General Questions and Information Thread

It's a good job I checked - No Escape (Mega-CD) is another secret Mega-CD exclusive. It was meant to be part-2D fighter, part-isometric thing, a far cry from the platformer on Mega Drive.

As for others... it's a little less interesting. There are previews of World Cup Golf: Professional Edition on the Mega-CD, but it's pretty much the same as the Saturn game, just less finished and with fewer colours.

Similarly the scrapped Mega-CD port of Chaos Control was almost certainly the same as other versions, just uglier:


According to Edge circa November 1993, these are "mindblowing visuals" that took 2-4 months to render. The Saturn port in early 1996 was critically panned (though look out for the bit where you can fire on the World Trade Center).

Return to Zork looks like it was announced around a similar time with a Mega-CD version planned for mid-94. Again, probably the same game as the others, just fewer colours.

There's rumours that Novastorm was Saturn-bound at one stage (I can't find enough proof (yet?)), but that has completely different (and much better) FMVs on PlayStation, suggesting a Saturn version might be different too.

 

I've automated another list - the games listed on the Silicon Graphics (SGI) page. Just add "sgi" to the list of properties, and it should work it all out.

but

this is playing more into "1990s marketing" than "1990s reality". When Donkey Kong Country launched, everyone was suddenly desperate to use pre-rendered CGI in games, and the claim became "we're using Silicon Graphics". This is a list of products that makes those claims.

but "Silicon Graphics" is
- a company
- a range of hardware
- not strictly responsible for making the graphics - that's up to software like SoftImage, which then leverages the hardware

none of this is amazingly well documented because these were very expensive workstations that developers often didn't "own". See also: most computer graphics of the 70s/80s/90s.


aka this might not work long-term

 

I do hope someone digs through this topic some day and finishes all the tasks I haven't started


Archive.org is recovering from a DDOS attack last week, and I'm treading water until it opens again. Because why spend the weekdays doing the job I'm paid for, when I can... not do that.

Because I'm ruled by fate, unreleased Mega-CD games led me to re-check Mega Power (the closest the world got to a Mega-CD-specific magazine) to see if I missed anything first time around. I missed something first time around:


bloody ITV regions again. Apparently an entire programme was aired in October 1993 on Central covering the development of Cosmic Spacehead. I'm conscious that as time goes on, fewer and fewer people will understand that sentence.



Very quick history - commercial television was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1955 as the "Independent Television" network (ITV). The country was split into regions, and companies could bid for a local "franchise", the view being that they'd produce localised programming as an alternative to the (pseudo)-national BBC channel (spoilers: it was for advertising). By 1993 the franchise for the Midlands region belonged to Central Independent Television ("Central"), broadcasting for just that area of the UK. Codemasters was based in that region so it makes sense that as part of its local programming mandate, Central might want to talk about it.

Changes in the law meant that all of these regions were allowed to eat each other up - Central still exists as a dormant company, but in 2024 it's little more than a name that pops up during the local ITV news. Because of this a good chunk of Central's programming and history has been effectively lost to time, so unlike the BBC which will quite happily tell you what it aired in October 1993, ITV pretends this period of its existence didn't happen.

Which means in order to find this programme you'll have to dig up a month's worth of 30-year-old TV guides and hope for the best. Very few have been scanned (or are publicly available) - did Central make more episodes with Codemasters? Or other games companies? Is the Cosmic Spacehead story even that interesting? Dunno!



p.s. Central had pretty idents because it was the only franchise (for a while) that hardcore graphics workstations in-house to produce such things.

p.p.s. I learnt last week that there are still separate regimes for advertising on ITV for the London region: weekdays and weekends. If you want to run an ad 7 days a week, you have to apply twice, because once upon a time London's weekdays and weekend franchises operated separately and they haven't changed it.

 

Not currently a subscriber, but got a 7-day free trial (need to remember to cancel) to newspapers.com. It was broadcast 1993-10-25 and repeated 1993-12-13. The programme was "It's a Living", and the episode was "Darling Buds". I could just about pick up Central in Bristol in the early 90s, also HTV Wales, which was different to the local HTV.

