Quick Squirrel maths suggests Team Europe are responsible for dumping about a third of all Japanese Pico games now. Pretty impressive when you consider just a couple of years ago we had... pretty much none
To be specific, until around April 2012 the only ROMs we had were all; 1) drx's prototypes (anyone kept them archived around, btw?) 2) A stray Sonic Gameworld (US) and Mickey's Blast into the Past (US) And we only had some research from various random Japanese websites as a general guide. Team-Europe then swept in and dumped... like... I think it's been a bit over a hundred ROMs by now, and it includes a good substantial portion of both the Japanese and US libraries, as well as multiple PAL territories in different languages, Brazil, and even a few more prototypes -of unreleased localizations-. On top of that, it prompted Cowering to finally let some of -his- ROMs get released, and that included a few redumps and new dumps! Basically, we've jumped miles and miles ahead of where we were last year in a short period of time. 2012, one year before the Pico's 20th Anniversary, was a good year for the Pico. I'd like to do a video piece on this to add to my Youtube page. Too bad I really don't have the Japanese sales numbers... Maybe I'll try diggin around Japanese Wikipedia again... EDIT: The Japanese Wikipedia article, for reference Does anyone here have the Famicom Tsutshins it's referring to? Also, This press article is linked Still no sign of hard sales numbers though yet.
The thing I like about these dumps that they include board and ic pictures. Other than these, MAME, and some misc stuff at smspower and spritesmind, I know of no other place where you can also check the actual mask rom IDs.
You may want to ask him about that. Unfortunately when it comes to cases like Famicom Disk System or Satellaview that kinda blurs the lines and makes things more complicated there.
that's good, because unfortunately I slipped there. ^^; We should actually get around to comparing the prottypes for differences. I dabbled a bit in it for Tails and the Music Maker, as you can see here.
Which one is that, that mega pack with the thousands of protos? I have been seeding that for a while.
This thread alone has really sparked my interest in the Pico. I have a 7 month old son that loves watching me play video games and he absolutely adores story time, so I'm thinking about calling my mom later and asking her if we still have our old Pico (I was too old for it at the time but she bought it at a garage sale 10 years ago for me simply because it was SEGA). It'd be cool to hook it up for him when he's big enough to do shit on his own. It might be worth it to expose him to some Japanese games, since if I recall from earlier in this thread someone mentioned that it's region free. Are the Japanese games too language heavy or do you think we could get away with it?
You may want to check the Pico games I recorded on Youtube for some reference points on that. You'll have a few games with language barrier issues, a few games which should be easy to pick up in spite of being Japanese, and some that are practically in English anyway.
Checked out your vids, totally awesome, I didn't realize there were so many weird (and sometimes too-much-boobery-for-eC-rated) games in Japan. As for my Pico, I had my mom pull it out of the closet and I went up to visit her today. We set it up, but it wouldn't turn on. Apparently finding a working Pico is pretty difficult, either because there's no demand for it or because its just a not easy to find system. I do have a good set of games, though, that I assume are in working order (the books are in prestine shape and the carts are really clean). We got Busy Town, Mickey Mouse Blast to the Past, 101 Dalmatians, Magic Crayons, The 3 Blind Mice, and the Magic Schoolbus. I think all the carts but one are purple, the other one is yellow. I'm bidding on a working Pico right now, I hope I win it, I'm really hoping to let my son play with it soon.
sup http://segaretro.org/Talk:Touch_Pico This is all the Touch Pico stuff I could find... but I can't read Japanese, so translations are needed. 10 "games" so far. There may be more.
apologies on being behind on these. There's also been some discussion on the ROM dumps as of late on the no-intro forums which was sparked by the finding of the Revs.
Sega never used numerical suffixes for alternate revisions of games as far as I know (I've only seen it for ASICs). They always mark them with alphabetical suffixes, eg. xPR-14088C, xPR-14088D, xPR-14088H, etc., not counting ROM headers. A "B" or higher revision may exist even if there are intermediate skipped suffixes, there are some examples of this. Those revisions are either unreleased, or released on so small quantities that they were not found yet. I've found new revisions of some Saturn games last year even after a decade of cataloguing them. Numeric suffixes for ROMs and prints (eg. 670-x, 671-x, 672-x) were used primarily for country codes, -03 is Australia, -05 is UK, -50 generic Europe, etc.. Again, not counting ROM headers. Game headers using numeric suffixes for versions may be highly inaccurate, many times they were left untouched on later revisions, or included arbitrary versioning (jumped from v1.000 to v3.000 and so). Alphabetical suffixes on the ROM ID is much more accurate way of checking which revision a game is; which is one of the reasons I applaud that these Pico dumps come with PCB pictures. If the mask rom ID is, say, MPR-12477A, then that game is the first revision of MPR-12477. I don't recall any games that got entire new ROM IDs after a minor revision: the ones that DO got new IDs were always actual new releases as far as I can tell (satakore and dorikore re-releases, Netlink editions, etc). Speaking of which: does no-intro maintain a list with ROM IDs, or do they only catalogue stuff by the header info?
I know Team-Europe's kept track of the IDs but I don't know how that applies to No-Intro as a whole. It'd certainly be complicated when dealing with stuff such as, say, Satellaview software, which wouldn't go by the normal rules here...
While this isn't directly Pico related, I would like to add this info. Team-Europe has been expanding into other educational/little kids-niche gaming consoles and has dumped a load of V.Smile stuff. I think if we can donate some stuff like systems and carts, we could maybe get Leapster-based systems and games emulated as well, so we can check out those.... Sonic X things.
