Can someone please explain the story behind the occasional references to "Rhinoceros Bar Command" that occasionally come up? I'm feeling left out.

Edit: don't worry, I've got it now - it's an artefact of feeding phonetic Japanese into a translator. Word division really trips those things up.

Right. It's also the go-to cautionary tale about trusting System16 too much (hell-O Naomi2 processor count!) At one point dozens of sites claimed it existed based solely on Sixtoe's say-so, including Wikipedia.

Anyhow, it sounds like a game where you serve drinks to polygonal rhinoceroses. And that concept *needs* to exist.

Vas;

There are more at the end of this page:
http://unmamed.mameworld.info/non_other90.html

Don Bear Near.

Rhinoceros Berth Lead Lead.

IIRC in the ancient past I discovered at least one of them didn't exist under that name (shocker!) by attempting to create a full Sega list from sources outside System16, then comparing to System16, and pattern-matching the differences. Then I made fun of Sixtoe until the cows came home.

I don't honestly remember writing the notes that btribble has, I think that was at least partially Justin, but I suppose it's possible I did. Some of these things are beginning to fade in my memories.

Let's not forget my new favorite at System16, Sega "Space In Bingo" - Invinco or possibly "Space Invinco" :P (and yes I told Sixtoe about it)

I think a graphical hack of Tapper might be in order

Yes, this needs to be done :P

LN

You might want to add "Underground King" to that list - it's a corruption of "Angler King" ("アンダーグラウンド" - underground - can be abbreviated to "アングラ", which is very close to "アングラー" - angler).

Edit: katakana seems to be broken, despite displaying fine in the preview. You'll have to decode the entities yourself to see it.

Okay, let me know if you see any more like that.

Interestingly, Sega avoided the rhinoceros problem with Cyber Troopers Virtual On. The Japanese title is 電脳戦機バーチャロン (dennou senki baacharon) which means Artificially Intelligent Battle Machines VirtualOn - no rhinos were implicated in the title of this game. I wonder if "virtual on" is supposed to be an imperative, like "switch on virtual reality" or something?

Yes, I know I've taken some license with the translation: "dennou" is literally "electronic brain" but that doesn't sound right in English, AFAIK similar characters are used to mean "computer" in China; "senki" often means "time to fight" or "military strategy", but here I think translating the two characters individually works better.

FWIW Google thinks the title should be translated as "Virtual On" (I guess enough people submitted that as a "better suggestion"), and SysTran comes out with "Electric brain chance for fighting [bachiyaron" (including the opening bracket).

Actually, the way Google Translate works these days is not as close as SysTran as it used to be. They switched to using their own statistical machine translation software a few years ago (versus originally being a licensee of Systran's rule-based translation software) with usually impressive results. It kinda helps that they're Google and have terabytes of translated documents to cross-compare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate

I know that. But the very best use of Google Translate is this.

Yeah, that's a lot of fun. I used to do that manually before a website was made that automagically did it.

Usually if I must /try/ to convert an email to another language, I do one loop through and then look for the glaring mistranslations to rephrase. It comes out pidgin-English usually, but that's the best you can hope for without a.) getting a friend or a professional to translate or b.) getting education. But that's only if I can't find a friend to do it.

Hahaha...nice!

Awesome! Needs to be, er, Namco © MCMXCV, though, to be "accurate" to the mistranslation.
Yes, I am that crazy, why do you ask?

Sixtoe's translations even appear in a list on a Japanese web site. "Don Bear Near" is right above Dunkmania, "Rhinoceros Bar Command" is below Ridge Racer 2 and "Ray Blurring - Sir" is below Downhill Bikers.

What was "Ray Blurring - Sir" a mistranslation of? RayStorm?

I'd have thought it was a jumbling of Rave Racer, except that list says that whatever it is was a Super System 22 game.

It's Rave Racer - "re-bu re-sa-" somehow got split into "re- bure - sa-" and the translation engine decided the second word was "blurring".

Heh - even Wikipedia blindly copies lists from System 16. So much for requiring reliable sources - they just use that as an excuse to delete stuff they don't like.

I've yet to find any arcade-related information on Wikipedia that *isn't* System 16 copypasta.

Here listed Hardware, software and operating system configuration supported for Rhinoceros on the Microsoft Windows platform.

* Rhinoceros (32 Bit and 64 Bit): 3.0, 4.0, 5.0

* Operating System (32 Bit and 64 Bit): Windows XP SP2 or later, Windows Vista

* RAM: 1 GB (Recommended 2 GB)

I'm famous on the internet.

And yes, wikipedia irritates the living shit out of me, just stealing all the work I do.

Sorry to reanimate the thread but yeah I wrote all of that, I emailed Bobby about it when it went up but as you may have noticed he's not exactly an updating maven....

This thread is t3h awesome. No-one should be ashamed of posting to it.