don't click here

More Sega Channel prototypes dumped.

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Kiddo Cabbusses, Jul 20, 2011.

  1. Asagoth

    Asagoth

    Behold! The mighty, the flawless, salted cod eater Member
    645
    203
    43
    Portugal
    wiki stuff... and a beer... or two... or more...
    To avoid any confusion that might exist:

    Scientific Atlanta Delivery System Diagram (United States)
    [​IMG]

    General Instrument Delivery System Diagram (United States)
    [​IMG]


    General Instrument Delivery System Diagram (Outside the United States)
    [​IMG]

    What do all three diagrams have in common?... the CD ROM (I mean... what else do you put in a CD ROM drive?)
     
  2. Kilo

    Kilo

    Starting new projects every week Tech Member
    1,241
    1,188
    93
    Canada
    Changes with the weather
    Personally, I use mine as a cup holder :V:V:V:V
     
  3. Overlord

    Overlord

    Now playable in Smash Bros Ultimate Moderator
    19,558
    1,127
    93
    Long-term happiness
    • Like Like x 2
    • Agree Agree x 1
    • List
  4. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

    let's hurl a bwiki mart Wiki Sysop
    9,261
    3,119
    93
    Northumberland, UK
    the kwiki mart is real d'oh
    Last time I checked the satellite was drifting off into space - it's not functional (I have no idea how long these things take to get out of Earth's orbit).

    Give Elon a call - "can you bring back Sega Channel pls"
     
  5. Kilo

    Kilo

    Starting new projects every week Tech Member
    1,241
    1,188
    93
    Canada
    Changes with the weather
    Nah let's just hijack it ourselves for the sake of preservation. I'm sure we can pool funds together to build a rocket :eng99:
     
  6. Asagoth

    Asagoth

    Behold! The mighty, the flawless, salted cod eater Member
    645
    203
    43
    Portugal
    wiki stuff... and a beer... or two... or more...
    Put me on board and I'll go get it... "one small step for Asagoth, one giant leap for Sega Retro"... :)
     
    • Like Like x 1
    • Agree Agree x 1
    • List
  7. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

    Member
    782
    339
    63
    The article is worded a bit poorly, satellites in Earth orbit don't really drift out of Earth's orbit, their orbits gradually decay due to drag from the Earth's atmosphere. However, Geostationary orbit is really high (nearly 36,000 km), the atmosphere there is so minimal that it will take millions of years for the orbit to decay and for it to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. On the other hand the International Space Station is just a few hundred kms up and would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in a a year or two if it wasn't getting continuously reboosted.
     
    • Informative Informative x 6
    • List
  8. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

    let's hurl a bwiki mart Wiki Sysop
    9,261
    3,119
    93
    Northumberland, UK
    the kwiki mart is real d'oh
    I gave up trying to solve the mystery behing that IMG file. I think we're going to have to find proper software.

    but

    I had a look at this, and did you know

    [​IMG]

    there's a demo version of Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in there (for DOS).

    Anyway
    One exe boots, but crashes if you try and use anything. The rest are 16-bit Windows applications. Luckily I have a trusty Windows 95 virtual machine:

    [​IMG]

    I think there's the tools here to make Sega Channel menus. Except you can't "see" the menus in Windows, so it's a bit of a guessing game. These programs are all credited to Pacific SoftScape and look like they were thrown together quite quickly, but I've no reason to believe they don't work. All the data (e.g. graphics, audio, scripts, palettes, etc.) exist on disk so I'm sure you'll find some gems in there.

    There are also BIN files containing the menus throughout 1995 (and a bit either side).

    [​IMG]
    did you know you could trial Pico games?

    [​IMG]
    look what I haven't got

    [​IMG]
    Oh if only there was something actually here.

    [​IMG]
    There's also SAMPSONG.BIN which just has (test) music.

    Also the music found in Astropede was used in some menus. Freaky deaky.

    [​IMG]
    Also some Canadian menus with French translations.
     
    • Like Like x 3
    • Informative Informative x 1
    • List
  9. Asagoth

    Asagoth

    Behold! The mighty, the flawless, salted cod eater Member
    645
    203
    43
    Portugal
    wiki stuff... and a beer... or two... or more...
    AUTHSEGA.EXE (SCMENUS folder)... DDB (Data Delivery Board)

    [​IMG]
     
  10. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

    let's hurl a bwiki mart Wiki Sysop
    9,261
    3,119
    93
    Northumberland, UK
    the kwiki mart is real d'oh
    While I'm here - I hadn't read our Sega Channel page in a while, and yes, I think it's a bit... cluttered. Nobody's really at fault here - when Sega Retro started, very little was understood about the service, but given the last few pages in this topic and other titbits I've read, I think it probably needs to be split up into multiple pages.

