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Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More)
somat wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
Very cool, I wonder why the service was never updated to work with
saturn. No hdd would be my guess. with no hdd games have to be absurdly
small to fit in ram.
I will note that as I was reading the saturn specs(I am unfamiliar with
the system) I found that there are save cartridges and a saturn modem.
Everything needed hardware wise. It looks like they made a
internet(dialup) based version for saturn.
And final thoughts: It would be neat to see what sort of back end
services they were using if those were in the recovered backup tapes.
probably quite a bit more sensitive than releasing roms so may not
happen.
aussieguy1234 wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
There should be some kind of video game preservation law.
If you stop selling a game, you're obligated to release it for free,
including any server code that game depends on.
pinewurst wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
In a previous work life, I remember working on a Sega Channel/XBAND
hybrid.
Famicoman wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
This sounds amazing, I’m a big fan of the tech that went into both
the Sega Channel and XBAND platforms.
Any more information you’d be willing to share about your work?
pinewurst wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
It was a joint Catapult/Scientific Atlanta thing - I don’t think
it actually went anywhere beyond some prototyping of server
streaming and client encryption.
garciansmith wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
This is very neat, though the difficulty and time it took to get all
this material speaks to the problems with subscription services and
game preservation. As more and more services and games move to
subscription-only models where individuals do not own or even control
local copies of the games they play, once those services shut down (or
specific titles are pulled) more and more games will be locked away,
forgotten, and then lost forever.
jakedata wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
If it was Nintendo instead of Sega, everyone would be slapped with a
cease-and-desist backed up with the threat of lawsuits.
physicsguy wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
Interested in the Lost World: Jurassic park variants. I was 5 when that
came out in 1997 and it was an odd release since barely anyone had a
Megadrive anymore but we had one and my parents wouldn’t buy me a
PlayStation, so they relented and bought me that as I loved dinosaurs.
It is honestly such a great game and was really underappreciated since
it was so late in the release cycle for that console.
ndiddy wrote 1 day ago:
One of the most interesting things in this release IMO is the internal
documents from Sega Channel management. For example, in this binder [1]
there's a bunch of research documents trying to figure out how to turn
the service around after it began underperforming their expectations.
It seems like the main problem they ran into was that the service
appealed mainly to the small minority of "heavy players" (who they
defined as playing more than 14 hours per week). Their original
projections were that they could target cable subscribers who own
Genesis systems and play games more than 4 hours a week, but they found
that most people who weren't gaming fanatics preferred to own a few
games and rent games as needed rather than subscribe to Sega Channel.
The other big problem they ran into was parental resistance. A large
amount of parents they talked to viewed Sega Channel as an "open tap"
that would increase their child's time spent playing games. An ongoing
subscription also was only a one-time "give" from the parent to the
child, whereas buying/renting games was one "give" per occasion, which
was more psychologically attractive to the parents.
[1]: https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/ef6246e4-79be-4b02-b262-a...
zorked wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
The document includes musings about a PC version of Sega Channel. So,
kind of like Steam, but in 1996.
reactordev wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
It was impossible to compete with blockbuster at the time. They had
walls of games to rent and rent we did.
pooyan93 wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
In addition to rentals, around maybe 1994-1995, some stores (I
don’t remember where) would have bargain bins or racks with some
older games that were really inexpensive on CD-ROMs, and this
continued for years. I remember snapping up some great old games
this way.
Much earlier, as a kid I’d sometimes get games on cassette tapes
in the bookstore and Radio Shack. Later it was great going to
software stores that had games on 5 1/4” floppy diskettes in
boxes. That stuff rocked.
I have had little interest in the games since then. Everything
seems the same: mostly FPS / 3D crap. I don’t see any escape from
this in the world building AI space either; they just added
goggles.
jghn wrote 1 day ago:
we had this in college. It failed to work more often than it worked,
but when it worked it was awesome and way ahead of its time.
jerf wrote 1 day ago:
"Sega broke ground in the late 90s with one of the first digital game
distribution systems for consoles."
By the time this came on to the scene the idea was already 14 years
old. Intellivision was doing it in 1980: [1] The idea blows people's
minds if they think of a TV channel as just a channel for delivering
TV, but the concept is not that hard if you realize it's just a way to
broadcast data, most of which happens to be television video signals.
