Things to mirror

The dimensions stayed the same. I think it may just be a quirk of how GIMP handles it, like you said.

I ultimately took this approach when I uploaded it. ImageMagick inexplicably & consistently made the JPEGs' file sizes larger after they were shrunk, either with the resize function or by changing the DPI to 300 with the resample function - I only got it under 500 MB in total after resampling them without the "-quality 100" parameter. It's a compromise, but the scans still appear quite readable after all the processing. (Also, I tested the OCR program with this, and I can safely say it does not recognize Japanese characters at all - the OCR layer is simply full of gibberish Latin letters.)

Going back a bit:

I did some research on this. Various Japanese gaming news sites (here's one example) reported that the Feel Bayonetta event was primarily dedicated to a pre-release demo, with this account from someone who attended confirming that the CD was given out there.

I also found reports of a fan site contest held about a month later that also revolved around an official fan site kit - this time downloadable from the game's website. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been saved on the Internet Archive (the link to the actual download was only saved in January 2024, well after it had been turned into a redirect) - however, the download page was, and the way it divides the kit's contents suggests that it may have included all the content of the disc and more:

For comparison, the disc has four folders: characters, banners, the logo, and screenshots.

 

Oh nice! Road Blasters was the first US import I got for MD as I was a big fan of the arcade, it was a pretty good port. Hopefully this will allow some cool mods.

 

It says "source code", but it also says "graphics" on both. Makes me worry that it's only the part of the source code related to graphics.

EDIT: Wait, it actually says "& graphics". So it contains both!

 

Cheers to HeroesSquad for sharing this in the Discord server: An archive of official Sonic guides that we don't have yet. These include the likes of the Sonic Adventure 2 Perfect Guide, Sonic Adventure 2 Hero/Dark Manual, Sonic Advance 3 Saikyou Kouryaku Guide and even the Shadow the Hedgehog Saikyou Kouryaku Guide!

However many of them here are scanned in ridiculously high quality PNGs and are gigabytes in size, so they'll need downscaling to JPEGs and put together with the appropriate tools. Also many of them need editing to be properly rotated and put together. A task for someone with lots of time to burn.

Tools you'll certainly need:
https://retrocdn.net/File:Dpifix.7z
https://retrocdn.net/File:JPEGtoPDF.7z

 

This will gonna take a while to download. Plus I already ran into a wall. While puzzling together the cover/envelope (?) for the Sonic Advance Perfect Guide, I noticed that some things seem to be missing?


I mean, this looks nice:


Edit: Wait a minute, is this a poster? But why is it cut off?

 

And inside it has a poster? Seems like it.

 

Worth mentioning that the same account has also uploaded the original Japanese scripts for Sonic Heroes. (There was a thread about it back in 2018, though it didn't get much traction here.) It's similarly pretty huge (scanned at 600 to 800 DPI), but I think it's valuable development material.

 

That's definitely something we have to mirror for Sonic Heroes/Development if we haven't done so already.

 

RE: Sega AI Computer things... the motherlode on it, including its system ROMs and MAME driver, was released today

 

There's a couple of podcast episodes that talk about them and Okawa a bit. We do also know that around the very same time as all the AI Computer business, their tech found its way into being used for things like Sega Game Card.

From memory Hideki Sato's big fat oral history touches on their brief 80s adventure in educating Japanese children too - he deems it a bit of a failure, but helpful when it came to later getting the Pico right. And possibly other things.

 

I'm not sure where this is coming from. I can almost certainly guarantee you that CSK was not using the Sega name to release consumer-oriented education hardware.

"Black Squirrel thoughts: “It is likely a CSK product with Sega branding. CSK was Sega's parent company at the time (they bought Sega in 1983) and seem to have used the AI Computer as an attempt to get into the educational market."

Do you have any evidence for this? It feels wrong to put this speculation on the page documenting this rare hardware from Sega.

CSK was a business-oriented software company. Books have been written about it - it was one of Japan's fastest growing companies in the 70s and 80s. Initially, it outsourced computer technicians/programmers to help run mainframes at companies. Later, it developed custom business software for companies. Think something like Oracle. CSK founder Isao Okawa 1) kept CSK's business far removed from the consumer domain, leaving that alone for CSK's subsidiaries like Sega to handle, 2) was hands-off at Sega until the late 1990s, as has been firmly stated by many former Sega executives.

All of the promotional materials and newspaper articles (I looked them up to make sure) clearly state that the Sega AI Computer was created by Sega, and that the "Sega Prolog" language was a joint venture between Sega and CRI.

Around the time they released the Sega AI Computer, Sega also established its "Sega Education System" subsidiary. A newspaper article I found in the Nikkei from 1986 talks about the rapidly growing educational software market, and how Sega is working to capture a piece of it.

All of this makes complete sense as coming from Hayao Nakayama, who was constantly pushing for the education angle. I mean, he founded a non-profit organization in 1992 to research exactly that kind of thing that still exists to this day.

 

In all fairness there is still barely any proper documentation of CSK's history out there in English, especially within the context of their relationship with Sega (of course, there's lots more in Japanese). It's not great for people's wider understanding of that when two 80 minute long podcasts are probably the best we have on them thus far.

I think Sato's oral history didn't really detail how much, but for what it's worth it did make clear that he was involved with the AI Computer's development in some capacity. By the same token I remember the subject of it only coming up in the first place via CSK talk - so I don't believe it's as simple as either of them doing most of the work on it (?).

Also: when it comes to Nakayama's aims with education I've always thought it was in large part image-driven, going hand in hand with Sega's other family-friendly moves in amusement centers etc around that time. But then they didn't shout about it as much as everything else, and it sort of just got subsumed by the toys business after a while?

 

Tried my hands on the HeroSquad uploads.

With a bit of cropping and downscaling, the size isn't a problem anymore. It just takes forever.

A project of sorts.

 

Agree with Gryson here, we should probably avoid speculation and stick to refereeable facts. If Gryson has evidence that can help improve the article, then forward it to Omar (Bock at SMSPower), as whilst Omar has done a massive amount for Sega preservation he's relying on the rest of us for the research side of things.

 

ah:

Via Shmuplations and Sega Consumer History

 

Is the AI computer software the only time Sega has published software on cassette? The SC-3000 can run software on cassette, but I've never seen any Sega (or in fact, any third party Japanese) SC-3000 software published on cassette.