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General Questions and Information Thread

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Andlabs, Aug 25, 2011.

  1. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    The Japanese Wikipedia has lists of unreleased games. I've taken their lists and filtered out the games we know exist, and this is what we're left with:

    https://segaretro.org/Sega_Retro:Todo/Unreleased
    (scroll down)

    or if your mouse if broken:

    No I haven't fully translated it, because I'm lazy.

    Some of these games definitely existed, and will get pages at some point. Others need more research, and because it's Wikipedia, I expect a good number to be flat out wrong.


    If anyone finds any details in any of the many magazine scans we host, that would be super helpful.
     
  2. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    A good chunk of those were easily provable:

    Altein
    Dennin Aleste 2

    Dobro i Zlo
    Obelisk: Project Oscar Suikou Seyo!
    Puyo Korogashi
    Real Sound 2: Kiri no Orugouru
    Rensa
    Wärrz

    Crack 2
    Harukaze Sentai V-Force 2
    Hiryu no Ken Retsuden
    Julian
    Oozumou
    Pro Shinan Mahjong "Tsuwamono" DX
    Shienryu 2


    and some others came along for the ride:

    Alex: Virus Composer
    Chen Wen no Sangokushi
    Dynamite Robo
    VJ Monster


    [​IMG]

    You were *that* close to having a Sega Saturn game who's official title used the Cyrillic alphabet.

    Anyway of these, there's only one title that stands out:

    [​IMG]

    "Let's make a 5000-player MMORPG on the Saturn"

    Yep, okay, sure.
     
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  3. BSonirachi

    BSonirachi

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    Courtesy of CBS 8 San Diego, there's been an upload of a 1977 news clip about the Sega Center that was in the Fashion Valley Shopping Center. What's fascinating about the clip is that it has actual gameplay footage of Sega's discrete logic arcade games from around the time, including Heavyweight Champ, Bomber and Road Race, as well as Sega's final electro-mechanical arcade game Plinker's Canyon!

    The clip can be viewed here:

     
  4. JaxTH

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    Jack shit.
  5. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Arena (Saturn)
    Fantasy Earth (probably something else)
    Gendai Daisenryaku Strikes
    Ike! Inachuu Takkyuubu
    Pachinko Club
    Raindrops
    Rauni Fiction (name probably wrong)
    Shinbatsu Jinsei no Imi
    Shinzui Taikyoku Igo Go Sennin
    Success Story
    Super 301 S.Q.
    US Drag Champ

    Animastar Puzzle
    Jahmong 2
    Renai Mahjong Melty School
    V.R. Mahjong


    and others:
    Mysterious Tarot
    TIZ: Tokyo Insect School

    Digital Keiba Shinbun 2
    K-1 Dream
    Saint Poppins (name probably wrong)

    Guess the Japanese are just as good at "not releasing games" as we are. These were all listed in Sega's catalogues - I have no idea if any of them are interesting.
     
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  6. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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  7. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Went through the first year and a half of Beep! MegaDrive, and got to here before the text became too small for the OCR software to work.

    F-1 Constructors
    Phildias: Kaze no Chinkonka
    Ushiwakamaru Saburouta Monogatari: 24-jikan Tatakaemasu ka?

    Also found Dream Island which might have become something else. Actually to be honest there's a few vague titles like "Heli Fighter" (ヘリファイター) and "Reds"(??) (レッズ) in these lists that sound like temporary names - I don't feel qualified to say if these were cancelled projects. Others like Ultraman - GDRI says it was delayed by two years, but I'm seeing it listed in 1990... which would make three. There's too many variables.

    Of the games people are more likely to care about:

    Power Drift was supposed to come to the Mega Drive, maybe as early as 1989. That would have been an early technical feat had it arrived.

    Dynamite Dux was also penciled in for a Mega Drive release, which would have meant you could play as cartoon blue duck on the Mega Drive before a cartoon blue hedgehog (ignoring backwards compatibility).

    Speaking of Sonic, the first game was originally due for April 1991 before being delayed. No games were hitting their original deadlines so this isn't unusual, but Sonic 2 wasn't afforded such freedoms. Incidentally I'd quite like to log "planned release dates" for games somewhere, so we can visualise how much the deadlines slipped, but that would require someone copy-editing every release schedule ever put to print. I could add it to my automatic development timelines.
     