 

Nifty

There's not much on YouTube - this is as close as I can get:

a) prove that "It's A Living" was indeed a show in 1993:

(that's right, Jim Davidson AND Michael Barrymore in one advert block)

b) prove that Central aired "something" on the 13th December

(where you can learn that Billy Connolly fronted an American sitcom that lasted a whole 13 episodes before being axed)

 

Does that mean there's a chance?... I'm actually curious to see the said episode...

 

Here we go;



No mention of Mega CD.

Edit: Similar to this 1984 documentary which I came across searching the BBC's programmes before. Not really Sega related, there is mention of Zaxxon.

 

Cool!... you know what? I'll save this and upload it to the Retro CDN...

 

It's interesting to see them assembling the MD cartridges by hand, I assumed that it would've been more automated. Then again, hits like Brian Lara's Cricket were constantly going in and out of stock after release, so they probably preferred smaller handmade batches to order rather than being stuck with a large batch of expensive unsold cartridges as happened to Sega Europe.

 

RE: Mega Power - I've had a better read of the first 15 issues. After Dave "The Animal" Perry leaves to front Games World, you can watch the magazine deteriorate in over time to the point where it stops being interesting.

(not that Dave Perry's bits were good, just that I don't think they replaced him, so it loses a third of the content and all the editorial bits)

And it helps to read the small print, because I found a few details we were missing. Things like the unreleased game Pinkie having some kind of tie-in with a soft drinks manufacturer (think Cool Spot or Fido Dido with 7up) which I don't think came to pass. Also the Tribal Tap - a multi-multi tap that would have solved the 4 Way Play/Team Player split before Sega solved it.

But the one that interests me the most is the cancelled Madness: House of Fun, which Mega Power covered in issue #9. I made our wiki page yeeaaaaars ago - I was told it was a port of the Amiga game Harlequin, just with some sprites changed and some Madness songs put in.

What I hadn't realised is that Harlequin is a very mid-tier Amiga title:



in the sense that this was clearly engineered for the Atari ST, with some of those copper gradient backgrounds thown in (aka the lazy route). This wouldn't have been good enough for the Mega Drive in 1994, so the solution seems to have been... redraw everything:



I still wouldn't say it looked great, but it's slightly more interesting than some of the other Amiga -> Mega Drive ports that never saw the light of day (e.g. Mr. Nutz 2, Putty Squad, Jim Power).


In fact since I made that page footage (of an earlier prototype??) has emerged:

apparently Piko Interactive have a build and might package it into something playable one day.

 

I noticed one of our Zaxxon Apple II covers was a load of old balls, so I did a quick image search to find a better one. But fate doesn't work like that:



We have to have the undocumented Japanese import instead. Who brought this to Japan??



Canon. That famed video game distributor.

https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/c1052343581/

There can't be many Japanese tech giants left.

 

As part of their big news bloodletting the other day, the BBC announced they would be shuttering Click, their tech strand that sometimes covered video games since 2000.

I can't claim to have great knowledge of everything that's relevant to us in terms of it, and footage of the shows themselves inevitably won't be forthcoming. But trying to look for it did turn up a few online pieces... and in the process made me aware again of something else that the Beeb made a few years ago now.

In 2018/19, their shortlived cross-radio/television/online programme 'The Gaming Show' devoted an entire episode to "The Sega Comeback". Because that was apparently deemed just as important as covering the early popularity of Fortnite.

And yet... annoyingly enough, it seems they didn't deem it as important to put that episode on YouTube, unlike many of the others they made. The same goes for the one they did from Japan a year earlier, where arcades apparently came up.

Surely someone out there nabbed them off iPlayer?

 

I hold out hope that one day the BBC will make its entire back catalogue available on iPlayer. The first step was the old Genome project - they have a digital record of pretty much everything ever broadcast, now it's just a case of getting the programmes themselves online. Unlocking 100 years of history would be a great way to appease the government in license fee negotiations.

