In other news https://segaretro.org/Template_talk:RegionLockTable I go through phases. Right now I'm in the mood to take screenshots of region lockout screens. Don't judge me.
In better news: Ecco: The Tides of Time/Region coding So This will need doing for 1000+ Mega Drive games. Any volunteers?
Hm, is there a list of games missing the Region Coding data, or perhaps a list of all games and a list of games *with* Region Coding data to make a simple enough checklist of what needs done? I can't promise the world here as most of my free time away from work is taken up by other hobbies and I obviously can't work on the project at work, but I may be able to knock some of these out.
Every Mega Drive game will need its own "region coding" sub-page. By doing it in this way, I can generate a big database that reliably documents how games respond in certain regions. Then I can use wiki magic to generate a list of region-locked games. Or games not optimised for PAL territories. Or games which break horribly. Currently all lists on the internet are incomplete and probably wrong.
Hacked together a quick list of all the pages that need to be made (and a few that don't): https://segaretro.org/Sega_Retro:Todo/Region_coding This is why I'm keen to spread the work. I've been writing some placeholders, essentially based on ROMs I've collected over the years, but I have no desire to personally download and test 35794783924832 bin files. It needs brute forcing by volunteers.
This may be of help when documenting the behavior of the PAL ROMs when used on NTSC systems. Would be still neat to have 60hz patches for all the PAL official releases, by the way.
Whatever the emulator selects first I guess. Taiwan is an NTSC region so I would guess most were designed with NTSC-J in mind. I've been listing every region for games that GoodGen marks as WORLD, but I haven't thought very far ahead for the more awkward titles. I'm not totally convinced the system I've invented is great, but it's better than no system at all.
I did a few pages. I'm doing it by eye/ear, so while some are obvious, I'm unsure about others. Gley Lancer sounds like it might be PAL friendly (not sure why it would be though), but it's hard to tell. I made a category for region lock screens so we don't upload duplicates: https://segaretro.org/Category:Region_lock_screenshots
An interesting example of why this is important: The Mega Drive port of Crack Down was published by Sage's Creation in the US, despite it being a Sega game at heart. Japanese screenshot on the left, US version on the right (which is apparently what PAL regions got too but do verify this). But if you run the Japanese ROM on a US (or PAL) system: ...you get an extra trademark. So this is technically a title screen that you couldn't see under normal circumstances. And because the change is so minor, you can bet it has never been documented before. At some point we'll have to work the legal situation behind the logo. The earliest Mega Drive games use the registered trademark symbol (®) in all regions, but at some point they stopped doing that, sticking ™ in Western copies and leaving Japanese logos without any mark at all. Except for when they forgot. Oh and yes this does affect Sonic games. It even affects games that were never released in Japan. And at some point, some lucky lad is going to have to go through and take screenshots of aaaaallll of them.
Mega Drive region coding (the lists will grow) This is what this exercise is working towards - a definitive set of lists for everything ever. Currently the award for most entertaining region lock screen goes to... Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker, which plays silly sound effects. Second is Cool Spot because Spot yawns. It's a low bar. (p.s. I refuse to believe me and Hivebrain are the only people with emulators on their PCs (hint hint))
I've not got time right now to explicitly go through and start doing these (maybe in the near future, we'll see) but I'll note that Mickey Mania (J) has a fun one of these:
This stuff isn't limited to cartridges, by the way. Some Mega-CD games also change their title screens when the system's country lock is disabled, so... that's quite a lot of additional games to test. =| I feel that this may get some better traction in its own topic.
Adding a switch to the console is relatively simple, but I don't know how long ago people were doing it. There's also these: https://segaretro.org/Mega_Drive_region_converter_cartridges
There was to versions of this console... the rarest of the two versions had a 50Hz/60Hz switch on the underside of the unit to force games to run at different speeds...
I fitted switches to my first Mega Drive in about 1992, after seeing a tutorial on which jumpers to cut/solder in a magazine called "Electric Brain" - Which was an elevated fanzine printed on newsprint that got national distribution in the UK for a while. So yeah... The knowledge on how to do it has been out there a long time.
Fact of the day: Takashi Yuda, who among many other things designed Knuckles the Echidna, stuck his name on Quackshot's title screen. It's at the bottom of the map, right above the credits to Walt Disney, which you would think would have a handle on these things. oops
So, the more I get through translating the flyer for Sparkling Corner, the more I'm convinced... this might be the first four-player arcade video game. The only comparable things I see from that time are based on computer mainframes. However, I want to make sure that's a valid claim. Any idea if there's anything else competing around 1976 or earlier for that title?
