Friday 8 March 2019

GreatS3k #001: Addition Tutor

We're in a unique position here at the 1k 'yard. Most other Sega-related blogs or sites focus on systems and games that have been digitised, dumped and emulated for years - decades even. But once you've exhausted your Mega Drives and Master Systems and Game Gears and Saturns and Dreamcasts and even obscurities such as the Pico and Beena, where can you turn to for brand new, freshly minted, digitised Sega game dumps? Well, that would be right here of course, with the humble Sega SC-3000.

The digitisation and preservation of games and software for the SC-3000 has so far been pretty thin on the ground. The guys over at SC-3000 Survivors have made a great start, with a handful of releases so far and an excellent tutorial on how to do it yourself with the M.E.S.S. emulator. I've been meaning to join in on this project for years, with about 100 .wav files sitting idly in a folder, languishing in digital limbo, begging for some digital restoration and remastering. I think 2019 might be the year I start to give it a red hot go.

Starting today, I'm going to try and commit to releasing a new digitally restored and remastered SC-3000 tape dump each week (but don't be surprised if I falter after the first week, life has a habit of getting in the way). This will build up a collection of digitised SC-3000 software I'm going to dub the "GreatS3k" set. The name comes from the old "Good" rom sets, but I'm going to include cover scans, tape scans, and manuals where I can, which makes it better than a "Good" set, it's a "Great" set (I see you groaning, and I chose to ignore you).

We might as well go alphabetical and start with the A's

GreatS3k Release #001: Addition Tutor


Addition Tutor was one of the very first games released by John Sands Electronics for the SC-3000 in Australia in 1983, and very likely part of the first batch of launch titles. It's not particularly fun or exciting, but if we discriminate against titles based on whether they are fun or exciting, than there aren't going to be many SC-3000 games to release in this collection.



The game also made its way across the ditch to New Zealand in 1984, released by Grandstand Leisure. I have copies of both games, and they play identically, with only the titlescreens and intros different in both versions.














Based on the SC-3000 Survivors method, I have loaded my raw analogue .wav files recorded from the tapes into M.E.S.S. and saved them back to a new .wav file as a pure square wave. I then edited them in Audacity to make them more consistent, with 10 seconds of silence at the start and 2 seconds of silence at the end. I then fixed up the square wav in a hex editor, as Audacity exported the sound with some minor impurities. 

I only had one copy of the Australian/John Sands version, but I had a recording of Side A and Side B of the New Zealand/Grandstand version. When comparing the remastered .wav files from both sides in hex, they were not quite the same, misaligned by 6-8 bytes. I don't think this fine level variation plays out any differently on the SC-3000 or the M.E.S.S. emulator though. If I'm doing my maths right (which is dubious), the variation equates to 1/11025th to 1/14700th of a second, and the SC-3000 looks at things in units of 1/1200th of a second. It'd be nice to merge the two files into one 'verified' dump though, but for now there is two copies, an original and an alternate dump. 

The following are the "Complete" releases, which include photos, scans, manuals, the remastered .wav files and the original unremastered and raw .wav files.
These are the same as above, but without the raw .wav files, only the cleaned up and remastered versions, plus photos, scans and manuals.
And if you don't care about any of the extra fluff, this is the GreatS3k collection so far, just the remastered games only. As I add new titles, I will continue to update this .zip file.
 Until next time (hopefully same time next week). 

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