General Questions and Information Thread

I think it's the fault of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R and Under Night In-Birth (which hasn't got a page yet). These were probably the first two games to publicly announce they ran on RingEdge 2 hardware. It took until 2019 for us give StarHorse 3 a page - I'm guessing it kept its hardware a secret (or at least, it wasn't reported in the West, because it's a series nobody over here understands)

So yes the date is probably wrong. This might be the case with a few arcade platforms - often you don't know what a game runs on until people start taking photos.

 

You'd think all the licensed NFL games would just include NFL teams... but some like to invent new ones, which is why I've spent so much time checking each one.

Does NFL 2K1 have anything interesting? Not really, but I left it running in the background while finishing off the page and you know what that means




colouurrssssss

(Dreamcast games are mandated to throw up some sort of screensaver after five minutes)

A gentle reminder from life that I could be documenting these instead. It's unfortunate games can be so picky about this - if you're on the main menu, you'll be taken back to the title screen, which means you run into the other mandate - Dreamcast games have to show a rolling demos, so there'll not be static elements on the screen long enough for a screensaver to activate.


Did you know NFL Quarterback Club 2000 has eight historical iterations of the Dallas Cowboys? No I don't care either but if I'm going to sit through this you're coming along too.

 

https://note.com/beep21/n/n0f7ca2dc6f32

This interview reveals that pachinko machines from Sammy used Dreamcast parts, including the Hokuto no Ken machines that made them billions of dollars

If you look at the videos of the pachislot of the first generation which came out in 2003, you can tell it is pretty much Dreamcast graphics:

[URL unfurl="true" media="youtube:x6hej6BBpNg"]

 

Not sure if this counts as Sega news, but apparently 3 years ago, someone predicted that Coco/Kson would be in Like a Dragon 8.


https://segabits.com/blog/2023/05/2...and-prize-will-now-appear-in-like-a-dragon-8/

 

Mostly on Monday, I expanded my Production credits additions to books, focusing on the SoftBank guide books with available scans from the Saturn era. For consistency, being able to see the slight evolution in credits... and I can copy over a lot of the text probably.

Guardian Heroes Perfect Guide
Last Bronx Official Art Works
Sonic Jam Official Guide
Sonic R Official Guide
Burning Rangers Official Guide
Radiant Silvergun Koushiki Guide Book
Dynamite Deka 2 Official Guide
Sonic Adventure: Navigation Guide

There are a lot of people and companies involved without pages, but there's assistance from some recongisable companies, and also credits for people like Koji Ono (小野弘司), and the Sonic Adventure Perfect Guide which I started with has several of the latter.

But, I didn't get around to mentioning a problem I had: the ProductionHistory template doesn't actually support books. Bit of a surprise since they're more likely to have credits than hardware or especially accessories. I tried adding bookContents to the template, but haven't gotten it to work. I've fiddled with it, adding the <!-- books --> under music, just duplicating the other tables but with the contents name and release type changed (to 7 'cause it's next), and tried adding bookContents into display, but I don't know where to go from there. Can I get some help with the template?

I also realised today that books could also do with having a support field in the BookBob template. Could go into Book "soft"ographies for companies like Marvelous Entertainment, Sega AM1 and Treasure. I don't think there's any media format other than games that have a support field, though.

 

I think you were almost there, but it's not type 7, it's type 4:

https://segaretro.org/index.php?tit...r_by_options[4]=ASC&limit=100&offset=&format=

(7 is audiobooks)

these templates/cargo templates aren't as intuitive as they could be - that's what happens when you keep hacking on expansions

 

Ooooh! I didn't even realise the specific types were tied into the different medias already. Thought it would just have to be a different number from the rest. Thanks very much! Can see it working now. Well, it's displaying them under a different "Music" section, I'll see if I can fix that.

EDIT: Saw the problem there as soon as I mentioned it, haha. And that would have been an edit conflict anyways.

 

You can build your own Neptune now, complete with custom shell.



https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/The_Neptune_Project_abf52b41.html

 

was hoping sega would make a mini version with 32x games

 

I'm assuming this interview is dead in the water? Wayback only has the first part.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170624190712/http://sega-interactive.co.jp/special/interview/vol9-2/

 

The first part was saved after SEGA Interactive changed the URLs and redesigned the site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191224102829/https://sega-interactive.co.jp/interview/5650/

 

In case anyone hadn't noticed yet: Sega started making photo booths (or 'purikura') again in Japan from 2020 onward. Kind of weird timing to get back into a space they'd left years ago, but it must be successful as this is their latest of already many since then, revealed just today:

Yes they're not really all that exciting, and for us are mainly just more work to put on the wiki at the end of the day. But for a slightly more interesting point that will nonetheless potentially involve even more pages to be made... they've also been doing a few special licenced versions of these booths, in a similar way to the old Pokémon and Disney examples from the 90s.

