Widge (the real one)

Today we’re diving into a rarely discussed yet fascinating slice of video game media history: a Japanese VHS tape released in 1987, showcasing raw gameplay footage from SEGA’s legendary arcade aerial combat-sim, After Burner . This isn’t a fan edit. It’s not a "Let’s Play". It’s not even a strategy guide in the traditional sense. What you will find is part of a short-lived but curious trend in Japanese media from the mid to late 1980s: commercially released gameplay tapes on VHS. This is a commercially sold gameplay video, professionally recorded, edited, and distributed to an enthusiastic market during the golden age of Japanese arcades. What Is This Tape? This particular videotape showcases a spliced run of SEGA’s After Burner , one of the defining arcade experiences of the 1980s.  Well, perhaps it isn't After Burner , but in fact After Burner 2 .  As the video cassette case advertises the name After Burner , the title sequence in the video shows that this might just ...

It's been over a year since SAROO firmware v0.5 introduced support for animated GIF backgrounds and background music . An amazing feature that lets SEGA Saturn fans customise their ODE experience with visual and audio flair. But despite the potential, there’s surprisingly little content out there taking advantage of it. I wanted to change that. 🎬 The Frustration of Making Backgrounds When I first set out to create my own backgrounds, I expected it to be a fun and creative process, which it was at first for a while, until i hit a brick wall. Finding and/or producing a set of still images from which to generate an animation was the fun part, but it fell apart when i tried to combine these into a GIF. the SAROO documentation, such as it is, doesn't go into any detail about what the Saturn and SAROO expects in an animated GIF. It only specifies the dimensions (320x240) and recommended upper filesize limit. The few tutorials I found didn't go much further either, only reco...

Hi, I’m Widge. I’m the author of the Captain Power VHS Game simulator for Hypseus Singe, and I’ve also released other projects for Hypseus including the Video Driver VHS Game Simulator, Minesweeper, Space Rocks, and most recently, I co-authored the Hypseus version of Marbella Vice. I’ve also had a hand in contributing to improving some of the earlier lightgun game conversions for Hypseus. Everything I’ve been involved with and released so far has been completely free — no strings, no paywalls, no donation drives. Right now, I’m working on a few different projects. But specifically, something that I’m really excited about is a simulation of the Video Challenger VHS game system. For those unfamiliar, Video Challenger was a VHS-based lightgun game system similar to Captain Power. It used video playback with special flashing patterns embedded into the footage that a sensor on the toy gun could detect — almost a home version of laserdisc-style gameplay, but much more obscure and limited. Th...

This article exists to catalogue and present my findings on the differences between various console and computer editions of the 1995+ game, Chaos Control, by Infogrames. I have extensively played and explored the filesystems of most versions of this game for another project. In my research, I have found inaccuracies regarding the game being reported, largely by people who have never played it and are repeating what they have heard elsewhere. I hope that this article will serve as a reliable reference to clear up the disinformation being spread regarding this game. Chaos Control was originally released for the Philips CD-i in 1995, and ported to Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, MS-DOS and Apple Macintosh soon after, and more recently to Steam in 2018. No console versions were released for the North American market, with releases only in Europe and Japan. The MS-DOS version was however published in North America by I-Motion, Infogrames' North American publishing division at the time...