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  8. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    This was also mentioned in UK mags, I waited a long time for that to never come out, and eventually got the PC Engine version.

    This is something I've wanted to suggest, we already do it for unreleased games, but going through and fixing DC US & UK dates (should be >90% accurate now, with vast majority of others within a week or two) I noticed some games getting pushed back for an eternity before getting released. I did leave the old dates in comments in the edit page, so they can be added to planned release dates easily enough. I'm currently doing the same for Saturn. For Japanese dates, Beep started giving a monthly schedule in early 1986, Famitsu started giving a regular bi-weekly schedule for Sega games from 1988, with weekly schedules from 1991. I will transcribe these at some point, probably after 1988 Famitsus get scanned. Incidentally, from looking at the schedules + Sega sales charts in Beep and Famitsu we can see that many of Sega's official dates for SMS games are wrong, some by more than a year (also confirmed by copyright date). Waiting for 1988 Famitsus until I attempt to fix that mess.

    Computer Entertainer had a monthly US release schedule for SMS throughout the 80s. They were pretty good at reporting on date changes, cancellations, even rom size changes. I documented every schedule change for SMS from there here.

    Another suggestion would be to have release dates for "Non-Sega versions". Whilst working on the US Saturn dates I've noticed that whilst it's more common for the Playstation version to release first, there are quite a few examples of the Saturn version coming first, it would be useful to be able to see which was the lead platform.
     
  9. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    This could get complicated - would we just go for the earliest release, or want to document every release from every part of the world? And then is the RRP important... or developers and publishers... and what if the SNES ROM was bigger so they could put more stuff in that version of the game.

    From what I understand, Wikipedia solves some of these problems with the Wikidata project, which all about inter-wiki data storage, letting all the translated versions of a page have the same numbers. I would very much like to have something similar on Retro CDN - just a load of raw facts, which could then be recalled on Sega Retro.


    The problem is I haven't seen a Retro admin in months.


    But I can probably cook something up for "missed release dates". We need a solution for unreleased game dates anyway because the auto-generated tables go a bit screwy with some.

    Maybe something like
    Code (Text):
    1. {{MissedReleases|MD|
    2. {{MissedRelease|JP|1993-01-01}}
    3. {{MissedRelease|JP|1994-07}}
    4. }}
    dunno
     
  10. Pirate Dragon

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    I guess ideally we would have the same data as we have for releases on Sega platforms, but on a practical level it's unlikely that we'll have accurate dates outside of Japan, US, and UK.

    Also, footage of unreleased Mega CD game Flying Nightmares.
     
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  11. Black Squirrel

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    https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:Mdfan_JP_1991-06.pdf&page=132

    Something else to consider - in addition to listing release schedules, Mega Drive Fan has (what looks like) a "percentage complete" rating for various unfinished games. EGM did this too for a while - I'm not sure you can rely on the precise numbers, but a rough idea of how games were progressing might give clues as to why some were scrapped.

    Case in point, this issue is suggesting development hadn't even started on F-1 Constructors by April/May 1991, but it was turning up in the schedules as early as January. That tells me straight away that the project wasn't much of a priority at Sega.
     
  12. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Last edited: Apr 12, 2022
  13. Asagoth

    Asagoth

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    If it had been released it would cost 10.990$00 escudos in Portugal (roughly 55 Euros) ... Ecofilmes mailed those catalogues to Clube Sega members every three months... that's the Christmas 1995 catalogue and it was mailed in that year in late summer/ early fall (September/October)...

    https://segaretro.org/index.php?tit...rteSega_Christmas_95_PT_Catalogue.pdf&page=13

    [​IMG]
     
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  14. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    We'll need a better solution for this:

    https://retrocdn.net/File:IE_06_FLNM.zip

    This is everything Flying Nightmares-related on the disc. Kinda. If you run the disc the proper way, there's a user interface layer on top where you can show system specs and the the script in text form, but in this case, it's a quick preview so there's not much to see.

    You'll also find that these AVIs don't work properly in modern versions of Windows because old codecs are old. You'd have to spend a more time and effort than I'm willing to do to document the contents of these discs properly, and short of completely re-creating IE's software, you're still going to be better off running the disc in a Windows 95 machine as originally intended.


    There's a Sonic 3 feature in one of the earlier CDs... but don't go expecting prototype footage:


    This clip better illustrates this series - cheesy voiceover, low quality AVIs, still screenshots and (yes really) ad breaks. Later issues only seem to be concerned with PC software.
     
