then got stuck in a corner. Anyone fancy some Mentucky Pried Chicken?

 

Well I sure do suck - after nearly 25 years, I've just learnt that international versions of JSR added two new levels not seen in the original Japanese version of the game. I thought it was just music (and bug fixes) separating the versions, and that De La Jet Set Radio brought it back to the homeland, as a sort-of slightly pointless "special edition" for the super fans.

And I've been in this business long enough to know that "two new levels" probably means "a lot more than two new levels" - lots of minor (and possibly major) changes that haven't been documented.


I've only looked briefly, but pretty much every screen has had something done to it (the PAL version lies somewhere in the middle).


What a load of old bums.

 

The VF Remix sega retro page seems odd, it only talks about the Sega Saturn version exclusively, and attributes the creation of VF Remix to the Sega Saturn. It doesn't mention the ST-V version at all, which is actually what I went to the page to look up: I wanted to see which released first, the Saturn version or the ST-V version. I've read that the entire reason remix exists is to create a cheaper virtua fighter arcade machine, hence the port to the ST-V, and the saturn version rode along, but I can't find where that is sourced from. Anybody come across some info about the ST-V development?

 

There will almost certainly be more detailed coverage of Virtua Fighter Remix in the Japanese Sega mags - you'll have to go hunting on the wiki.

The ST-V hardware was created to offer a lower-cost alternative to the hilariously expensive Model 2 board - I don't know if it was specifically made to get Virtua Fighter out there. In fact gut feeling is in Japan at least, they'd be wanting to push the full fat release - Stateside maybe not, but it's tricky to tell.



Anyway because it was never put on any demo discs, I knew very little about Confidential Mission until about half an hour ago. I sourced a copy to document cheat codes... but apparently these need controllers to be plugged into specific ports and I can't be bothered to deal with that on a Friday evening.

But I did spot something only wiki editors might notice:

The stand-in for James Bond is called "Howard Gibson".

And I think... it might be named after Sega employee Howard Gipson, who just happens to be credited as "localisation producer" for this game. The lady, "Jean Clifford" isn't obviously based on anyone, but you tell me.


also

because I'm quirky, I have my Dreamcast emulator set to French, because this more clearly highlights when a game has been translated. The Japanese version of Confidential Mission has French translations (as well as other European languages) - that's quite rare. I don't know what to do with this information yet.

 

Could only convert some of these, I guess they use a slightly different format than the ones recognised by uCON64. I also couldn't work out how to join the ones with split roms (it just made gigantic files which continued to get larger and larger until I quit), but I could manually deinterleave the headers for the unrecognised ones. The only exception being MD4232, not sure which game that is. The file dates suggest that these were all dumped August - December 1994.

Code (Text):

1.  
2. MD2027 Pac-Attack
3. MD4232
4. MD4233 Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker
5. MD4234 Magic Girl
6. MD4235 RISK
7. MD4236 It Came From the Desert
8. MD8300 The Misadventures of Flink
9. MD8301 Animaniacs
10. MD8302 Berenstain Bears' Camping Adventure
11. MD8303 Generations Lost
12. MD8304 Dino Dini's Soccer
13. MD8305 The Lawnmower Man
14. MD8306 Top Gear 2
15. MD8307 Micro Machines 2
16. MD8308 Bonkers
17. MD8309 Wacky Worlds
18. MD8310 Fun 'n Games
19. MD8311 Rock 'n Roll Racing
20. MD8312 Power Drive
21. MD8313 Kick Off 3 European Challenge
22. MD8314 Mr Nutz
23. MD12012 Viewpoint
24. MD16100 Ballz
25. MD16101 Vitale Basketball
26. MD16102 Zero Tolerance
27. MD16103 Troy Aikman NFL Football
28. MD16104 Uncharted Waters 2
29. MD16105 Beavis and Butthead
30. MD16106 Bubsy 2
31. MD16107 Dragon
32. MD16108 NBA Live '95
33. MD16109 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
34. MD16110 ESPN Hockey
35. MD16111 Lethal Enforcers II Gun Fighters
36. MD16112 Lemmings 2: The Tribes
37. MD16113 Madden NFL '95
38. MD16114 FIFA Soccer 95
39. MD16115 Uncharted Waters New Horizons
40. MD16116 Markos
41. MD16117 Taikou Risshiden
42. MD16118 Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure
43. MD16119 Pac-Man 2
44. MD16120 Busytown
45. MD16121 PGA Tour Golf III
46. MD16122 NFL 95
47. MD16123 Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel
48. MD16124 Rugby World Cup 1995
49. MD16125 Brutal: Paws of Fury
50. MD16126 Aero the Acrobat 2
51. MD16127 Red-Zone
52. MD16128 Wolverine: Adamantium Rage
53. MD16129 Syndicate
54. MD16130 Clay Fighter
55. MD16131 Hurricanes
56. MD16132 Death and Return of Superman
57. MD16133 The Great Circus Mystery
58. MD16134 ESPN Speedworld
59. MD16135 ESPN Sunday Night Football
60. MD24007A Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls
61. MD24007 Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls
62. MD24008 Yuyu Hakusyo
63. MD24009 Earthworm Jim
64. MD24010 Shaq-Fu
65. MD24011 Lion King
66. MD24012 Samurai Shodown
67. MD24013 Power Instinct
68. MD24014 Boogerman
69. MD24015 Mega Man: The Wily Wars
70. MD24016 WWF Raw
71. MD24017 Rise of the Robots
72. MD24018 NFL Quarterback Club
73. MD24019 The Story of Thor
74.  

