shmups.system11.org

Strange indeed, re GAIII! As I clicked I was thinking to myself "didn't he and Julie do several Sega covers anyway?" SEGA PAY YOU TO DO SHIT THEN STEAL IT ANYWAY

And WTF I had no idea Ecco was one of his!

New page! Three year drought breaker! An auspicious start to this Wednesday evening.

Some of the examples of so-called tracing in that article are a bit of a stretch. Like the author (I'm not sure if it was Etch-A-Sketch or derbooboo) assumed that because Castlevania and Simon's Quest promo illustrations were traced from other illustrations, then Dracula's Curse promo art was also traced. But Tom Dubois's artwork for the game looks nothing like the Clyde Cadwell illustration they're comparing it to. Likewise, Akumajō Densetsu promo art looks nothing at all like the Return of the Jedi poster aside from the fact that they're both group shots of the main characters.

It's possible that the Japanese Golden Axe III illustration might not to be a copy of Boris Vallejo's unused version, but rather a separate commission that was done at the same time with the same instructions given to another artist (I know the JP illustration was featured in a Sega artbook, I think VGdensetsu covered the artist at one point). They never bothered to ask Vallejo to see if this was the case.

The plot thickens

The JP Golden Axe III artwork was by Shohei Oshiba, who did a few other stuff for them too.

Anyway, I've mentioned this before, but most of the information from that article comes from the 現代用語の予備知識/Gendaiyōgo no Yobichishiki (Background Knowledge of Neologisms), run by a guy who goes by Yadayon, but they simply refer to his page as "some Japanese site". They don't even cover some of the more interesting information on his page, like the fact that there's an earlier version of Ashura promo art where the main guy looks even more like Rambo (the sunglasses and helmet were added on the packaging version). I remember reading somewhere else that Ashura was always meant to be a Rambo game, but they could only get the license for the U.S. (the opposite of what happened with Hokuto no Ken).

Excellent to know, bookmarked. I must've missed you mentioning it the first time around, just a quick browse and I saw a ton of cool stuff I wasn't familiar with.



^ Always knew it was Bruce Willis, but not the exact reference! So it's John McClane cosplaying as Rick Deckard, haha.

Everyone who's into computers surely has heard that 1 byte = 8 bits. However, that's not necessarily true.

A byte, or syllable, is the number of bits needed to encode one character of text, so it is the smallest addressable amount of memory. This can vary depending on the hardware architecture. Historically, bytes with a size from 1 bit to 48 bits have existed, and some machines used variable byte sizes. The modern convention of 1 byte = 8 bits was established by the immense popularity of IBM's System/360 mainframe family, introduced in 1964.

More about it at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

Skies of Arcadia has much worse music on the Gamecube port than on the Dreamcast original. It is often said that this is due to lack of space: one 1.4 GB miniDVD versus the original version's two 1 GB discs. However, it seems that's not the real problem, or at least not the whole story. The Dreamcast version used InVision Interactive's CyberSound audio tools; but due to InVision's bankruptcy, Overworks had to hastily adopt different tools, so the result was a bit of a mess.

https://segaretro.org/CyberSound
https://skiesofarcadia.wikia.com/wiki/S ... esentation

The power supply unit of the IBM 5150 (the original PC) produced a meager 63.5 watts (for perspective: 200 watts today = cheapo low end). It was so weak that, to install a hard drive, you had to replace it with a better one, or buy the 5161 expansion chassis which came with its own power supply.

most people have two butt cheeks