General Questions and Information Thread

Oh god, it's arrived from Spain, but whew, I don't even know where to begin with this thing. It's cracked in several places. It's still reverse engineer-able, so I will be doing that. But I will definitely be making some tweaks to its design.

 

I just noticed that along with the Dengeki 1993 Top 30, they also published platform specific Top 10s. Points only, but from the monthly charts which published both points and total sales estimates we can see that the multiplier was x55.

Code (Text):

1.  
2.                                                             ; Dengeki                  Beep!  
3. Pos Title                                        {Date    } ; Points (Total Dengeki) / Points {Beep/Total Dengeki Ratio}
4. 01. Puyo Puyo                                    {92.12.11} ; 4,793  (x55 = 263,615) / 19,660 {x13.41
5. 02. Shining Force II                             {93.10.01} ; 3,137  (x55 = 172,535) /  8,949 {x19.28}
6. 03. Silpheed                                     {93.07.30} ; 2,460  (x55 = 135,300) /  8,046 {x16.82}
7. 04. Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium  {93.12.17} ; 1,768  (x55 =  97,240) /  5,838 {x16.66}
8. 05. Fatal Fury                                   {93.04.23} ; 1,677  (x55 =  92,235) /  4,678 {x19.72}
9. 06. Streets of Rage 2                            {93.01.14} ; 1,561  (x55 =  85,855) /  5,114 {x16.79}  
10. 07. Sonic the Hedgehog 2                         {92.11.21} ; 1,550  (x55 =  85,250) /  4,855 {x17.56}
11. 08. Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition {93.09.28} ; 1,279  (x55 =  70,345) /  7,223 { x9.74}
12. 09. Seima Densetsu 3x3 Eyes                      {93.07.23} ; 1,079  (x55 =  59,345) /  3,851 {x15.41}
13. 10. Yumemi Mystery Mansion                       {93.12.10} ;   907  (x55 =  49,885) /  1,481 {x33.68}
14.  

Here I compared the Dengeki total sales to Beep! Mega Drive points, where titles had dropped out of the Beep! monthly chart I estimated the points to be half of the last charting title. This doesn't make much of a difference as most titles (Puyo Puyo being a notable exception) sales are heavily dominated by the first couple of months. Another caveat, Beep! September chart finishes October 1st, thus catching Shining Force II first day sales. The October chart starts October 1st, so would seem to include the first day sales of Shining Force II in the following month too. For this reason I didn't include the points for Shining Force II from the September chart.

I was quite surprised at how similar most of the ratios were, even the two outliers Street Fighter II at x10 and Yumemi at x34 are only half and 2x the ratio average, which is in the same ballpark IMO.

The average ratio for Beep points comes out at x18. So from late 1992 through early 1994 you can multiply Softbank/Beep! Mega Drive points by 18 to come up with an estimate of total sales.

 

GamesMaster -> The Terminator/Video coverage

I've added preliminary TV/video support - it's basically the same as how we do magazines. The "video coverage" terminology might not be great - feel free to suggest something better.

There's work to be done on displaying the information, but it's being stored correctly:

https://segaretro.org/Special:CargoTables/videonames
https://segaretro.org/Special:CargoTables/episodenames

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

I don't yet know how to handle one-off news reports or teletext, and I'm conscious the code is already unreadable, but hey, GamesMaster should work.

 

There's a very nice Sega Versus Billboard unit for sale on ebay right now. The price is actually really good all things considered what you get with it. I probably spent close to $400 in total costs to get my unit up and running. This one comes with harness adapters I don't even have.

If anyone's ever wanted one or knows someone who has a Versus City cab with a broken billboard unit, this is kind of a steal!

 

RE: Ben the Boffin:

https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:SegaPro_UK_20.pdf&page=100

Got his face on some Krusty's (Super) Fun House ads.

This is the only good Simpsons game to come out of Acclaim... and it isn't even really a Simpsons game. I've had the first two music tracks stuck in my head for about 25 years.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFMA6w5nFVB/

Shinichi Higashi worked on Sylvan Tale.