Unreleased "It Came From the Desert" matches the prototype rom already available. There's a few bytes difference to the retail rom in Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker, some of which were for the region, so may be a hack, although some other byte differences were deep in the rom. I haven't looked into the other 8 Meg and under games yet. Games over 8 Meg will require working out how to join and / or convert them.

 

not really related to the contents, but it's funny that the CD uses the cover to Ultimate Body Blows for seemingly no reason:

 

I've been utterly fascinated by Fatal Labyrinth, and I'd like to ask, what do we know of its development? Have Yasuhara or Oshima (or anyone else in the team) talked about its process? I can't seem to find anything in the Wiki (since it hates me and I can't really access it) besides its reception, and "a roguelike game you have to download from an online subscription service" fits 2020 so much more than 1990! A full three years before Mystery Dungeon, too. I'd love to know who had that idea, or how it came about.

 

Catching up on some recently dumped press discs:
https://archive.org/details/redump-id-120892
If anyone's keen on Mac emulation, there's a bunch of NFL Blitz 2000 screenshots that don't like modern Windows.

Anyway slight oddities with Ready 2 Rumble:


This is the character Boris Knokimov but... uh... he's wearing clothes. Weird clothes - is it a reference to something? Like a previous Midway game?


He doesn't appear like this in the final game... but this model can sort-of be viewed if you know where to look.



Because there's a bunch of old screenshots on the CD portion of the disc, and one of them is old Boris.

I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to trace the development of this one - Ready 2 Rumble was released for a bunch of platforms worldwide. It's unusual to send off some renders to the press, only to redesign one of the main characters before launch. Clearly nobody has noticed for 25 years, but now I can't un-see.

 

Somehow the thing I ended doing a lot of first after I came back from holiday was... adding more music credits (what a surprise).

I was going through a lot of arcade soundtracks with BridgeM1 (for recording music with some instruments and removed, and different mixing). This was the first player I'd used and noticed that it shows the song IDs (or Request Numbers, that's a term I just learned from Hiro's notes on his soundtracks).

BridgeM1's a very outdated player at this point (for example it doesn't support a single Sega System 24 game), and only works with MAME games from its time, so that's not gonna help with finding out the IDs for newer dumps or console games.

Anybody know of other players that show IDs or other simple enough ways of finding them?



Incidentally, is there something we can learn from song IDs? Yeah, a lot of times (but definitely not always) they give an idea of the order songs or effects were composed in. A good example is Out Run.

81 Passing Breeze
82 Splash Wave
85 Magical Sound Shower
A5 Last Wave

Hiro's confirmed that he wrote the main 3 tracks in that order, and that Last Wave was a last minute addition.

You can see cases where the first song heard in the game wasn't composed until pretty late into development, like Quartet, Shinobi and Power Drift, and some interesting stuff shows up early into development, like Spider-Man: The Videogame's first 2 songs being the weird Quartet remixes, and SDI starting with Illusion, the stage 2 theme, but also the ranking theme for some reason.

When you see that a game has an ending song come before some more level music... I have a feeling those are times when the music was being written right up to the deadline, and might not have been entirely finished for the game. Arabian Fight (which should've had one more stage theme), Passing Shot, Super Masters... lot of Tohru Nakabayashi games... Cyber Police ESWAT is one from a different composer.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

 

I'm going to throw this out here to see what happens:

(H.)

This page has two problems we're not solving very well (three if you count the concept of "bands" - we're currently treating "the group" as "a person"):

1) a good chunk of their music appeared on compilation albums, alongside non-Sega properties. I never really know where to draw the line with these things - if 80-90% of the album has nothing to do with Sega, should it have a dedicated page? We're not doing that with books... but we sort-of are with magazines.


b) there's a whole list of "events" that this band played at, and I think we ought to make note. But Tokyo Game Show isn't a music event - it's a game show, which presumably set aside a stage for a one-off performance. An event within an event, so to speak (also compliation albums from events within events).

A word like "performance" feels restricted to music. It might be wise to track when Sega people do presentations too. And of course we also have those Sakura Taisen stage productions where the whole thing is Sega-related. Also maybe tournament (final)s.


I want to vary up Sega Retro's "on this day" section, because more happens than just game releases.