General Questions and Information Thread

Looks like there's a Portuguese edition of Dynamite Headdy with a Genesis cartridge and two sets of manuals, oh my!

 

There's a lot of those Portuguese editions with Genesis cartridges... there's not much detail about the subject... but it's known that Ecofilmes sometime in 1994/1995 started selling Genesis cartridges on "Altered European covers" (altered because the text on the back covers is written entirely in Portuguese... so they were made by Ecofilmes)... some of those altered covers have also the seal "Garantia Sega Portugal" printed in them (not a sticker as in other releases)... I owned two games in this condition ... Champions World Class Soccer and F1 (European Cover with Portuguese text, Genesis cartridge)... complete US Genesis and Game Gear versions (US Box, US cartridge, US Manual) were also sold in Portugal ... like Mega Man for the Game Gear and also Pirate's! Gold and Shadowrun for the Mega Drive ... it looks that what was considered "in excess" (it was around the time when Sega Japan started to focus more in the Saturn than on the Mega Drive/Genesis...) in the United States, sold well in Portugal...

 

It amazes me after all these years we can still find undocumented Sega magazines. Dreamcast Trucchi E Soluzioni - Italian hints and tips mag.

These sorts of magazines never seem to be sustainable, and yet there's millions of them for all sorts of platforms, and they're now all stupidily rare. Crazy.

 

And then you wonder why people haven't documented things. At one point both Electronic Gaming Monthly España and Electronic Gaming Monthly en Español existed simultaneously. The latter was for Mexico.

Documenting magazines - we already had a list, but I've found several dozen more just in the last few days. Currently up to 14(?) official PlayStation magazines. That's a lot of trees.

 

Lot of 39 Astro City cabs for $14K

woof

 

RE: stupid magazine names



ファミ通DS+キューブ & アドバンス

Famitsu DS + Cube & Advance


Four Nintendo systems in one title. Rolls right off the tongue - well done.

 

Upgraded my PC recently and realised I didn't have a nice tool for extracting images from PDF files.

https://retrocdn.net/File:PDFImageSplitter.7z

So I made one.

Or rather, I wrapped one that already existed (pdfimages). So you can avoid all those crappy online and trial versions that don't do the job properly.


Your mileage may vary. You may have to convert PPM files to something less dumb - imagemagick will do it.

 

Amusement Machine Show 1993.

Photographic evidence that Virtua Fighter was once called "Virtua Fighters". This was the days before Akira existed. Jacky takes centre stage in the artwork from the looks of things.

 

So anyone who's obsessed with this stuff as me will know that Sega doesn't always know its own history. It is adamant that the company was founded in 1960, and so it's having some 60th anniversary celebrations, complete with teenager in a cape that's doing a Segata Sanshiro-type thing. Hurray for them.

Anyway there's a history page and it has more stuff in it than usual:

https://60th.sega.com/en/history/

Namely, it has some opening dates for some of its important arcades. I'm not sure they're completely reliable, but it did prompt me to check the archives, and I found things:

https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:GameMachine_JP_437.pdf&page=5
https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:GameMachine_JP_437.pdf&page=11
https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:GameMachine_JP_439.pdf&page=6

This is the reason I highlighted Game Machine as something we wanted (and now have). Finding photographic records on Sega's pre-internet activities is neigh-on impossible, so the time when Sega put massive squids on a wall of one of their game centres would have been lost to time were it not for this.

 

Those mags have lots of "treasures"... when I was "arranging" some of the early issues I noticed several good things that were covered in them ... we just need to translate that stuff (which will not be easy)... things like when Sega acquired Esco Trading and Hayao Nakayama became part of Sega's management, undocumented arcade games, lots of photos from shows in Japan and abroad (like the photo that you posted above) not seen in western magazines and many other things... these magazines will help us fill many of the gaps that we have on some of our pages ...

 

Today's questionable life choice:

What happens when you print a magazine in at least 8 different countries?

Talk:GamePro en Español

At least 8 different scans for each issue.


The impression I get from having compiled this list is that the contents are straight translations from the US magazine, complete with US pricing and release dates. However, I can't confirm whether the advertisements were the same.


https://i.imgur.com/Kx86LcW.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/mE5ql7J.jpg

Full fat US GamePro is not immune to this either. So yes, we might have the first 100+ archived, but there could be a complete set left unscanned.

 

You know, I have a whole bunch of Italian magazines that I never threw away, some are in awful shape (in my defense, I was 8 in 1992), but some of them are still excellent, if anyone is interested I would be more than willing to donate them all (bar the shipping costs, of course) to someone who feels like scanning hundreds of pages.

I could write a list of them, for starters, just let me know.

 

I was going to make a bigger song and dance about Sega Retro's 10th anniversary, but then we had this virus and I lost track of time and bleh. We're old and great.

And here's a reason why - Action Games is an Argentinian magazine nobody outside of Argentina will ever care about. Not much original content here but it does have advertisements... for Mega Drive clones.

So, in order:


The Songa (I)/Magic 2 was probably the first clone console to hit the Argentinian market in the summer of 1994. We've got this listed as the SB-16C, originating from mainland China. Advertisements were crushed by early 1995 - perhaps Tec Toy stepped on it.


November/December 1994 saw the release of the (Turbo) Aito, which we think is the KW-501, a Taiwanese console (although given that it appears to shared ideas with the above, we're probably wrong about that). This was being advertised well into 1995 - it's Taito, without the T.


Next, the Super Senga, or the AT-168, also a late 1994 release in Argentina. No effort made to hide the fact it's a Mega Drive clone - the best part about it is its silly name.


The Songa II rolls up around 1996. Apparently it won awards. Not sure who was giving them - the tech was at least 8 years old by then.


I particularly like the way these are advertised alongside the real Mega Drive and Tec Toy's "piracy is bad" ads.

 

I was once told that (no joke) Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble, with its numerous accolades, 3 million sold, widespread availability and handheld re-release classed as an "obscure video game". It's a thought that's stuck with me over my time with Sega Retro.




This is VideoJuegos, a Colombian video games magazine. I'd be tempted to say that until 2 hours ago, nobody outside of South America knew this existed, and by posting this here, the number of views in the next 24 hours could eclipse the magazine's circulation in its prime. Maybe. Give it a week.


I'm not sure how many iterations of copy-pasting this represents. I would suspect it's at least "Japan -> US -> Brazil -> Colombia" - it's an entirely worthless magazine for the vast, vast majority of the world, but it is most certainly a thing, and it's now been documented as such.


It's nothing compared to the real magazine scan story of the day, anyway.

 

*sigh*

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/iam8bi...-cartridge-collection/6406741.p?skuId=6406741

 

So I'm worried there might not be enough official PlayStation 2 magazines.

 

Found extra options (Model Check, Scroll Check, and Stage Select) and a build date in Pilot Kids!

 

Missed one.

Couldn't find Sweden or Finland. It's hard to find anything up North, really.

 

Wtf Chrome/Windows.

 

Okay, so, here we go:
Access debug functions: Hold P1 B1 and press the Test Switch.
View build info: In the test menu, press and hold P2 B3 to view the build info.

That was so stupid I think it gave me cancer.