(Not so) GreatS3k #002: 3 Gioche Per Home Computer SC-3000 [bad]

Well, here we are again and it's basically one week later, so we're doing okay so far. If we're doing this thing alphabetically, then I've hastily skipped over the games that start with numbers in their titles. I suppose we could do them at the end, but let's do them now. I only have one anyway, but as you can probably tell from the [bad] in the title above, the news isn't going to be good.

3 Gioche Per Home Computer SC-3000 (3 Games For Home Computer SC-3000) is an Italian release by Melchioni, the electronics distributor who brought the Sega SC-3000 into Italian homes. The company is still operating today, and back in the day were also responsible for the distribution of Atari and Commodore products into Italy as well.

No cover scans for this one, I only had the loose tape.

As you may have suspected from the cassette's title, this is a compilation of three games: Jazzi, Ragni, and Black Box. I couldn't get any of the three games to load in M.E.S.S. and it wouldn't work with either copy on Side A or B. Either the tape I had was severely degraded, or the method Melchioni used to store the data was unusual and not recognised by the emulator. As you can see below, it doesn't look much like a square wave, more like a pulse.

Track 1 is the raw dump of Addition Tutor, Track 2 is the remastered
square wave, and Track 3 is my raw dump of 3 Gioche.

I'm not that familiar with .wav file editing in Audacity. Maybe there is a magic button, script, filter or effect that can fix the raw sound dump to look more like a square wave, but I've yet to learn about it. I might come back to it at a later date. For now, I'm just going to release the raw files, and maybe someday someone else will pick up the baton and carry it forwards, if indeed it's possible for anything to be salvaged from the recording.

Interestingly, when I tested the tape on real hardware back in 2015, the games did load (to a degree) and I captured some footage. As you can see in the videos, the code is somewhat corrupted and unstable at times. It's possible that the digitised raw copy I'm releasing today might also work on real hardware even though it doesn't work in the emulator - it's something I'll have to test out myself in the future. If it does load, maybe I can adapt the SC-3000 Survivors method to re-record a remastered square wave onto a blank cassette, which I can then digitise for use in emulation - I'll add it to my todo list.

Game #1: Jazzi

This appears to be an unlicensed adaption on the classic dice game Yahtzee (unless it's officially known as 'Jazzi' in Italy?). As you can see at the end of the video, it eventually crashed with a 'Statement parameter error'



Game #2: Ragni (Spiders)

Perhaps best described as Robotron without the shooting bits, and sort of like Pac-man without the maze, and starring spiders instead of ghosts. You control the black spider, avoiding the other coloured spiders and dropping doppelgangers/shadows as traps to stop your pursuers. I was losing punti (points) as I was playing, but wasn't exactly sure why. It was pretty much too slow and jerky to be much fun, unless the game is redeemed by the nuances of the point scoring system that I didn't fully understand.



Game #3: Black Box

I didn't understand Black Box at all. It's some kind of grid based puzzle game (I think). That's about as far as I got. It's also possible that it didn't load right.



Another avenue for getting this release properly digitised and preserved is to find another copy and I know there is at least one more out there in the hands of collectors. The photo below is of a more complete copy from an ebay auction I lost out on a while back. It came with an example of the oversized packaging used by Melchioni to sell SC-3000 cassettes, which appear to be similar in size to the boxes used to sell Sega's cartridges. It seems that Melchioni colour coded their software releases, using red to denote games and entertainment, and blue to signify business and educational programs. It would have been nice to get some scans of those boxes and manuals.

Shame I was outbid on this auction, I might have had better luck digitising and
remastering this copy. Maybe it will surface again one day.

For now, here is today's [bad] dump release. Like I said, if you happen to have some real SC-3000 hardware, it might work for you, but if you're looking to load this up in M.E.S.S. you'll have to wait and see if we can get a [good] release of this in the future.

• 3 Gioche Per Home Computer SC-3000 (IT) Complete [bad].zip

And for completeness, here again is the GreatS3k collection so far. I won't be including the [bad] releases unless they get fixed up, so it's no different to last week and only features Addition Tutor.

• GreatS3k v.001.zip

See you again next week.