General Questions and Information Thread

http://segaretro.org/Press_release:_1992-03-31:_INTERACTIVE_NETWORK_ANNOUNCES_NEW_WAY_FOR_VIDEO_GAME_PLAYERS_TO_COMPETE_FOR_PRIZES_AT_HOME

dong

 

I get a kick out of making requests that are never fulfilled



Super duper ultra mega bonus points for scanning this issue of Wired. It's the US edition, December 1993 (Volume 1 issue 6?). It has stuff we want.

Now for sure, there's an online archive but it's missing pretty pictures, and possibly other things. And I'm sure you want a high resolution scan of that beautiful Sonic model.

 

Tedious fact of the day: Virtua Fighter on the 32X supports 16:9 widescreen displays:




It's potentially the first console game to do so, years before anyone really had widescreen televisions to play it on.

 

Not sure whether to bump this thread or make a possibly pointless thread, but I ended up getting my first Genesis controller and a Mega Drive Mayflash adapter to use it on PC. While the adapter works flawlessly...the controller is a bit wonky.

I ended up taking it apart, carefully scrubbing and cleaning the buttons far away from the board, drying them and whatnot. I also did some Q-Tip + alcohol cleaning on some of the button input areas on the board following some YouTube guides (and letting them dry) and got out a pretty fair amount of small black gunk. Put it all back together and have a controller that now kinda works instead of flat out unresponsive buttons, but I still have some issues.

It's a 3-Button Genesis 1650 model with a fairly long cable and white start button. Sometimes KEGA Fusion gives me the middle finger when it comes to inputs, and I've noticed on Joy2Key mapping that buttons don't always register clean inputs. One moment it's an easy press, the next I'm fighting the darn thing with hard presses or occasionally no input at all.

TL;DR: Do Genesis 3-Button 1650s just give out over time to the point where no amount of alcohol and Q-Tips can give me clean inputs again, or should I keep trying a few more passes and it should be fine?


UPDATE: Gave it an extra clean or two and tried the foil circle trick. Buttons work near flawlessly now, just guess I needed to give it a little more, my b!

 

I hate to give a bit of a jab, but isn't almost every 192px tall Master System game technically natively widescreen? At least, in regions running 50Hz. Though, going by my calculations, 60Hz would still be a safe crop too.

There's such a ridiculous amount of 'wasted' vertical resolution, that it crops almost perfectly into a 16:9 screen!

 

If you're playing the game at a 1:1 pixel ratio, then maybe.

But you're not meant to do that - the image is meant to be stretched to 4:3 and good developers realised this. Sonic 2 is a great example - in its native aspect ratio Sonic is too thin and the loops aren't circular. Full screen on a 4:3 display everything is more-or-less perfect.

 

I do mean the image being stretched.

 

That's the native, 4:3 and 16:9 resolutions. If you were to take out the borders...


it's less fat in 16:9, but still fat

 

The Sega Saturn turned up at Imagina 94, which was a computer graphics expo/event/thing. This was very shortly after Winter CES 1994 - the 16th of February... at 3PM in the afternoon (yes I did find a schedule).

Basically everything Saturn related was all that pre-rendered early stuff, all previously shown at CES. French media reported on it (it was in Monaco so you'd expect that), but the focus was more on virtual reality and weird stuff rather than what Sega were planning.

http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3APlayerOne_FR_040.pdf&page=8

We're always on the hunt for really early Saturn stuff, and this might be a better lead than some murky CES photos.


If nothing else it's an opportunity to look at the best 1994 had to offer in terms of computer graphics. Some of it still holds up. Well, the 2D bits do.

 

Most of us know that Sega of America spent a great deal of time attacking Nintendo back in the early 90s. Nintendo's position flip-flopped between fighting back and pretending competition didn't exist (their current policy), though it didn't really manifest itself until 1994 when it became apparent that the Sega CD wasn't the best of plans.

