The State of Pico Emulation (as of 2012)

Now that the Pico has a large amount of ROMs available for it, it's much easier to gauge the compatibility and accuracy of emulation of the Pico on emulators.

Unfortunately, it seems many Pico games have problems even besides the inability to use particular inputs.

Let's take a look at some ROMs being emulated here.



The "Professor Pico" games in particular tend to have glitched sound and be crash-prone. The "Mickey no Yukai na Bouken" game also has glitched voices.
And speaking of crash-prone, in Kega Fusion "Futari wa Pretty Cure" crashes right on the title screen. And while you can get past this in Picodrive, the game has noticable speed glitches, rapidly slowing or speeding up.
Many games also don't display all of their pages correctly - for example, I can't seem to access page 5 (out of 6) in "Huckle and Lowly's Busiest Day Ever" on Kega Fusion for... some reason.

There's probably an assortment of other issues I haven't noticed as well. Either way, I hope these all get fixed someday.

"Sega Pico" Youtube channel.

Just letting everyone know that I subscribed to the Auto-Generated Sega Pico Channel on Youtube.

This gives me pretty easy access to many of the Pico videos that pop around the internet. :)

I'll let you know if anything interesting shows up! In the meantime, a bit of trivia: What's the Sega Pico video with the most views?

By a long shot, it turns out to be one I uploaded myself years back - an edited recording I did of the Pico game "Ojamajo Doremi Dokka~n".


I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that with the sheer amount of Pico vids I upped one of mine would be the one, but... this one in particular? I was kinda thinking the Pokemon games would blow more people's minds...

Pico Accessories 01: Watch out, you're gonna crash. Ah.

I hope to do a series of articles on Japanese Sega Pico accessories.
There's a significantly large amount of them, and they're needed to play many of the games in the Pico's library. But of course, you probably never heard of them because, well, Japan-only content, as usual.

Let's start with one that's really easy to understand just by looking at it:

The Drive Pico.

Which Pico model is best?

I recall at least a few people asking me questions about various Pico models in the past, so I suppose it'd be a good time to write this one down. :)

To start, there's a (probably still incomplete) list of Pico models, reivisons and editions over at Sega Retro.
While the sheer quantity of models seems high, there's one very important thing to note - With one notable exception, compatibility differences in most NTSC Pico models are few.
Japanese Pico games can boot on US Pico consoles without much hassle, and the inverse likewise. Their compatibility is one and the same.
Therefore, what would probably be the best solution would be to simply grab the cheapest Pico model you can. Most likely, this model will be a MK49325 Majesco US Pico. Of course, if you want, you can pay a bit more and get one of the multi-colored "Kids Communication Pico" Japanese models to have a more stand-out piece. I myself have a MK49002 Sega US Pico. The most common Japanese Pico systems available on eBay and Yahoo Japan Auctions appear to be Kids Communication Picos.

(Hey, look! Those Amazon listings on the right? There's a kinda-reasonable Pico right there!)

Whether your Pico models is from the USA or from Japan, it can pretty much play anything - except, that is, the StoryWare designed for the Mixt Book Player Copera.
This Japanese site has some good info on the Copera, including comparisons to standard Pico models.
Copera software, quite simply, will refuse to boot on a non-Copera model. The reasons are probably grounded in the hardware additions that the Copera has compared to the regular Pico model. Copera software also isn't emulated yet, sorry!

As I have never seen a Copera console for sale, I do not know what it'd potentially sell for, but the "exclusivity" factor will probably set it fairly high. Still, how much would you be willing to pay for compatibility with 10 more games?

Getting this large pair out of the way...

I'll just ask this simple question to Bandai someday...
"Why on earth did you think Cutey Honey, of all things, made a good Pico game?"

Then I'll ask them this...
"Why does that sequence from 3:10 to 3:18 in this video exist in a Pico game?"

I mean, honestly, my perverted little mind is enjoying this greatly, but regardless, this is a bit crazy.

Just a fair bit of warning, "Cutey Honey" is among the Storyware packs I sent to Team-Europe, so a ROM may be coming along soon. Brace yourselves, parents.

I'll Novotrade you, but not my Appaloosa.

Before I start writing anything, let me link you folks to Team-Europe's blog.
Today's a good day for me, because those USA Pico dumps came from Storyware carts I supplied to them. :D

... Now, speaking of USA dumps, I've actually been trying to look into the USA games in terms of proper developer credits. This is in part because in a few of the games you can actually find the credits somewhere in there. For example, "Huckle and Lowly's Busiest Day Ever" and "Tails and the Music Maker" have credits, hidden as easter eggs, as selectable objects right on the title screen listing the appropriate Novotrade developers.

Sometimes looking at prototypes can be helping in figuring out who developed what, too. For example, I examined the "Tails and the Music Maker" prototypes that Hidden-Palace.org released a long while back. And it turned out the "first" one wasn't actually "Tails and the Music Maker"... it was "Magic Crayons", but with header data blanked out. When you compared it with the next "Tails" prototype that actually had Tails data, you could tell that "Magic Crayons" code was used as the basis because there were a few holdover elements apparent, such as the preliminary "PICO" splash screen.

You can also note coding similarities between games. The made-for-US Pico games have a fairly different "flavor" from Japanese ones. Novotrade games in particular tend to have "minigames" that can go for a prolonged time compared to a Japanese game's short games, chiptune music that sounds "simpler" than Japanese games, and are more focused on directly giving lessons. Compare "Sonic the Hedgehog's Gameworld" to "Tails and the Music Maker" and you can see easily how two developers can approach the Pico radically differently, even with the same characters as a basis.

I have a good hunch that Novotrade actually developed a huge majority of the games made for the US Pico audience, but more research has to go into that to confirm it, especially since US Pico games rarely even had developer or publisher logos like Japanese Pico games do. Of course, finding Japanese Pico game credits proper is hard, too...

... Apologies if this one sounds a bit more complicated than my "I'm trying to write for beginners" articles from earlier.

Now, SegaPico.com redirects to here.

Just thought I'd make that announcement on here. You can now access my blogspot from http://www.segapico.com/ just like it's... well, a dot-com site.

Pretty sweet news for me, huh? :D

Now if only I had a really sweet blog appearance worthy of a .com domain... Well, I'll be sure to tinker around with it, anyhow. I remember getting The site that used to be Satellablog to look kinda neat... What I'd like to have as a design for this site would be one that is inspired by the Sega Toys "Kids Communication Pico" models.

A real informational Pico article may come around later in the day as soon as I decide what to toss in. Probably something non-Japanese Pico for a change.