At the risk of generalizing, it seems to me that Japanese people are far more skittish about uploading scans onto the Internet than foreigners. I'm not sure that it's ever happened with magazines, but there have certainly been high profile cases of people being imprisoned for pirating manga, so I can understand the reluctance. Of course, pirating manga is a direct financial blow to the publishers/creators, since the manga is usually still being sold in some fashion. Whereas the only places selling old magazines are used bookstores and auction sites, so it isn't harming the publishers in my opinion. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if the attention being brought to your scans was what scared that guy off of twitter.
This isn't a generalization at all, it's true. It why info from Japanese stuff is so valuable. I mean, back in the olden days of the internet, if a Japanese artist found foreign IPs on their websites they would start geo-blocking people, most likely in an attempt to not have their art saved and hosted elsewhere.
I was contacted by a Japanese collector/trader of magazine scans once. He didn't actually scan things himself - he used a book-scanning service (how's that for irony -- everyone is afraid to upload to the Internet, but there are dozens of legitimate businesses which will digitize your books/magazines/manga for a fee). Anyway, he wanted to swap scans for scans I was making...but with the caveat that I would promise not to release them on the Internet (my scans or his), at least until copyright ran out 50 years after publication or whenever. I had to pass. (185 Japanese magazines scanned and counting)
Also, I should add as a counter-example of the above generalization: A large volume of the most valuable Japanese magazine scans on RetroCDN were contributed by Japanese user Akane. https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Akane&offset=&limit=500&target=Akane
I scan a variety of gaming mags, but not really any Sega-specific ones. Don't worry, they're all publicly available, and are already mirrored in more than one location. I have requested that they not be distributed through Retro because Retro has a rule that everything must be converted to PDF. I don't care for the closed architecture of the format, but more importantly, do not edit my scans with the intent of them displaying properly as PDFs, so although I have no problems with people redistributing my files as they are (CBRs) or converting them to PDF for their own personal use, I do ask that my request be honored to not see them be spread around in PDF format. Many of my scans from when I used to release them on Retromags have already been uploaded to Retro as PDFs years ago, but I've accepted that as water under the bridge, and greatly appreciate the fact that my scans from the past year have been left unmolested. You may have seen some of them, but since Retro doesn't credit the scanners of the content they mirror, you wouldn't know they were my scans unless you downloaded them elsewhere.
We simply have a template on CDN that gives thanks to Retromags in general if a scan from them is used. By the way, did you ever test out our .pdf converter since I remember you saying other programs make them lossy, I believe? Also yes, Akane is a treasure.
I did, and it DOES appear to be lossless. However, I still don't want my files spread around as PDFs for reasons mentioned above. Plus, if someone downloads one of my files as a PDF and wants to extract jpg images from it, I don't want to have to hope that they use the one program out there that does it losslessly as opposed to one of the dozens of others that are lossy. Far simpler/safer to just extract it from a CBR, which is nothing but an archive of jpgs to begin with.
The new employee introductions are a bit much, but there's still lots here that I think would be much better appreciated if it was in English from the beginning. Particularly intrigued by some of the "Sega Spirit" features - these touch on what Sega acknowledge to be their early history in the 1960/70s. Haven't given them a deeper look yet, though they do only seem to have started with issue 127, so we unfortunately won't get many more. Nice to have this map of Osaka ATC Galbo in good quality too: This has been available through one or two other sources beforehand, but all in much lower resolution. Judging from the issue count here I imagine the yet-to-be scanned issue 128 has coverage of the centre's actual opening in April.
Well... their early history is a bit controversial... and it seems that the Sega 1000 was really their first entirely original product because their early slot machines were just copies of Mills Bell-O-Matic machines ... https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:CashBox_US_1958-06-21.pdf&page=63 June 21, 1958 https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:CashBox_US_1958-07-05.pdf&page=193 July 5, 1958 Bromley was a "crook"...