Nintendo of America ran a series of surprisingly thorough attack ads towards the end of the year, pretending to be journalistic and throwing statistics around. We might have a full set on Retro CDN - I'll have to check.

Here's a taster - it's hilariously biased reading, as you might expect:

http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AGamePlayers_US_0705.pdf&page=10
Nintendo debunks BLAST PROCESSING.

http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AGamePlayers_US_0710.pdf&page=8
Nintendo says it has more sports games.

http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AEGM2_US_05.pdf&page=90
Nintendo attacks every machine made after the SNES


The Mega Drive has "8-bit sound" and apparently that's bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddhPOsFF-IY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRaczFXmd7I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHllgCwUnN8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ksd3paqF68

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm7sT87AXFA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dauRYb9il8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBVT4rvhMCo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uR7doemZD0

Right-o.

 

Oh look, for one of their sources they give "Sega Soft Newz". There's not really much info about it online, but there is a scan of one. It's a newsletter from Sega Consumer Services.

Sega Soft Newz May 1993;
https://www.magzdb.org/file/247301/dl

 

I noticed on the wiki that the Dynamite Headdy sample cart that you see on eBay and Yahoo Japan auctions all the time is listed, so I thought I'd just mention that Armageddon_Potato on the Nintendo Age forums has this cart and has already dumped it and informed me it's apparently 1:1 with the final JP release. So that other "beta" that's been floating around the net all these years must have been a magazine leak or something else.

 

Presenting:

Forgotten events that live on through badges­™


Sega hosted a bunch of events in the early 1990s, and until recently absolutely every single one was undocumented. Seriously, do a Google search and you'll get... badges. Yes really.



Champion Train '93

In mainland Europe, Sega had a thing about decking out trains. This is one from Germany - choo choo, all aboard the CHAMPION TRAIN, with Mega Drives and Game Gears and two apparently famous people I don't know. What did it involve? Apparently nobody knows.



Sega Masters 91 and Sega Masters 92

I think it's a French thing from around November time. What did it involve? Apparently nobody knows.

??



Sega Euro Challenge 92

More trains!

Actually this was only an unknown until today when I made a page. What did it involve? Well actually it's all written down - it's just in French and I haven't bothered to translate. There was also a sequel.

And yes, France = "Europe" just like America = "the world".

 

Innoventions

Sega had a thing at Epcot between 1994 and 2001. Chances are, some of you went to it (I know I did).

For some reason though there aren't many photos of the place online. I'm hoping one of you will know more about this exibit than I do (even if it's nothing special, I think the props came from various forms of CES or E3 and it would be interesting to see what happened to them).

Usually there's a big market for this stuff - old-timey Disney attractions often carry strange and bizarre stories (my favourite is DisneyLand's "Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland", where, after being torn down in favour of Thunder Mountain, apparently saw the animatronic animals buried in a mass grave (except for this fish)).

 

Yeah that photo of the older sonic statue at Innovations is mine heh. I posted it on sega memories once. I visited Epcot when they had Sega stuff twice: that photo was in 1998 I believe and then again in 2000 when they had the big Sonic Adventure statue and Dreamcast games (mainly that awful disney world mario kart clone). Unfortunately I didn't have a camera of my own at the time and went into that area without my parents so that's why I never got any photos of it

 

segaoa.com! Archived October 13th, 1996, which is the earliest archived sega webpage yet. Unfortunately just an error page, as they had already moved to sega.com in May 1996. Still, a couple of graphics that were previously MIA. Also earliest CSK homepage (same date). CSK hosted SoJs Saturn pages before they launched sega.co.jp. Unfortunately again, just the homepage saved.

 

Ever wondered how they made that cool moving background in the dialogues of Ecco the Dolphin?

Well... it was a glitch.

 

Is there any way to solve the jail bar issue on a Model 1 Genesis? What's strange is I didn't have them one day, and the next suddenly I had them. Using the HD Retrovision component cables.

 

Did you change the AC adaptor by any chance? I've read that some of them may give some picture issues.