  15. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    I got somewhere with this, but had to change my plan a couple of times, and I'm not super confident with what I've created:

    Template:MissedReleases

    The displaying of data needs a rethink, but the storage is relatively sound. Basically the proposal would be to change this:

    Code (Text):
    1. | date={{MD}} 1995-09{{magref|cvg|165|48}}, 1995-11{{magref|segamaguk|21|20}}{{magref|topconsoles|6|32}}, 1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}, 1996-02{{magref|sv|25|100}}, 1996-05{{ref|https://web.archive.org/web/19970122074549/http://www.cuttingedgeent.com/genlist.html}} {{SAT}} 1995-12{{magref|sv|25|100}}, 1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}, 1996-06-28{{magref|cvg|176|49}}, 1996-07-18{{magref|cvg|177|53}}, 1996-10{{magref|ssm|10|16}}, 1996-11{{magref|ugameplayers|90|79}}
    into this:

    Code (Text):
    1. | date={{MissedRelease|MD|1995-09{{magref|cvg|165|48}}}}
    2. {{MissedRelease|MD|1995-11{{magref|segamaguk|21|20}}{{magref|topconsoles|6|32}}}}
    3. {{MissedRelease|MD|1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}}}
    4. {{MissedRelease|MD|1996-02{{magref|sv|25|100}}}}
    5. {{MissedRelease|MD|1996-05{{ref|https://web.archive.org/web/19970122074549/http://www.cuttingedgeent.com/genlist.html}}}}
    6.  
    7. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1995-12{{magref|sv|25|100}}}}
    8. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}}}
    9. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-06-28{{magref|cvg|176|49}}}}
    10. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-07-18{{magref|cvg|177|53}}}}
    11. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-10{{magref|ssm|10|16}}}}
    12. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-11{{magref|ugameplayers|90|79}}}}
    There's also an optional "region" argument, so you can do {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-10|region=US}}.

    The results are stored here:
    https://segaretro.org/Special:CargoTables/missedreleases

    I've built it into Template:UnreleasedBob, so unreleased games can be covered. I do not have a clean solution for normal games yet - do we want something in the Bob template, or a new template, or do we want these details declared on Development sub-pages? Is there a better solution entirely?

    Also it only currently works with Master System, Mega Drive and Saturn games, because I've hard-coded things and nothing's set in stone.
     
  16. JaxTH

    JaxTH

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    It would make more sense to have them on dev pages if the game was released but we wouldn't want that for the unreleased pages though.
     
  17. Pirate Dragon

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    They seem to play OK on VLC media player, on Linux at least, but should be the same on Windows. I'm not sure if they come as standard, but if IIRC VLC player can detect which codec is required and download them, but it's been a long time since I had to do that.

    The videos are encoded at 15fps, which is why they look a bit choppy. The Mega CD version has a lot of similarities to The Kremlin's port of Mig-29 on Mega Drive, so it seems that they used that engine as a base. The big difference is that whilst they retain the polygons of Mig-29 for objects, they use the Mega CD ASIC for the terrain, à la Thunderhawk II. This is now my #1 wanted Mega CD proto (previous was Myst), I'm not sure any other games tried to push the Mega CD like this. Also, here's a trade leaflet for the game, I would guess from 1994 Summer CES.
     
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  18. Pirate Dragon

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    I agree, but what about games which released in one region, but ended up getting cancelled in another region?
     
  19. Black Squirrel

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    There's also AV-8B Harrier Assault to consider - I never got around to checking whether that was a distinctly different game.

    Another unrelated flight sim mystery is an apparently scrapped Mega Drive version of F-19 Stealth Fighter by MicroProse - there's some noise about some of F-19's missions being shoehorned into console versions of F-15 Strike Eagle II (maybe to compenate for not having a full release?).


    It's really difficult to distinguish between "yes we're bringing this game to the Mega Drive and have written code" and "well the console's a bit like an Amiga so it'll probably happen" somtimes.
     
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  20. Pirate Dragon

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    Yeah, I was intending to look into that too. I've seen Flying Nightmares on Mac referred to as a port of AV-8B Harrier Assault, but elsewhere it's referred to as an evolution of it. Needs more research ... but flight sims were never my thing, so not sure I want to spend a lot of time playing them both.
     
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