The problem is making it cost-effective for a console to have an amount
of RAM normally associated with a cartridge. For most of console
gaming's lifespan cart size completely outclassed RAM size so storing a
full cartridge image in RAM was expensive for what was generally the
low end of the market. Plus the RAM you could stick in the receiver put
a firm upper limit on how large a cart you could broadcast, and in an
era still undeniably ruled by Moore's Law the size of the more
desirable carts tended to outrun the RAM put in these things so they
tended to become rapidly unable to keep up with the cart sizes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayCable
Melatonic wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
Couldn't they just have released a "blank" cartridge with RAM?
LocalH wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
That's essentially what the Sega Channel adapter was. The service
didn't rely on something like you'd expect from a modern cable
modem. The games were broadcast in a round-robin fashion
(presumably broken up into blocks, as I remember the time to
initiate a download was never super long, but the whole process to
play a game did take a small amount of time). The adapter thus
needed hardware and software in order to decode with the one-way
signal to download the menu and game data.
Nextgrid wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
The main cartridge (with the cable modem) was presumably heavily
subsidized by the expected recurring revenue, which relies on the
ephemeralness of the games. Offering RAM carts (even at cost) would
threaten that revenue as people can stock up on games and cancel
their subscription once they've built up their collection.
xp84 wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
That's got to be a good part of it. And to top it off, there wasn't
persistent storage available locally, so you couldn't build up a
little library of playable content you received from such a service,
having to sacrifice the old stuff to get something new, and if they
didn't rebroadcast that item, you would never see it again.
I'm sure to some kinds of people that was fine, but I think people
kind of don't like having to delete something they like even a little
-- even if they won't play it again, they'd rather know they can.
dr-detroit wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
some months they had General Chaos and some they didnt. perhaps
the coolest thing was only my one friend had it so we had to go
over to his house to play it not like today where I would just
passively consume it in a sad room all alone.
darepublic wrote 1 day ago:
I remember my cousin excitedly telling me that his mom had got him Sega
Channel. My mind was blown. However it was soon taken away per
parental discretion and I never got a chance to visit and play it. Back
to Sonic 2, and Eternal Champions.
devinprater wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, I never heard of that before today. Sega Genesis was my first
console. I still remember the six button controller. It worked well for
Mortal Kombat 3.
pram wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
I still think the Genesis 6 button and the Saturn 6 button are the
best controllers ever made.
pezezin wrote 16 hours 59 min ago:
If you want a modern version, get yourself an 8bitdo M30, it is
really good.
bityard wrote 1 day ago:
Growing up, the Sega Channel was something I desperately wanted as a
kid. Unfortunately, I did not have a Genesis, we did not have cable TV,
and our parents would have balked at spending $40/month (adjusted for
inflation) on a service to keep us from going outside to play.
nomilk wrote 1 day ago:
From Wikipedia:
> The Sega Channel was an online game service developed by Sega for the
Sega Genesis video game console, serving as a content delivery system.
Launched on December 12, 1994, the Sega Channel was provided to the
public by TCI and Time Warner Cable through cable television services
by way of coaxial cable. It was a pay to play service, through which
customers could access Genesis games online, play game demos, and get
cheat codes. Lasting until July 31, 1998, the Sega Channel operated
three years after the release of Sega's next generation console, the
Sega Saturn. Though criticized for its poorly timed launch and costly
subscription fee, the Sega Channel has been praised for its innovations
in downloadable content and impact on online game services.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel
Aissen wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, I thought those would be as lost as the Doctor Who episodes. Kudos
for the great research and archive work!
Jeremy1026 wrote 1 day ago:
I felt like the coolest kid in the neighborhood with Sega Channel. It
was so cool to have a dozen or so new games every month. There was a
stunt car driving game that was on there at one point. I have no idea
what it was called, I couldn't really explain it anymore than that, but
whew was it a great time when it was there!
toast0 wrote 1 day ago:
Race Drivin' maybe? [1] (sound level is high) ... or maybe the
earlier game Hard Drivin'
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fsCDXk-pk
Jeremy1026 wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
That is 100% it! Time to fire up an emulator.
kevinsync wrote 1 day ago:
> The Berenstain Bears’ A School Day
Given how often people love to swear with certainty that they remember
Berenstain spelled as Berenstein [0], I find it kind of
neat/interesting when this sort of digital archaeology refutes the
silliness with undeniable proof.
