SpritesMind.Net

As we all know there has to be more on the subject of official documentation. so i decided to email Julian who happens to be part of the Accreditation board for Sega's Informative Advice Unit. I was given his contact details as my brother worked for Shine Mill enterprises who had close relations to Sega in the 90's.

Well i got a response...

Here's what they had to say.

"Dear Mr. Ioannou,

Thank you for your request of information from Sega Corporation.
Unfortunately, Sega and its subsidiaries cannot release specific information regarding programming documents used by our developers since we had liquidated all solvency of Sega Genesis hardware.
Most of our original documentation are held within our servers and I can tell you that rights to the Sega documents are allowed when we issue a temporary license for these documents.

A costly fee would need to be paid towards a specific 1 user license accreditation agreement set out by the FNCU (our main accreditation unit for Sega Corporation). As much as we do support arcade development by 3rd Parties;

We cannot allow home console development for no cost and such disclosure of the information without the supplemental fee would be against our policies and procedures.

If however your usage would be for arcade systems programming we can allow you use of our documents.

Subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966, the use of our documentation would need to be approved by our FNCU and strict usage of the documents would need an agreement set out by you and for what intentions.

Furthermore to allow access we need to believe that our agreement would be enforced and not released/shown/copied and would need to be proven.

I'm sorry this is a little detailed but I am sure this will help in someway

Many Thanks and please if any thing else is require please dont hesitate to contact me again as i would be more than happy to help answer your enquiries

Julian Grainer
Secretary of FNCU for Sega Corporation"

Sounds promising dont you think..practically lie an say its for an arcade system relating to similar hardware of the Megadrive and we get it handed to us?

Sounds like he's saying that yes, they still have that documentation and that they will give it to you for a big pile of money, if and only if they believe that you won't distribute it, and that if you do, they'll beat you to death with the lawyer stick.

Are you offering to be our sacrificial lamb?

What did you ask him? Surely he can't expect anyone to develop any serious projects for something like System16 in 2010..? When he says "arcade systems" he may be talking about one of their newer x86-based arcade systems.

But hey, more information is always welcome. I'd love to have developer's manuals for their older arcade systems (stuff like memory maps, I/O description, VDP description, etc.).

Well it seems that whatever documents they do have they dont want to let out without a hefty fee.

I dont tend to spend that much but for the sake of the megadrive and my obsession for it i might consider doing so

I thought the hefty fee was only for home console docs? It sounded like all you needed to give them to obtain arcade systems docs was a confirmation that you would not share that information with others (e.g. by signing an NDA).

To be honest I'm not certain they'd have anything that would be worth our time. I guess it would be interesting to know what sample code they provided in their SDK, but I doubt there'd be any interesting hardware knowledge.

Either way I'm not sure it would be worth the fee they'd want to levy for it. :P

Well from the reply im not too clear on what they were charging for...I dont know if this guy just wanted some cash for himself lol...

But ill email them back...

I suspect it's not really worth it. The development docs for the Sega CD and 32X got leaked quite a while ago and the Megadrive/Genesis is a pretty well understood beast these days. The kinds of details that are still unknown probably aren't present in the official docs anwyay.

First off, I'm not sure if "programming documents" would include source code. With that...

Mask of Destiny wrote:I suspect it's not really worth it. The development docs for the Sega CD and 32X got leaked quite a while ago and the Megadrive/Genesis is a pretty well understood beast these days. The kinds of details that are still unknown probably aren't present in the official docs anwyay.

Yeah, at this point, the only things I can think of are missing:

• The complete Sega Sound Manual
• More addendums and bulletins (but given the XBAND ones this may not be likely)
• Documentation of the tools used to compress data to what the Sonic hacking community call Nemesis, Kosinski, and Enigma formats that are used in multiple games
• Documentation of the SMPS sound driver and its variants, including the two-DAC sample Z80 auxiliary driver used in Pulseman and Gunstar Heroes, and possibly more games (I haven't ripped DAC samples out of everything yet , but I'm sure it's used in more games)

Pretty much everything we have here is either already known or may already be known, so... yeah.

andlabs wrote:First off, I'm not sure if "programming documents" would include source code. With that...

Mask of Destiny wrote:I suspect it's not really worth it. The development docs for the Sega CD and 32X got leaked quite a while ago and the Megadrive/Genesis is a pretty well understood beast these days. The kinds of details that are still unknown probably aren't present in the official docs anwyay.

Yeah, at this point, the only things I can think of are missing:

• The complete Sega Sound Manual
• More addendums and bulletins (but given the XBAND ones this may not be likely)
• Documentation of the tools used to compress data to what the Sonic hacking community call Nemesis, Kosinski, and Enigma formats that are used in multiple games
• Documentation of the SMPS sound driver and its variants, including the two-DAC sample Z80 auxiliary driver used in Pulseman and Gunstar Heroes, and possibly more games (I haven't ripped DAC samples out of everything yet , but I'm sure it's used in more games)

Pretty much everything we have here is either already known or may already be known, so... yeah.

Have you managed to build a sound engine for games so that music and sound fx are played?

I cant seem to get around this problem.

Well, that's not hard at all. Just don't update the registers for a music channel when the channel is being used for a sound effect. Turn off the sound for every channel that a sound effect uses at the start of the sound effect. Remember the current instrument in use for a channel, whether it's used by music or a sound effect, and update the instrument if it changes. That's how my sound engine works.

That's how every other engine works I guess... There's panning, volume level, maybe some other effect statuses to keep an eye on also, but that part depends on what your engine does(or doesn't).