Jeez, It’s been 4 years I posted this old article.
I didn’t post much on the Sega Channel here since. (After all, it wasn’t really related… hah! Like that would’ve stopped me…)
You’d probably have expected me to have given up on my hopes of obtaining the Japanese BIOs ROM. But if you did, you don’t really know just how stubborn I am, do you?
I searched Yahoo Japan Auctions for the years since that article in order to retrieve it for a ROM dumper. Thankfully, In July of this year, my searching finally paid off as not one, but two copies eventually surfaced on Yahoo Japan Auctions – and for significantly cheaper than my recent 8M Pack hauls, too.
The cartridges eventually got in the hands of DocEggfan who recorded this video.
After that, he sent them to RetroJunkie to ROM dump. Long story short, MISSION COMPLETE.
Mega Drive ROMs:
Sega Channel (Japan) (BIOS) (BB40010501) | セガチャンネル (BIOS) (BB40010501)
ROM Download
Sega Channel (Japan) (BIOS) (BB40002456) | セガチャンネル (BIOS) (BB40002456)
ROM Download
Discussion over the BIOs dumps – and future things to search for regarding Sega Channel content – is currently happen over at this Sonic Retro forum thread.
You’re probably asking why I put so much effort into this, so let me leave a bit of a personal story.
Around 1996 or so, I was on a summer vacation and took a trip to a certain suburbs’ local arts festival. There was a Sega Channel Kiosk. (US version, obviously. I played the Punisher on that sucker.)
I played it for a good while and wanted to subscribe to the service, but unfortunately it was not available in my local region – and never was. I’m one unlucky sob story, am I?
But anyway! That was just a year before I then got the Nintendo Power which teased BS Zelda at me.
I’ve always said previously that that Nintendo Power magazine was what got me interested in Satellaview. But perhaps before that, that display of Sega Channel before my eyes got me interested in the very idea of the online distribution model for these systems. Of course, this is probably heavily driven by how these were both completely unavailable to me. It felt like a one-two punch! The online game distribution services both teased me with their allure and then went and ceased to exist. And now I want them, and I’m doing crazy things to get them back.
Let’s just hope it works out. 🙂