The in-game staff roll credits "Tetsu" and "East" as the artists. Have either of these pseudonyms shown up elsewhere?

 

Sonic Chaos for "East".

 

Shinichi Higashi = 東 真一
East = 東

 

The latest Football Manager is set for launch in November on everything that isn't a PlayStation. So that's 15 years worth of games we barely understand.

And it reminded me of recent news:



Because we live in a world where this can happen, Hashtag United recently got promoted to the Essex Senior League, and are now in the ninth tier of English football. Their current sponsor is... Football Manager, which means the team is partly funded by Sega.

Not that this is anything particularly new - Football Manager has been sponsoring teams for years (AFC Wimbledon is in league one), but I mean... Wimbledon's a place. Hashtag United didn't even exist five years ago.

 

New Football Manager means that the old one get delisted forever.

 

So this disc on the Internet Archive contains the raw, original Adobe Illustrator assets for the original boxarts of some Sega games including Bug, Fighting Vipers, and Virtual ON!.

It's a little tricky to access the data, so I've uploaded the extracted contents here. NOTE: Some filenames have been modified as Windows systems won't allow those characters in a file name.

Perhaps someone more savvy in Illustrator can be of assistance in restoring the files to their original looks for the Wiki.

 

I think I came across this before but Mac formatting meant it didn't extract properly, or whatever.

Most of these seem to be EPS files but the resolution is quite low:



I'm not going to pretend I'm a postscript expert though - I might be doing it wrong.

 

Okay there are a couple of vectors, though some do seem to want Adobe Illustrator.


https://retrocdn.net/File:ESRB_1996_T.svg

Here's the 1996 version of the ESRB T rating.

 

My twitter friend managed to open and export all of them at 600 dpi! EZ uploads for the wiki here.

 

What was his/her method - so I know how to tackle this if it comes up again?

 

Not sure if this is the right topic for this kind of things since my previous post was ignored, but here goes: the "complete playthrough" linked at the bottom of this page is dead (that channel is closed apparently). I'm also not sure why that particular unlicensed game had a playthrough while the other ones didn't, but if you want to add more playthroughs, you can scavenge my channel since I've been making videos of them:

• Fighter Sonic
• Jurassic Boy
• Chaoji Yinsu Xiaozi
• Sonic Jam 6 (not a complete playthrough)
• Sonic the Hedgehog (that SNES Speedy Gonzales hack) (not a complete playthrough)
• Sonic 6 (that Game Boy Speedy Gonzales hack)

I'd add them to the respective pages myself, but yeah, you know how wiki logins work these days, also I don't like to spam, so I'll just leave the links here and never talk about them again.

 

Anybody have backups of Sega's 'Creator Note' developer interview series?

Just realized something distressing: Sega seems to have removed this from their site.

Original link (down): https://sega.jp/fb/creators/home.html
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304054611/https://sega.jp/fb/creators/home.html

The Problem: The Internet Archive only has the first 20 interviews.

For example, the interview with Yaiman of Treasure (linked on SegaRetro) does not seem to be available anywhere:
https://sega.jp/fb/creators/vol_25/1.html
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://sega.jp/fb/creators/vol_25/1.html

Although the second page is available on the IA:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130623050440/https://sega.jp/fb/creators/vol_25/2.html

I'm not even sure what other interviews were after the first twenty, so we have no way of knowing what's missing unless someone has backed this up. It would be a huge loss if these interviews are gone...

 

Some were mirrored:
https://segaretro.org/Category:Japanese_interviews

it was on the TODO page for years, but nobody stepped up to finish the job

 

I managed to find the first page of the Yaiman interview. It seems like Sega moved these to its own "archive" site but then removed them at a later date.

Original (down): http://sega.jp/archive/creators/vol_25/1.html
IA (without pics): https://web.archive.org/web/20080320124300/http://sega.jp/archive/creators/vol_25/1.html

However, the index page for interviews 21-30 is still not archived for that URL either, so there's no way of knowing what those interviews were.

 

Double post - please ignore.