https://twitter.com/SEGAForever/status/1680973635169951745 These were the original photos used for After Burner in flyers, at their highest resolution based on the original assets.
Publishers are starting to issue takedowns on French video games magazines now. Not fully sure of the state of them on Retro (I know some weren't acceptable to upload due to their quality), but worth keeping in mind.
We have a few Mega Forces, although there are gaps. Not many Playmags have been scanned. There are other language variants of Mega Force that could assist if the worst happens, but it's not ideal. It's one of the few sources we have of Sega in early 90s France.
https://twitter.com/SEGAForever/status/1691845271016132925 Yup, the actual photo that they took for use in things like flyers, and without the alpha masking!
Arcade Britannia's been uploaded in full for free on IA by Jason Scott. Have had the book since last year and amongst a lot more there's a wodge of good information in there on Sega's UK coin-op side, sourced from Coinslot magazines that have not been scanned in yet and the like.
If you haven't been following this - French magazine scanning site, Abandonware Magazines took down their Mega Force and Playmag scans after being contacted by... someone... who presumably owns the licenses now. But an agreement was reached: https://mega-force.fr/2023/08/annon...devient-partenaire-avec-abandonware-magazine/ Abandonware Magazines would get to host the stuff they had, but this new Mega Force site would have... "more"... at some point. Currently neither site has delivered on their middle-of-the-month pledge, and you can't find these magazines on either site. Abandonware Magazines never had full sets of either publication, and scans vary drastically in quality, to the point where some magazines aren't scans at all, just photos of pages lying on a table or bed or something. Thing is, I have a "can't be bothered" threshold - longer term we want to replace all of the scans with high quality, lightly touched (i.e. cropped and rotated) 300/600dpi versions. Most websites play with scans - they resize them to fit a convinent template, or adjust the colours, or "clean" things to make them look pretty, which means there aren't many scans representing the magazines as they actually are, just what people think they should be. And people are often wrong. If a scan is too butchered, or watermarked, or generally terrible, such that it's not actually useful, I've historically been reluctant to touch it. Alternatively, if a scan is over 500MB, chances are it's going to be a massive faff to deal with - it might not physically fit on Retro CDN, or is straight off the scanner without those light touches I mentioned before. If I'm putting more in than we're likely to get out, I'm better off spending time on something else. aka "you do it". Basically, we should have mirrors of all the decent scans of Mega Force and Playmag, but we might not have the "bad" ones. But there's a strong argument that "bad scans" are better than "no scans" - when there was another mirror, I didn't care enough, but now there isn't... maybe we should, so you might have to pop over to the Wayback machine and scrape the scraps.
Yeah, they're not the best from a preservationist point of view, but for sourcing stuff on the wiki the photos are better than nothing. But I get the point that it discourages people uploading proper scans if they see that it has already been "scanned", but don't realise the quality that it is. The guy who claims to have the rights to these did say that they were going to scan them properly and all be available for free from their site, so there's that. Not a big deal if they don't go for wikis like ours, and maybe for the best in the end. I still don't understand why someone would purchase the rights to these old mags and expect to make their money back, it's a super-niche fanbase, and one which is clued-up enough to know they can just torrent it. Outside of mags still in publication (Retro Gamer etc) which can bundle their back catalogue with a subscription, I don't see any way to monetise old game mag scans.
Probably the last remaining factual and concrete information on the events that occurred while Sega SPLASH! Golf was live are on 4gamer, as archive.org could only grab so much back in the day due to Flash being the premiere way to design your websites. I might take it upon myself to archive what I can from that 4gamer link to the wiki but would appreciate some help on establishing a timeline for the game. EDIT: Looks like GAME Watch also has a ton of content!
While it's true that some websites like Retro (until a few years ago) alter scans by "resizing them to fit a convenient template," for the most part the alterations you mention are the work of the scanners themselves (known as "editing"). And while I understand the point of view that it's best to "represent the magazines as they actually are," I think you might be surprised to find that such an opinion is not shared by the general public. Most people, given the choice between watching a faded, discolored and scratched film reel found in a basement after 40 years or else watching a newly restored HD transfer are going to opt for the latter. The same goes with scans. If my 40 year old mag is faded and yellow, full of dog-eared pages, creases, tears, and random stains from who-knows-what, most people don't see it as necessary to preserve those flaws for all time, especially since they aren't supposed to be there in the first place. Ideally, we would scan mags fresh off the presses before the mag has a chance to be physically degraded, but that is almost never the case. Which is where editing comes in. Granted, there is a possibility of someone doing such a poor job of it, the "as is" stained yellow copy might be preferable. But I would advise caution in suggesting that an un-edited scan offers a truer representation of the mag "as is." Anyone who scans magazines can tell you, no matter how nice or expensive the equipment being used, optical scanners DO NOT capture a perfect 1:1 image. Every piece of scanning equipment is different, but the exact colors and hue of the page will not be 100% accurate to what you see with your eyes. Fluorescent ink is notoriously impossible to capture in a scan, for example. So I would argue that an "as is" scan is no more accurate than an edited scan, and could indeed look less accurate than a scan which has been altered with the goal of representing what the eye sees on the page. At any rate, the HQ "lightly touched" cropped-and-rotated scans you mention as ideal are certainly the easiest to do, though it's perhaps giving them a bit too much credit to say "lightly touched," since any scanner worth their salt has already invested in a quality ADF scanner, which automatically crops the files (and since the pages must be debound before scanning, there's no need to rotate unless the mag was printed crooked.)
SEGA Amusement Machine Guide 1998 Hooray for more of these getting scanned in. Definitely some Things in there.
When the 1993 and 1994 guides turned up we were missing tons of games. This time, there aren't too many surprises: - Sukuccha Oh! (which might be translated incorrectly). - Paradise Crane. - Some Print Club things that look more Atlus-y than Sega, which would explain why we never spotted them (although there's essentially no info online anyway). - And a bunch of medium and large scale attractions which I haven't been keeping on top of. I don't know if that's good or bad news. It also solved a question: This is the DP-24000 change machine. It's one of four, incredibly similar models. So similar that they share a manual. The only difference between this and the DP-1400 is the ability to take 10,000 yen notes, whereas the golden ones can also dispense medals. So if you're after the best Sega change machine from 1997, you want the DP-25000. Maybe.
I tried to at one time, and I think there's one or two points: "V.R. Aquarium". Confused as to exactly what this is supposed to be - Aquarena? Fish Life? A prototype made between the two, as the latter was apparently based in part on the former? There's even a whole fish family tree of course, as Fish "on" Chips and that sushi restaurant menu come into the equation here somewhere too. Help "Horror Ride". This one debuted as "Lost Cemetery" upon its debut at Kyoto Joypolis in 1997, and then seemingly got renamed for some reason on its only other installations at the ones in Tokyo and Okayama the following year. I think there wasn't any other difference (?), but there's so little documentation that it's hard to say definitively.
Just when you thought these scans couldn't get any nicher... SEGA Kara Magazine - Prologue Vol. 11 1997.10
