Oh boy, there's a lot of juicy stuff to pick out here. Rooting through this, I've found: The Earthworm Jim 2 supplement for Mean Machines Sega #38, meaning we finally have their review score for the game! Issues of Games World: The Magazine that we're missing! Issues of Advance (UK), with Sonic Advance 3 as the cover feature of #8! Issues of goPLAY, with a Sonic Rivals cover feature! Some other issues of Cube (UK) and PlayStation 2 Official Magazine UK which could be good to check for post-Dreamcast Sega stuff! I shall find the time to get this stuff sorted out!
https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:PlayMeter_US_0813.pdf&page=44 Fresh from Retromags - Gremlin/Sega's new factory, circa June/July-ish 1982. I quite like this - every Zaxxon cabinet to come out of the facility was left running for a 6-12 hour "burn-in" period. It was the best way they could ensure the units wouldn't break, because apparently quality control in the past was a bit of a problem. This probably means some earlier games failed that test. EDIT: This post is in the wrong topic but it's sort-of related so ehhhh
Sega Powers and Pros were posted overnight. And someone else has given us Electric Brain. Quite the day we're having this Wednesday.
On top of that, we finally have more of the missing issues of Sega Zone, including the fifteenth issue with the infamous Socket review.
And the Complete Guide to Consoles #3, one of the few sources for the unreleased Mega Drive game, Battle Mission, https://archive.org/details/c-vg-me...guide-to-consoles-volume-3/page/n113/mode/2up And better scans of Bad Influence, and loads of Ultimate Future Games. Apparently the Sega Saturn is like a Vimto vending machine. Fun fact: Vimto vending machines from the 90s are so rare I can't find a photo of one. Meanwhile Radiant Silvergun, a game people claim is rare and so charge stupid money for, is readily available on eBay.
And speaking of unreleased Mega Drive games, Sega Zone #14 has a cover feature for what appears to be an unreleased EA game called Face Plant. I don't think we have anything like that covered in other magazines, do we?
I haven't seen it before Over the course of the year we've been able to plug most of the gaps in our "Sega UK magazines" library. The UK had the most publications by far, so this was a massive task, and when Sega Retro started in 2010, the only full sets that existed were low quality scans of Mean Machines Sega and Sega (Master) Force (Mega). Now we have almost everything: Done: Dreamcast Magazine Dreamcast Strategies Dreamcast Tips Mean Machines Sega Mega Mega Action MegaTech Mr. Dreamcast Official Dreamcast Magazine S: The Sega Magazine Saturn Power Sega Force Sega Force Mega Sega Magazine Sega Master Force Sega Power Sega Saturn Magazine Sega XS Total Saturn One issue missing: DC-Tips DC-UK Mega Power Saturn+ Sega Pro Sega Zone More issues missing: Dreamcast Monthly Dreamcast Solutions Mega Machines Sega Mega Drive Advanced Gaming There are more gaps on the mulit-platform side (and plenty of missing supplements), but given we had magazine scanning communites hoarding their wares, it didn't look very likely we'd get this far so soon. And it's all thanks to a small handful of people who donated their time to the cause - it's a shame we can't give internet medals. What we need now... is someone to read them. Mirror the facts, list the pages - the only necessary qualifications are at least one working eye and a brain.
"becoming a Sonic/Sega Retro member and having the privilege of editing its wikis is the best medal one can have" ...
So last week I ran into an issue: Sega Amusements (International) used to have a fairly extensive website. In fact, they've had several - the thing is constantly changing layouts and URLs. Because Sega arcade games are popular, they were (and probably still are) servicing machines dating back to the early 1990s. They used to have flyers and manuals and all sorts hosted online (some of which we mirrored), and while it was skewed more towards making money from operators than people who want to document this stuff, it was a tool we could still use. Sadly at some point recently they stopped caring: https://www.segaarcade.us.com/ Now it's just one page and a list of contact details. All records of the last 20 years have gone. Luckily a good chunk was archived on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.segaarcade.com/* But downloading and checking hundreds of files by hand is not a pleasant experience. I couldn't find any useful tools to automate this process, so I made one: Code (Text): import urllib.request, os, shutil #Set up output directory output_directory = "output/" # try: # if(os.path.exists(output_directory)): # shutil.rmtree(output_directory) # os.mkdir(output_directory) # except: # pass #query url_to_check = "www.segaarcade.com" url = "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=" + url_to_check + "&matchType=prefix&fl=timestamp,original,mimetype,statuscode&collapse=timestamp:10" file = urllib.request.urlopen(url) #set up a local copy of the result above so we don't have to deal with timeouts temp_file = open("temp","w") for line in file: line = line.decode("utf-8") temp_file.write(line) temp_file.close() #get the things downloaded_files = [] temp_file = open("temp","r") for line in temp_file: decoded_line = line.strip().split(" ") if(decoded_line[2] == "application/pdf"): output = output_directory + decoded_line[1].split("/")[-1] if(output not in downloaded_files): download_url = "https://web.archive.org/web/" + decoded_line[0] + "if_/" + decoded_line[1] try: print(download_url) if(not os.path.exists(output)): urllib.request.urlretrieve(download_url, output_directory + decoded_line[1].split("/")[-1]) downloaded_files.append(output) except: print(" DIDN'T WORK: " + download_url) (Python 3) This uses the Wayback CDX Server API to download every PDF archived for that domain. I wrote it in less than an hour to do one thing - it's not checking revisions and really ought to be comparing hashes rather than filenames, but whatever - you can make it better. It won't try and download files that don't exist, but it won't be able to detect if they're corrupted. 62 of the about 700-ish PDFs came out bad, so that's a thing. So if you're looking at my Sega Retro contributions and wondering where all those files came from... there's your answer. Current highlight - how to inhibit the old £1 coin from working in your machines. Also great news if you're fan of Derby Owners Club World Edition - for some reason more documentation for that game survived than any other.