    Or at least, I think the Japanese service needs to be split off, because for all intents and purposes, it was a completely different system. Yes it's the same basic idea (cartridge + TV = games), but we have different companies, different hardware, different software, different delivery system, not to mention Japanese television being fundemantally different to that of the US. I think we may be perpetuating a myth that one single service was available everywhere.

    (as to how to handle other countries... I have no idea. My gut feeling is they're going to derive from either the US or Japanese systems, but idk)


    Also what it boils down to is "you could get the Sega Channel through cable TV"... and what does that even mean? Which cable packages? Which areas of the country? Apparently we have General Instrument and Scientific Atlanta systems - did the one you get vary based on geography, or the time you bought into the service?


    Could I have personally received Sega TV in my area in late 1996? (could I even get cable TV at all for that matter - it was a rarity in these parts). We partially answer some of those questions, but ehh.
     
  11. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

    Member
    782
    339
    63
    Oh nice! You got it to load the menu, how did you do that? I've been playing around with the dev stuff for a couple of days but couldn't work out how to use Menumakr (the help files are missing). I got the GAMEEDIT.exe (seems to be the same as GAMUNCMP.EXE) to produce .GAM files, but they're just hundreds of bytes and the same regardless of game, so I don't think I have it working correctly. Anyway, I think Menumakr is what creates the images, so if we can make some basic simple images we might be able to reverse engineer what it's doing.
     
  12. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

    Member
    782
    339
    63
    Yeah, it could definitely do with splitting. I think there was basically two content creators, the US one which produced Domestic, Canadian, and International (Europe / South America) versions, and the Japanese one which produced Domestic and Asian (might only be Taiwan) versions. I think they're probably both using the same technology.

    Incidentally there's a SCHEDULE.DAT for can0112b.img, so "CAN" should be the prefix for Canadian discs. I think there was probably only one version for Europe / South America, but I could never find schedules for the same month for multiple countries.

    Whether to use the GI or SA versions was probably down to the local cable operators, a bit of competition there, but it might boil down to which one they already used for their other services.

    Probably only 5 regions in Europe which got it England (Telewest: South East, North East, North West), Rotterdam, and Kaiserslautern. Add on Santiago in Chile and Argentina (I'm guessing just Buenos Aires) then there was maybe only 7 local cable operators for the international version compared to hundreds in the US.
     
  13. rganders

    rganders

    Member
    27
    21
    3
    Worth noting that in addition to Breakthru...Waterworld and Iron Hammer also appeared on the service
     
  14. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

    Member
    782
    339
    63
    Yeah, Waterworld was a Test Drive, but we don't have the schedules after that to see if it ever appeared as a full release. That's the first I've heard of Iron Hammer appearing on it, do you have more details?
     
  15. Wow, that is interesting.
     
  16. cartridgeculture

    cartridgeculture

    Wiki Editor Member
    I would also be interested in more details, especially on Iron Hammer. This would mean that a Sega VR game actually did see release after all, just without head-tracking.
     
    • Like Like x 1
    • Agree Agree x 1
    • List
  17. ndiddy

    ndiddy

    Member
    43
    67
    18
    Glad to see others are interested in the game image file RisingFromRuins uploaded (thanks again for that!). I was able to reverse engineer the tool that encodes the image file (NSF.EXE) and wrote my own that reverses this process. Here's all the ROMs from the game image:
    https://infochunk.com/files/schannel_sep96.zip

    There's a couple unreleased games in there (Chessmaster and Klondike) and a few "test drives". The .bin files are decompressed, while the .sa files are compressed (same as the compressed .sa files from the Sega Channel dev disk). Files 0 and 1 are Sega Channel menu/help files that won't load in an emulator.

    I'll release the code to do this in a few weekends if anyone cares about that (it's super messy right now, and I need a break from working on this project).

    Shout-outs go to:
    - Whoever at Scientific Atlanta compiled NSF.EXE in debug mode
    - Tdijital for releasing the Sega Channel dev disk
    - Octocontrabass for reversing the .sa compression
    - RisingFromRuins for releasing the game image. I hope that if anyone else has a Sega Channel game image, they follow his example.
     
    Last edited: Nov 14, 2024
    • Like Like x 8
    • Useful Useful x 1
    • List
  18. That is impressive! Great job ndiddy! Yep, I can load the games in bin form using an emu, that would be awesome to see the menu items as well if that's possible but I can wait. This is great!!!:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:
     
    • Like Like x 1
    • Agree Agree x 1
    • List
  19. Chimes

    Chimes

    The One SSG-EG Maniac Member
    993
    700
    93
    holy shit this is uncharted territory
    good job boys
     
    • Like Like x 1
    • Agree Agree x 1
    • List
  20. aria

    aria

    day dawns Member
    296
    152
    43
    chaotix
    This was not only technically impressive, but incredibly fast. Thank you ndiddy and everyone who made this possible.
     
    Last edited: Nov 14, 2024
    • Like Like x 2
    • Agree Agree x 1
    • List