General Questions and Information Thread

I live in the wrong country for this.





What's the difference?

Well of course, the top one is Sega's proprietary "Sega Game Card" system, and the other is a telephone card. Both are probably redundant in 2019, but the former was, until a few minutes ago, undocumented in the Western world.

500 means 500 yen. Because it's a pre-paid card for arcade games. I have no idea how the technology worked.


Also...



that's...



... so we've got two video game companies promoting Yume Kojo '87. Must have been quite the show.

EDIT: Nissan, Super Game Z, Sega Super Circuit, head hurts

 

I'm learning a lot today:

There was a "bigger" version of Cyber Troopers Virtual-On - Dennou Senki Virtual-On Special.

There was also a medium scale attraction called Bike Athlon. There's barely any evidence this ever existed save for some blurry photographs from 20 years ago... but you can get the soundtrack.


I also learned that QUO Cards are a thing, so that's more mislabeled telephone cards to deal with. It's really hard to quantify how much Sega related stuff is out there.

 

I'm not a python user, but a friend created this? Maybe give it a shot?

 

Part 2:

https://segaretro.org/File:Sega_Consumer_History_JP_EnterBrain_Book.pdf

 

I had heard about this, but wasn't sure how easy it was to use when the point where you want to split the page may not necessarily be the exact middle when the 2 pages are slightly off centre.

 

Our "not tested in linux" tools, for the record:
https://retrocdn.net/File:Vertical_Image_Splitter.7z
https://retrocdn.net/File:JPEGtoPDF.7z

I'll need some time to digest 1.1GB of information. This is basically Sega Retro: The book

 

Missed this one, but yes. I am collecting various Model2 hardware to identify differences in components. Namely, I need an actual Fighting Vipers board to confirm the supposed overclocked nature of the CPU board as stated by Yu Suzuki.

Also, I had been pestering Doc for a while to get this up because I almost bought the book on eBay a few years ago but he said he had the raws. It's as glorious, albeit slightly different, than I hoped for!

 

No mysterious undocumented games in that consumer history book. And no precise dates for SG-1000 titles which is unfortunate.

Lots of text that needs translating though. Don't actually know how best to go about that.

 

Thanks Yahtzee

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3007704.stm

Find evidence that this actually happened and... you'll be considered great for a bit or something.

 

This bloke has been posting things on a blog:
https://joyojc.com/tag/sega/

we probably ought to absorb things (p.s. I like those Sega Retro links)

My current favourite thing is Wong's Kong King in Hong Kong

but there's also a bunch of EGM scraps for subscribers, including this bit on Sonic CD (dated August 1993):

https://joyojc.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EGM-Q-Letter-5-b.jpg

"Certain events" could mean anything, but the final version of Sonic CD never forces you to time travel, even in our prototypes. I wonder if this is an EGM mistake or a genuine game mechanic.

 

Lots of stuff we don't even have ... Why Jonathan? ... Why?

 

Links not working. Also, considering it's EGM I have no doubt they were just writing a fantasy about what they think happens in the game rather than any true info they were given or experienced in a preview build. Either that or that's the most exaggerated way of referring to the "Eggman machines" that you can destroy in the past.

 

https://retrocdn.net/File:EGM_US_Supplement_053_QLetter.pdf
December 1993.

EGM was predicting the Game Boy's demise for years, but it does make you wonder if this was a genuine thing. The Game Gear lasted a fairly long time, and there were many years between Tetris and Pokémon - was the gap closer than we thought?

 

This is why that arcade history book is useful - we've been using the history section of Sega Interactive's website as a reference for arcade machine dates... only for the URLs to change at some point in the last six months or so.

So Sega Retro now points to a load of 404 errors. What a massive load of bums.

With a book, at least you know the page numbers won't change.

 

There's no shortage of exceedingly rare Dreamcast games but you'll probably never see this one:



"School Net Experimental". Judging from what little is out there, it appears these discs were given to Japanese schools in 2000. Each one is personalised - I reckon there's at least a dozen in total.