These do appear to be a little different in some respects. From what one can tell, most of them are only offered for a specific period at certain locations, events etc, which could make documentation harder somewhere down the line. Case in point:

For the newly-reformatted JAEPO 'Amusement Expo' last week, Sega themed their 'romakyun' photo booth around none other than Persona 5 Tactica. This has also been made available at certain locations for a limited time, i.e. until next month or so. And it does indeed make things come full circle, as even those who have done barely any homework on this stuff (like myself) will know that Atlus co-produced Print Club, the original line of machines that first made the whole purikura thing big in Asia.


Do we think these will be immortalised in Yakuza games like said original machines a decade or so from now?

 

If I remember correctly, the company "Omron", who produced Ni Teranjero split off or changed its name and continued producing these kinds of machines. I forget if there was a Sega connection, but it was at the very least inspired by Sega's efforts in the late 90s.

It's not a world I personally wanted to get caught up in - I know Sega dedicated floors in some of its arcades to these types of machine. But I'm not a teenage girl in Japan.

 

I *think* Omron are the same people that later became 'FuRyu', who at the very least did this glorious example (with any luck, Sega themselves will make one that localises dreadfully soon too). But that's genuinely the full extent of my knowledge in this space now.

FWIW I think it might only be a matter of time until we end up with a Sonic photo booth. In fact I'm half surprised there hasn't been one already - god knows Sega couldn't help plastering him all over their other arcade stuff. Then again though, Jack Frost is more recognisable there.

 

I own Super Runabout: San Francisco Edition in real life. Never really got on with the ugly characters and lack of voice acting - turns out the draw distance is worse than I remember too!

There is a mystery in that there were two games in Japan, starting with a "non-San Francisco edition", Super Runabout. As a Windows CE game, non-dev versions of Redream won't run it, and the internet is perplexed by the two versions - I was never quite sure what I was looking at on YouTube. I figured the two games were being grouped together out of ignorance... but turns out it's bad marketing!


Both iterations of Super Runabout are broadly the same piece of software (there may even be three iterations given gap between release dates... but definitely at least two).

(Japan, 2000)
(US/Europe, 2000)
(Japan, 2001)

What does "San Francisco Edition" add? Not San Francisco - the first game already takes place in that city... with the same maps and missions... and the same vehicles(?). SFE adds some polish here and there, but it's often very subtle - the biggest difference I encountered in my brief few minutes of testing was one the first car changed from red to blue. I'm sure you could devise a big list of changes, but it's akin to the Sonic Adventure/Sonic Adventure International situation - SFE is just a slightly updated version for international markets, which was then re-released in Japan because reasons.

No versions actually bother to fix the deep rooted problems, in that they look like PS1 games developed by aliens who have never been to San Francisco, but to be fair, the PS2 sequel, Runabout 3 doesn't fair much better on that front. There's a reason this series didn't survive.

 

https://xcancel.com/rew_w/status/1730070517556899885

After Itoken asked people from the retro games industry how they stored their data and if it was lost, Izuho "IPPO" Numata, Tomohiro "REW" Yamamoto and Yasushi "JUDY TOTOYA" Yamaguchi started talking about floppy disks SEGA used, complete with the logo, and how unbelievably fragile they were. IPPO tried not to use because of how easily she'd damage them and JUDY TOTOYA said you couldn't feel safe unless you made a backup of the backup.



EDIT: Also I meant to post this in
Sega people say Sega things on Twitter

 

Now take that, and imagine the sheer luck the M2 team had when they asked HIRO for the original After Burner music floppies and he still had them... wild.

 

https://archive.org/details/computing-with-the-amstrad-vol.-3-no.-8-1987-08/page/49/mode/1up?q=sega

This is the best the internet has to offer:

a low resolution photo of half a car. Apparently it didn't qualify, so you're after footage of the qualification round for the 1987 Le Mans on the off-chance there's a Sega logo. Hmm.

 

https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:PCW_UK_870612.pdf&page=6

It was announced on Popular Computing Weekly at the time...

 

Apparently the press kit for the Retro-Bit Eliminate Down re-release uses some of the screenshots that I took for our Eliminate Down page.

https://segaretro.org/File:EliminateDownPressKit_Screenshots_Eliminate_Down_04.png
https://segaretro.org/File:Eliminate_Down,_Stage_4-4.png

https://segaretro.org/File:EliminateDownPressKit_Screenshots_Eliminate_Down_05.png
https://segaretro.org/File:Eliminate_Down,_Stage_5-4.png

https://segaretro.org/File:EliminateDownPressKit_Screenshots_Eliminate_Down_06.png
https://segaretro.org/File:Eliminate_Down,_Stage_6-3.png

https://segaretro.org/File:EliminateDownPressKit_Screenshots_Eliminate_Down_07.png
https://segaretro.org/File:Eliminate_Down,_Stage_8-1.png

https://segaretro.org/File:EliminateDownPressKit_Screenshots_Eliminate_Down_08.png
https://segaretro.org/File:Eliminate_Down,_Stage_8-3.png

On the box art too:


I don't blame them, they're pretty sweet screenshots.