(theoretical history - obviously most of it needs finding and digitising, and a lot will never be found)


But I don't think the infrastructure is there yet, and it might need a push from someone. I think the best incentive would be a "community iPlayer" of sorts that dates back decades - not one that's not a pseudo-YouTube for old shows, but a really big timeline simulating the real broadcast of channels. "Here is BBC One in its entirety" (or the bits people recorded).

e.g. say you have the first episode of Eastenders recorded on VHS - the data on the tape would be digitised, uploaded, and then users could navigate on a website to 7pm, 19th February 1985, press play and watch it in the simulated timeslot. And you'd do that with everything for every channel and every region - try and fill as much as the void as possible (knowing you'll never get all the gaps). There's already plenty of clips out thereto get the project started - a timeline would provide the much needed context.

And just like the BBC above, the first task would be document all the TV schedules, which clearly needs to be done since we keep tripping up on it. I'd do it myself if I didn't do so much else.

 

IPDB lists all these Sega/Stern hardware games as being Solid State. We have them as Digital, as seen here with Apollo 13.

Do we have any pinball specialists around? There might be a reason for this discrepancy, but our pinball hardware coverage isn't great. Any insight here?

 

That's because in pinball terms, "solid state" and "digital" are kind-of the same thing (see: why IPDB doesn't have a "digital" category). I think Retro makes the distinction just to separate the late 70s machines from the mid-90s ones, though I guess strictly speaking "digital pinball" would be a machine where everything is simulated (i.e. no physical balls or flippers).

Mind you these probably aren't Sega terms either, so it might need reviewing (although then again, Sega distributed things by other manufacturers so idk). But I mean, when these pages were made, there wasn't much documentation on Sega's history of pinball, just that "they made some".


Technology Connections has a 50 minute video on electro-mechanical pinball. Replace all the mechanical spinny bits and relays with circuit boards and you've got solid state.

 

Spent yesterday's afternoon and the following night looking into this. I initially was going to ask Sazpaimon, but while staring at it and looking at some adjacent tech articles on Wikipedia, it became pretty apparent on what was going on. With the help of BlastEm discord this is what I've found:

What you're seeing here is not Shift JIS. This is, in fact, JIS X 0208.

Unlike most Mega Drive games, VIC Tokai chose to format Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken's header using Shift JIS's... namesake? Well, basically, they took the cookie pan out with their bare hands. This was a total bitch to research, because while talking with the BlastEm Discord, I found out that no program for Windows can actually decode JIS X 0208 text. Everything expects you to hand in Shift JIS, and with this data it gets confused and doesn't know how to read it, so it spits it out as coincidentally "valid" ASCII text.

I first looked at the bytes and realized the changes with every second byte corresponded to a change in Japanese kana. There, I poked around on Wikipedia for a few hours until I saw something that checked out. To decode this, I just stared at the bytes and took each word and looked at Wikipedia's encoding table. Unsurprisingly, it's just the game's title with five spaces appended at the end.

Interestingly, Sega's documents don't call this foul: it expresses that the two ASCII and Shift JIS standards are encouraged, but it doesn't actually mandate that you should do so. Perhaps VIC Tokai saw this and decided to cook it rare? I wouldn't know how you would do this. My thought immediately jumped to PC-98 computers or the X68K, but my knowledge on those go as far as "These were the Japanese computers before they used Windows".

Sega Software Manual (page 83)

Sega Software Development Manual Version 2.0 (page 5)

Sega Software Manual - Ozisoft (page 95)



03-MEGA DRIVE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MANUAL.pdf

Update: Sazpaimon got back to me. JIS X 0208 isn't necessarily a encoding, it's actually the character set that Shift JIS is based off of. Whatever VIC Tokai used, it was a variant that we just don't know of that used the JIS X 0208 set directly.

 

We don't have that one... but we'd like to... do you know where to find it?

 

Believe me, I'd love to post a link, but it seems it's stuck in a weird limbo where it's most likely in some Google Drive that can only be accessed by only a few extant links. It's not in the Exodus website's folders, and it's not on Sega Retro's files. I tried searching for the Japanese documents online, but could only find the English documents. I'll get back to this post when I get word about where to find the Japanese documents.

 

The Internet Archive is back up, kind of.