I just tried to acquire a scan of issue #26 of Australia's Hyper Magazine from the National Library of Australia, but they didn't have a copy. There are two explanations. 1. Issue #26 sits between December '95 Issue #25 and January '96 issue #27 and *could* be a missing special Christmas issue, which the NLA just does not have, or 2. Issue #26 does not and never did exist, and January '95 #27 is mis-numbered and is the actual 26th issue. I have no idea how to confirm which one is true. EDIT: Ok, I lied, I do have some idea... From Issue #30 (April '96)
Yeah, if we care about the first Hint Cheat and Playguide masquerading as issue #26. I'm pretty sure there were several issues and volumes of these as well over the years. We're also missing Issues #99 and #101. I'm gonna try and track them down through the state and national libraries.
Need to formulate a plan on this: https://am.sega.jp/ A thing that exists - Sega has a website for arcade operators where they can download promotional material, manuals, replacement stickers, etc. Some of it is password protected, but it's a goldmine for weird stuff nobody cares about. The bit that caught my attention was: https://am.sega.jp/cad They've got CAD files for their arcade machines, in DXF format. That's like, the real deal psuedo industry standard* stuff for design and manufacturing. There's PDF versions of varying quality and I think it's more about visualising floor space, but yeah, that's a thing. *Not actually sure what the industry uses as a standard - when I had to care a few years ago, AutoCAD dominated the market and AutoDesk kept changing their priopietary formats so you had to keep buying their products. But it was based on DXF.
I just came across this thread and wasn't sure if I should post here. A little while ago I scanned the Sonic Mania Introduction Manual and posted it over on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/sonicmania-intromanual-paged/mode/2up I also made a scan where the pages are together: https://archive.org/details/sonicmania-intromanual/mode/2up Is it possible for this to be mirrored on Sonic Retro as well? I don't think I'm able to edit pages so I was wondering if someone else can do it. I suppose the most appropriate place to put it would be in the manual section for Mania. https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Mania/Manuals A PDF for both versions are here: https://ia801707.us.archive.org/27/...manual-paged/sonicmania-intromanual-paged.pdf https://ia801704.us.archive.org/24/items/sonicmania-intromanual/sonicmania-intromanual.pdf A transcript of the text can be found here: https://archive.org/stream/sonicmania-intromanual-paged/sonicmania-intromanual-paged_djvu.txt The text itself needs to be tweaked here and there but it's a good way to get all the information from the manual. I apologize if this isn't the right place to post this.
Done... we have been facing some issues with thumbnails... but do not worry... it will eventually be fixed later ...
Update on this. Apparently the source is this Chinese forum, and there's a second person uploading things. So they might be sorting themselves out. Sega Retro:Todo/Publications Sega Retro:Todo/Publications/Third-party Last time I had a good look at books, I hit a wall, because I don't know what a lot of these things actually are (or indeed in some cases, what they're called). It would have just been me copy pasting "XXX IS A BOOK" a couple hundred times. Christ knows if Sega Game Attack Manual Book Phantasy Star II: Kaerazaru Toki no Owari ni Joukan is the correct title.
Just so we're not re-uploading the same things over and over again: Book scans go here: https://retrocdn.net/Category:Shared_book_scans i.e. Retro CDN, not Sonic/Sega/NEC Retro If coming from archive.org, take the higher quality comic book RAR/ZIP if possible (CBR/CBZ are just RARs and ZIPs with different extension names), not any super compressed PDF the site generates for OCR purposes. I'd expect the average 100-page book to be at least pushing 30/40/50MB as a minimum, with good quality scans being 100-200MB+. You might want to use our DPI fixing tool on any JPEGs, so that the thumbnails render correctly. This isn't as straightfoward and obvious as I'd like it to be, and because I haven't been paying attention, not everything is in the right place, but yeah, check Retro CDN first.