[0] [1] Edit: that's one of the ROMs they recovered from tape backup --
wanted to add context since, if you don't actively expand the list in
the article, my comment appears wildly non-sequitur
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain_Bears#Name_discrepanc...
userbinator wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
I think it's a "mental autocorrect"; there's far more names ending in
-stein than -stain. You may amuse yourself by clicking on these links
sequentially: [1] [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstein
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain
toast0 wrote 1 day ago:
> I find it kind of neat/interesting when this sort of digital
archaeology refutes the silliness with undeniable proof.
Undeniable proof that the conspiracy goes so deep it altered tapes as
they were read. :P
LocalH wrote 1 day ago:
To me, it's part satire and part arrogance. Some people find it so
hard to understand that their memory can be faulty that they'll
construct a whole theory around something in order to avoid doing
so. Others capitalized on that in a humorous way to contribute
further to the "Mandela effect".
Of course, the silliness has always been refuted, since nobody has an
authentic example of "Berenstein" that isn't itself an error or
misprint.
It also touches on the lack of care that people tend to have when it
comes to getting names right. The creators of the Bears dealt with
this in school, with a teacher who absolutely refused to believe that
the A spelling was correct, asserting "there is no such name". A very
large number of people throughout history have suffered similar
fates, where others would dispute the spelling of their name, or
indeed their entire name.
piltdownman wrote 9 hours 2 min ago:
The Mandela Effect isn't used to describe coping mechanisms around
the faulty recollection of an individual; rather it categorises a
systemic and widespread incidence of false collective memories.
There's no satirical or arrogant component inherent in this
phenomenon. For example, pick any five people at random in your
life and ask them if they remember any of the following iconic
lines:
* Snow White "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them
all?"
* ST:TOS "Beam me up, Scotty"
* Star Wars "Luke, I am your Father"
* Wizard of Oz "Fly my pretties, fly"
* Casablanca "Play it again, Sam."
I've done about 50-100 of these 5x5 samples in casual
groups/workshops and have never had a single all-negative response.
Problem is, none of the lines above were ever said.
LocalH wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
The Mandela Effect itself is not meant to be humorous, no, but
inevitably a non-zero number of participants are involved for
humorous reasons.
empressplay wrote 1 day ago:
Sega Channel cut my game rental costs in half (sorry Blockbuster) and I
played so many games I would have never bothered renting. Good times.
nickpeterson wrote 1 day ago:
And now blockbuster is out of business, thanks a lot empressplay.
jdubs1984 wrote 17 hours 46 min ago:
Blockbuster went out of business because they made the video rental
market incredibly boring and had no vision for the future. Once
they got market dominance it became just 500 copies of the first
fast and furious as a guaranteed rental, and all the cool and
interesting stuff gone.
mjevans wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
Observationally, their model was roughly like this:
* For hit movies buy an obscene number of copies to rent month 1
* Sell off some for a discount as the rentals dwindled
* Discount anything over a reasonable backlog / duplicates set
shortly after
Offhand I think they tried to time this to end well enough before
the release windows slid to TV + Ads distribution.
* Rent the backlog until dead or until they sold in a discount
bin
Some independent shops also competed. I recall my parents kindly
rented a few less popular games they happened to carry. Not sure
about videos, might have been better for stuff not mainstream
enough at the big national chain.
nickpeterson wrote 15 hours 28 min ago:
I’m pretty sure it was people playing sega channel games.
exogeny wrote 1 day ago:
Oh man. Yeah, Sega Channel was amazing. It's true that it came pretty
late in the Genesis' life and by that time, Sega was prioritizing
Saturn but man, I loved SC and looked forward to the first of the month
when all of the menus would switch.
Melatonic wrote 1 day ago:
Sega Channel was so ahead of its time
millzlane wrote 1 day ago:
This is awesome! I used to have sega channel as a kid. I never had a
game console and a Sega is the only one my mom ever bought us. We were
fortunate enough to have cable TV from TCI cable and they had Sega
channel. Every month we'd get new games and eventually they changed it
to 2 weeks.
marpstar wrote 1 day ago:
We were also on TCI when I was a kid. I begged for Sega Channel. My
mom tried to sign us up, but being across the river from the city
meant we got half the TV channels, no PPV, and no Sega Channel.
nubinetwork wrote 1 day ago:
Cool, it's nice that they're sharing them instead of adding them to
Frank's private collection.
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