General Questions and Information Thread

Andlabs · Aug 25, 2011

Hello again

Does anyone remember when Sonic Eraser was discovered and people were getting the Sega Game Toshokan (we thought it was Meganet at the time) games from the B Club! service? There are only two more Sega Game Toshokan games missing from the set: Columns and Flicky. It's entirely possible that these match their retail releases (the latter was only released retail overseas) but who knows, so does anyone have them or know where to still get them (isn't the service long dead? I think that's what Phugolz told me). Was anything else there?

Was/is Phantasy Star IV ever marketed with the "The End of the Millennium" tagline outside Japan? It's on the title screen but that just holds over from the Japanese version (which is called "Phantasy Star: Sennenki no Owari ni", which means "Phantasy Star: The End of the Millennium")

What is "Frog Feast"? I see both a Mega Drive and Mega CD entry in Guardiana and both are associated with the modern-retro-game scene (OlderGames and GoodDealGames, respectively). I can see the Mega CD version has been dumped, but I'm not sure if that's the GDG release or the original prototype... But what's up with this Mega Drive one? (I presume the game is an unreleased prototype given the listed developer made the Mega Drive The Great Waldo Search.)

Have the original versions of the various Mega CD prototypes reprinted by GoodDealGames survived? (I'm assuming he modified them in some way...)

I guess that's all for now... I thought I had more but I must have forgotten them. I'll ask later I guess =P

LocalH · Aug 25, 2011

Frog Feast is an indie game (from before indie games became cool and trendy) by Charles Doty of Rastersoft, and has been released across a number of platforms. Here's the list of demo versions, not sure why he doesn't list the MD version there but it's official. Guardiana is full of shit, Radiance Software had absolutely nothing to do with this game. They (and people who were too lazy and pilfered the info from them) are the only ones saying it's by Radiance.

Oh, and I don't know if you have a dump, and this link doesn't work for me (nor do any ROM downloads from this site apparently, so I don't know if the ROM is actually there or not) but if you can get it to work, there might be a dump here. That site also has homebrew stuff listed as well, I saw my First Time Out demo from way back as well as that old Peter Tomarken tribute I made when he passed. Interestingly enough, I don't see any ROM hacks on there though.

Andlabs · Aug 25, 2011

Yes, figuring out where Guardiana went wrong is one of the consequences of what I'm doing =P I do have a list of things to suggest fixing (primarily linking games together), meh. But you have to blame the guy for using the Radiance logo everywhere, including the copyright and boxes :|

Good that he released the Mega CD source (and the source to most other platforms). Strange about no info on the Mega Drive version; I can look into it later. His blog indicates he is still active; I'll probably wind up having to ask him. Actually, do you know if the source builds to the same thing that he sold?

ICEknight · Aug 26, 2011

About the Gooddealgames releases, I remember downloading Citizen-X before they started selling it, so at least that one is very likely to have been preserved properly.

EDIT: Oh, and about the Game Toshokan games, RyogaMasaki also had a hand in getting them. I remember back then at 'Cult, when they were trying to make an account for that Japan-only service that SEGA had.

Andlabs · Aug 30, 2011

So what about Phantasy Star IV's subtitle? Was The Story of Thor also ever advertised with "A Successor to the Light" as a subtitle?

Does anyone have even a remote idea of what type of book-on-CD Wonder Library demands to play?

Andlabs · Aug 31, 2011

Is it "Foreman for Real" or "Foreman For Real"? The US and AU MD boxes have every instance of the title in ALL CAPS; the US GB box has "Foreman for Real" at one point and everything else in all caps, and I can't find clear scans of anything else (including carts and manuals).

Is it "G-LOC Air Battle" or "G-LOC: Air Battle"? I can't find anything to suggest one or the other, and it sounds like Sega doesn't consider "Air Battle" part of the title.

Does the Mega Drive G-LOC have different music from the arcade version? I heard something about Matt Furniss writing the former...

ICEknight · Aug 31, 2011

Speaking of correct capitalization, this very site could do with some "Sonic The Hedgehog"...

Black Squirrel · Aug 31, 2011

"G-LOC" is probably the trademark, and then you have "G-LOC: Air Battle" for the standard game, and "G-LOC R360" for the crazy moving cabinet version

whether there should be a colon there would be dependant on the naming standards of Sega Retro. Not many games bother to put the colon on title screens or box art or whatever.