Oh and it turns out there's so many Fish Life discs that I made a category.

 

Let's say, hypothetically, that I'm trying to maintain arcade game pages on a Sega-related wiki.

Imagine I was looking for scans of flyers, and Google Images kept returning photographs of things I'm not looking for. Photos like this:



What are these things? Aside from being material supplied with Funky Head Boxers for the Sega Titan Video system.

It strikes me as these are instruction cards of all shapes and sizes, but... do they have "official" names? Are the measurements standardised? Do all games ship with these things, and if not, how do we know which ones do or don't? Do you have to specify what sort of cabinet you have, with the bits being made to order? Do you get a different set for tabletop machines? Are the things in this category correct? Question marks?

 

Great questions, not sure if there are any answers

The skinny ones are generally intended to go below, above or around the bezel of the monitor, so the name "bezel stickers" could be what you'd call them. Although sometimes there is space on the flat surface behind the joystick and buttons, so I've seen them fixed there as well.

It's less clear where the squarer instructions cards go. I've seen them in the marquee part of cabinets, but this is a less attractive option than the actual marquee poster.

Not sure if there is standardised dimensions. I don't think you'd order custom sizes for your specific cabinet, everyone would get a "one size fits all" pack of stickers and posters, and maybe it isn't intended that you use all of them. As in the above pack, you could use the thin and skinny move list, or the tall and fatter one, depending on what works better for your cabinet.

I don't think we will ever know exactly what comes with every game. Every pack is potentially similar but also different. I've seen free standing stiff cardboard marquees that are intended to be fixed above and on top of the cabinet.

 

Category:Dead external reference
Yeah I was hoping I could get away with just replacing links to web.archive.org, but it doesn't work. Too much bloated HTML5 gubbins... which means every affected page will need to be edited by hand.

Making things worse, sega-interactive.co.jp and sega.jp have different release dates for some of the newer machines, meaning Sega disagrees with itself.

What an even bigger load of bums.

 

I think I understand this a bit better now. Maybe. I can only do things by eye.

I can't really work this out, but it seems that in the 1980s, unless your video game came equipped with a special cabinet (e.g. OutRun), it was likely going to be played on a tabletop machine. Something like this:



Not sure how it worked - whether Sega sold the tabletops separately or packaged it all as one thing, but in these cases, you'd need just two instruction cards, one for each playerm and they'd both be the same (although there seems to be a trend of only supplying an official shiny Sega seal with one of them).

In 1986 Sega releases the City cabinet, which has space for instruction cards in the marquee. For one player games, the two cards could now be different, but they seem to be the same size and shape as before for "backwards compatibility" or something.

When the Aero City and Aero Table appear in 1988, they offer a big spot for a an actual marquee. So now games can ship with a big banner.

The Astro City adds a space on the control panel for extra instructions, and it looks as if most Sega arcade games released after that point were tailored for those cabinet designs. e.g.:





so two classic "vertical" instruction cards that probably aren't going to get used. A big banner that goes on top, and "horizontal" one for the control panel.


then later they drop the classic style cards:



that bigger horizontal card here for Sonic the Fighters might be for the Super Megalo 2. They would standardise things again for the NAOMI cabinets that would follow.


Either way I think it's safe to say that Sega only made instructions for their own cabinets, so the measurements are likely standardised. Other publishers like Capcom seem to have made up their own rules - I'm guessing this is why the instruction card placement isn't always elegant.

It seems that outside of Japan, cabinets were almost always bespoke.

 

I'll have to dig around for it, but my Wonder Boy cabinet had an interesting history in that it was originally a Frogger Cabinet, that was converted to Carnival Games, that was then converted to Wonder Boy. Now, Carnival games was a Sega product, but stapled on the inside of my cab was a sheet detailing a conversion process for the cabinet with instructions from Sega. I just went looking through my files and couldn't find the flyer, so I'll keep digging.