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Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998.
In November 2024, the user RisingFromRuins on the Sonic Retro forum announced that he had found a Sega Channel game image CD for September 1996 while he was going through a lot of PC equipment he had bought years earlier. Unfortunately, IDA Pro didn't automatically pick up the debug symbols from the executable, so I had to open NSF in Turbo Debugger (it was compiled with Borland C++ 4.1) and manually copy them over. I have to thank Tdijital for releasing the Sega Channel development backup CD, Octocontrabass for reverse engineeering the .SA compression format, and whoever at Scientific Atlanta compiled NSF.EXE in debug mode.
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