On a completely unrelated subject because I can't be bothered to make a topic of my own

THE SEGA AGES 2500 SERIES
http://segaretro.org/Sega_Ages_2500

apparently there's concept artwork, manuals and flyer scans stored within these games, similar to how Sonic Jam has digitised versions of the Mega Drive Sonic manuals. Seeing as there's 33 volumes covering vast chunks of Sega's history in the 1980s and early 1990s, it would be nice to extract this stuff from the games and mirror them on Sega Retro.

Any volunteers?

Andlabs · Aug 31, 2011

For Europeans: Was the Mega Drive version of Tintin in Tibet/Tintin au Tibet distributed outside France? Where was the Game Gear version distributed?

ICEknight · Sep 1, 2011

Andlabs said:

For Europeans: Was the Mega Drive version of Tintin in Tibet/Tintin au Tibet distributed outside France?
Click to expand...

It sure was, it's not like Tintin was banned in some countries or anything...

There's at least two different versions of the cover, "Tintin au Tibet" for France and "Tintin in Tibet". Not sure if other countries just used the English one, though.

Andlabs · Sep 1, 2011

Ok. I've only seen the French version of the MD one (and no one appears to have scans of the GG box), so I was just wondering (ROM sets all use the French name on top of that).

There's a slight possibility I might be able to do the Sega Ages 2500 stuff when I get more HDD space.

Andlabs · Sep 4, 2011

I've forgotten: why is it Game no Kanzume instead of Game no Kandume? The kana says du (?) instead of zu (?)...

Shoemanbundy · Sep 4, 2011

? is pronounced the same as ? in Japanese(well, unless you ask some people who say there's a tiny difference, I honestly can't tell). It's just become standard to represent the character in romaji with zu, just like with ?. But in order to be able to type them both you can't have them using the same spelling, so when you want to type ? you do have to type du.

That's it's only purpose really. As far as romanizing JP for sentences or titles of things go though, I don't think you ever or at least too commonly see them spelling it with "du." That just invites people to go around pronouncing it completely wrong.

Andlabs · Sep 4, 2011

Ah, I see; thanks. I also see that Hepburn says it should be zu =P

http://sega.jp/cgi-bin/csgame.cgi?rpp=20&sr=160&tt=&sy=&gr=&hw=11&fw=&sort=2 this says there was a Sakura Taisen on PC in 1994
http://game.sakura-taisen.com/databace/sakura_1.html this one says there wasn't
Who is right?

Also would ?? be "Kuuga" or "Kuhga" ? Or is that just differing romanization types?

Shoemanbundy · Sep 5, 2011

I'd write Kuu. I don't think I've ever seen an H used for long vowels like that unless it's an O like ?? or ?? or the like, and even then, they don't always use H's.

Sik · Sep 6, 2011

Considering how long vowels are made (in hiragana they just repeat the vowel sound, in katakana they use the dash), should be "kuu".

muteKi · Sep 8, 2011

Andlabs said:

Ah, I see; thanks. I also see that Hepburn says it should be zu =P

http://sega.jp/cgi-b...w=11&fw=&sort=2 this says there was a Sakura Taisen on PC in 1994
http://game.sakura-t...e/sakura_1.html this one says there wasn't
Who is right?

Also would ?? be "Kuuga" or "Kuhga" ? Or is that just differing romanization types?
Click to expand...

I have disc images for all 4 games here somewhere, so it almost certainly must be true.

Andlabs · Sep 9, 2011

Huh, could you provide more information on what you have?

Is the romanization of サクラ大戦Ｖ～さらば愛しき人よ～ "Sakura Taisen V: Saraba, Itoshiki Hito yo"?

On Sega of Japan's catalogue pages for the non-Sega consoles, there are a bunch of games listed as "partner" that Sega isn't listed as a publisher of (example: Milestone's ports, the 3DS version of BlazBlue Continuum Shift II, the Wii version of Codemasters's F1 2009, MadWorld (which was published by Spike in Japan)). The pages say "※パートナーズは、他社ブランド商品となります". Does this mean they are the distributor, the publisher, involved with the development, or something else? It sounds like the Japanese text is just a captain obvious "this means third party"...

muteKi · Sep 9, 2011

This would appear to be the box art to each version.

Found that here: http://bit.ly/p3fJW9

Andlabs · Sep 9, 2011

Oh, I knew about the PC release; I was saying Sega says there was one in 1994, but the Sakura Taisen site says it was 2000. What does your disk image say?

On another thought, I should probably see what the PC list says were released on PC, because I'm seeing things that I don't recognize from what we have on the franchise template...

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