Monthly Archives

April 2016

SEGA To Allow People To Share Mega Drive ROM Hacks Through Steam Workshop

Yesterday Sega Europe announced the SEGA Mega Drive Classics Hub for Steam. Basically it’s a fancy emulator shell that lets you play Mega Drive games in a virtual room. It has the standard features you might expect officially released emulated games to have like save states and visual filters. But outside of that, it’ll have one very interesting sounding feature: Steam Workshop support.
According to Sega’s blog post, the Steam Workshop support is for “modified versions” of the Mega Drive games. You might think that this sounds a lot like they are letting people share ROM hacks, which would be huge news. And it turns out: they are! It was later confirmed on Twitter that you’ll be able to share “custom ROMs” of the games with other Steam users. So yeah, ROM hacks.
It’s no news that Sega is okay with people making and sharing ROM hacks. After all, they haven’t tried to stop us from letting people host them on this site. But to let people share them through an official channel like this has never been done before. More details on how Steam Workshop support will exactly work will be shared next week, but so far this all sounds very promising.
The SEGA Mega Drive Classics Hub will launch on April 28th, and will be released as a free update to the current Mega Drive emulator on Steam. It’ll be compatible with all of the Mega Drive games Sega are selling on Steam, and you’ll be able to make use of the hub if you already own any of them. This of course includes all of the Mega Drive Sonic games that are being sold on Steam.

April 21, 2016 by TimmiT

Community, Fan Works, Miscellaneous

#TakeMyMoneySoE: Or, a campaign to get Sega Europe to localise games

https://twitter.com/SEGA_Europe
This is Sega Europe. They do things like localise games from Japanese and release them in the UK, Germany, France, Australia, etc.
Oh, did I say localise games? Old hat. Their current job is to say “no information at this time” to any questions on Twitter. Over and over and over again. This is a shame, because SoE used to be the best Sega division, and SoA has rather cheekily stolen this title in the last couple of years.
The only reason I can think of for them doing this (other than just tormenting the audience, and I can’t see this as a logical business decision), is that they don’t think they’ll make any money on a release. That the translation won’t get them sales, and that they need some incentive or something.
Right. They want some incentive? Let’s bloody GIVE them an incentive! If the only thing they’re going to listen to is cold hard cash, I think we can do that. Continue Reading

April 15, 2016 by Overlord

Arcade Games, Community

Meet Sonic & Knuckles Rock the Rock champion Chris Tang at Galloping Ghost Arcade’s SEGA Week

Sonic Retro sister site SEGAbits (say that ten times fast) is collaborating with Galloping Ghost Arcade, America’s largest arcade, for SEGA Week from Monday, April 25th to Saturday, April 30th at midnight. Galloping Ghost Arcade is located just outside Chicago in Brookfield, IL, and features over 500 classic and modern arcade machines, and several of them are made by SEGA. SEGA Week’s main focus will be tournaments covering 10 SEGA arcade titles, of which will remain a mystery until the day of the tournament. Still, if you want an idea of what to expect, the arcade has SEGA titles which include OutRun, Space Harrier, Thunder Blade, Monkey Ball, Crazy Taxi, Zaxxon, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, Golden Axe, Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder and several more. It is also the only arcade in America to have both SegaSonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Championship.
Continue Reading