Sega Tech Docs archive

Ask anything your want about Megadrive/Genesis programming.

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Asagoth
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Asagoth » Thu Aug 29, 2019 1:19 pm

You're probably aware of this already... https://segaretro.org/TUME... it's open source and works great under DosBox (it's basically an historical artifact...) ... it contains several documents (user's guide, source code overview, programmers guide, configuration guide, "tPBin" user's guide and "tP16" user's guide (tP stands for "tUMEPack" ) which I compiled in a single pdf...

Nemesis
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Nemesis » Thu Aug 29, 2019 1:49 pm

Hpman wrote:
Thu Aug 29, 2019 12:01 pm
Microtec manuals for assembler and C compiler:

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/ ... -librarian
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/ ... konstanzde

Mirrored the PDF files if you don't feel like registering: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p6bu5gczw06s6 ... c.zip?dl=0
Thanks, I didn't have those. I've saved them off, will upload to the site soon.
Asagoth wrote:
Thu Aug 29, 2019 1:19 pm
You're probably aware of this already... https://segaretro.org/TUME... it's open source and works great under DosBox (it's basically an historical artifact...) ... it contains several documents (user's guide, source code overview, programmers guide, configuration guide, "tPBin" user's guide and "tP16" user's guide (tP stands for "tUMEPack" ) which I compiled in a single pdf...
I actually had no idea about this! That goes to show why an archive is needed, some tools/docs/info that a group of people are well aware of others have no idea about, since it often comes down right now to seeing a certain thread 8 years ago on a random forum. Thanks very much for bringing this tool to my attention, I'll definitely add it, and I'm interested in any other "period" graphics/sound tools from the era that were used in development.

Nemesis
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Nemesis » Thu Aug 29, 2019 1:53 pm

I've just pushed a significant update for the Saturn section, adding in content for the DTS (Developer Technical Support) newsletters, CDs, and website archives, as well as the Japanese developer CDs, including the full image of the CD I pulled those new Japanese Saturn developer docs from. I also provided live mirrors of the Japanese html documentation, and the DTS website archives. A lot of this stuff has been very hard to locate, and quite inaccessible until now, so enjoy. A translation of the Japanese docs to English is making steady progress, but it'll be a few more days yet before I've got that ready to go (it's 2800 html files!).

BigEvilCorporation
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by BigEvilCorporation » Thu Aug 29, 2019 2:43 pm

Here's all my 32X stuff (Elliot Gay copy) at 600dpi: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/etnlae4nw0vf ... aC__a?dl=0

Pages 36-48 missing from the Technical Manual.
A blog of my Megadrive programming adventures: http://www.bigevilcorporation.co.uk

Nemesis
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Nemesis » Thu Aug 29, 2019 5:48 pm

Awesome! I've incorporated all your new scans into the archives on the website, with OCR performed and the tech bulletins separated out. I've also combined the hardware manual back into a single unified document. That's made a huge improvement to the quality of the available 32x documentation, thanks for that!

Now all we need is a better complete MegaCD hardware manual scan. Anyone know the origin story behind the mysterious "Sphere Inc" partial scans we have? We have four separate scans of that doucment, but three of them are all from a dodgy faxed version leaving plenty of barely readable content. The "Sphere Inc" version is the only one that was from a clean source, but we only have some of the pages scanned. Some more MegaCD tech bulletins would be nice too, we're missing half of them at least right now.

Nemesis
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Nemesis » Mon Sep 02, 2019 10:13 am

A couple of days later than I wanted, but I've just uploaded an initial translation of the Japanese Saturn developer docs, in both offline and live hosted versions. If you'd like to take a peek, here's the hosted links:
http://docs.exodusemulator.com/Archives ... hyousi.htm - English
http://docs.exodusemulator.com/Archives ... hyousi.htm - Japanese
I haven't actually done a detailed comparison between the English and Japanese docs, but they seem to follow the same layout/structure in the few manuals I checked, so it's likely they largely share the same content. Worth digging through though, for anything that might have been dropped.

The translation isn't without its issues. There are 2801 html files, so a manual translation was out of the question. Through custom tooling written for the purpose, and some blatent abuse of the Google translate API, I've pushed all the content through. There were some issues with escaped characters or alternate Japanese symbols being converted to html control characters. I've tried to locate and correct these using a variety of methods, but some undoubtedly got through, so some pages may have invisible content or broken formatting. You can let me know about those issues here and I'll correct them. You can probably use google translate on the hosted original Japanese version of the page in these cases to work around any issues. There are also 2299 gif images too. None of the text in any of these images are translated. The images are too low resolution for OCR to work properly, and even if they weren't, the English text is generally much longer than the Japanese text, making simple substitution within the original images difficult. I'd recommend cross-comparing with the English docs. Most of the images will have translated versions in the English manuals most likely.

Despite these issues, the English translation is quite serviceable at this point, so give it a go if you're interested.
Last edited by Nemesis on Mon Sep 02, 2019 11:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

TmEE co.(TM)
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by TmEE co.(TM) » Mon Sep 02, 2019 11:31 am

Both links are same...
Mida sa loed ? Nagunii aru ei saa ;)
http://www.tmeeco.eu
Files of all broken links and images of mine are found here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/FileDen

Nemesis
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Nemesis » Mon Sep 02, 2019 11:59 am

Whoops! Thanks for that, fixed. :)

Asagoth
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Asagoth » Sun Sep 08, 2019 9:09 pm

https://segaretro.org/CodeScape_(Saturn)... If you want to see it in action... just download the demo (composed by 6 videos)...

Nemesis
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Nemesis » Mon Sep 09, 2019 12:18 am

Thanks for the link. Do you know if any copies of the CodeScape software itself have been shared anywhere? I've used it for the Dreamcast, but I don't think I've ever seen it for the Sega Saturn.

Asagoth
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by Asagoth » Mon Sep 09, 2019 7:33 am

Nemesis wrote:
Mon Sep 09, 2019 12:18 am
Thanks for the link. Do you know if any copies of the CodeScape software itself have been shared anywhere? I've used it for the Dreamcast, but I don't think I've ever seen it for the Sega Saturn.
Sorry mate... unfortunately not ... all I know is that Cross Products developed it until Version 3 ... after that Cross Products was acquired by Imagination Technologies in 2001 and they continued supporting and improving the debugger until now... in fact ... when it was released in 1996 it was not used just by Sega and video game development companies as the debugger for Saturn and Dreamcast... it was also used for general Hitachi SH processor based development and used heavily by companies like Harman Becker, BMW, Bosch, Porsche and others...

AamirM
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Re: Sega Tech Docs archive

Post by AamirM » Fri Sep 13, 2019 7:37 pm

This is a gold mine. Especially the Saturn stuff.

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