Yes, hence my wording there - Bromley was of course a prolific tax evader + numerous other dubious things, and Sega have some pretty good business reasons for celebrating the 60th anniversary of their brand yet not the company itself. I did briefly machine translate the "Sega Spirit" article on the Sega 1000, and indeed there were some tacit references to the company's poor reputation and constant run-ins with the law as late as the 60s, but nothing specific. Nonetheless those features do generally appear to call on the memories of early Japanese employees - 127's features amusement director Takenori Ogata talking about his early days at Rosen Enterprises, for example. This kind of stuff can be even more unique and hard to come by than opening dates for long-gone arcades.
Harmony 128 is up. I also scanned some items in a lot I picked up recently that, while not directly related to Harmony, will likely also be of interest: Sega Ichikawa Galbo pamphlet Sega World Tomakomai - Sonic Bowl pamphlet Misc paper materials from various Sega amusement centers, mid to late 1990's All of the above were in the same lot, but I split out the pamphlets into their own posts. As always, there are 600dpi TIFFs in a zip, and a JSON with more info about the item(s). You may need to go to "Show All" on the archive.org page to see them.
Oh that's fascinating - there's an article that appears to show bootleg Mega Drives being seized. Specifically These ones. This clone was just a footnote on Sega Retro - now there's a ~story~.
Today's translation fun: This photo is casually used in a piece about women in management - it's an undocumented arcade which I've saved as Hi-Tech Sega Myths 2 (ハイテクセガ ミス2). The only trace of its existence online are a few references to the katakana spelling - the building was either knocked down or extensively re-modelled, somewhere in Hiroshima. But is this photo of "Myths 2"? Is it just "Myths" (i.e. did a second myths come along later?). Unfortunately "ミス" also translates as "Miss" so the internet isn't helpful in image searches. I'm guessing an earlier issue of Harmony has the answer. Now that we can start putting dates to things, it's almost possible to recognise the age of an arcade by its branding. 1993 and 1994 venues tend to have logos with both Sonic and Tails, but this just has Sonic (and the older "Sega" lettering for Hi-Tech Lands), which may suggest it's pre-Sonic 2. Or they put the Sonic logo up after opening.
Thanks as always, especially for the other material this time - I'd say this type of thing is often even harder to come by than Harmony, despite some of it being mass produced across the country for a time. It's been copied into the Todo/Venues page on Retro for eons now, but aside from a few mentions on old websites, that's our first evidence of there being another Sonic Bowl outside of those at Sega Arena Toyohashi and Okayama Joypolis. Although it doesn't have any photos, for some reason (surely you'd want to advertise what it looks like??). There does also seem to have been a more detailed pamphlet made for Ichikawa Galbo, with unique pictures of its attraction facades instead of the standard promotional shots from other venues - not sure what the point in making two of them was, especially considering how long it lasted as anything more than an amusement centre.
The scanned one has opening times and directions, so my guess one was meant to be distributed inside, and the other outside. Also Undocumented Sonic game!
Just remember, a few years ago the English speaking world didn't even know what a "Galbo" was. Sega invented a character called "Dr. Chrono" who had a machine called the B.U.R.P. and wait what's that: By day it's a whale and/or amusement park. By night it's a source of energy for Dr. Chrono's B.U.R.P. for world domination or whatever. This is Cyber Dick サイバー・ディック The mascot and/or setting of Ichikawa Galbo. It's like Moby Dick, but more cyber. And it localises so well.
I had seen footage of that in one of the Game Catalog II editions where they visit Joypolis, but wasn't sure if it had been noticed over here yet - guess it hadn't. (around 2:25 here - also includes "Sonic Canball", VR-1, and even some snooping around at Sega's headquarters in the middle) There was an official English translation for the "Dr. Chrono" and "B.U.R.P." themes they had going on at the Galbo locations and Yokohama Joypolis on its original web page, in case any overseas people wished to know about it back then: Mind you, it still doesn't go anywhere near as needlessly deep as the quasi-lore that Namco had already made for their Wonder Eggs theme park - I'd like to see someone tackle that and the soundtrack CDs they made explaining it one day.
And now, returning to the Sega 1000 jukebox ... this was posted on Sega's official twitter account in 2014... it's a paper craft sheet... the link is dead... but someone save it on archive.org ... and there are a few more ... according to us the Sega 1000 was released in 1960... but according to Sega, it was released in 1962 so... who's right?