Let’s face it, search engines are bad again. Google has made their product worse and nobody’s replaced them yet. All the nerdy info about games and how they work used to live in public sites and forums. Now it’s in random Google Sheets and Discords, invisible to webcrawlers. We’re back to the stone age of webrings and RSS readers.
So with that in mind, here are some links I have found helpful:
General
Archive.org – Obvious huge resource for old games and game magazine scans. The absolute center of the online game preservation universe at the moment.
The Cutting Room Floor – Great wiki on unused or cut content in video games.
Vimm’s Lair – One-stop shop for emulators, ROMs, game manuals, romhacks, translations, etc.
GameFAQs – I feel like these used to be easy to find everywhere, but now the only 90% reliable source of game secrets/cheats/guides content for old games is GameFAQs. Impossible to even search for this stuff on Google without getting linked to a million empty pages on IGN or whatever.
yt-dlp – A command line program for downloading videos from YouTube and elsewhere.
Game Data Library – Good site for game sales data, especially for JP games.
jp.wazap.com (JP) – Japanese game cheats website. User-submitted and often sort of chaotically written, but best general resource I’ve found for cheats and secrets in old Japan-only games.
Baseball video games
SABR Games and Simulations Committee – A wing of the Society for American Baseball Research dedicated to games.
Power Pros and Pro Yakyuu Spirits series
Pawaplot (JP) – Thorough encyclopedia of Pawapuro series characters, their appearances in each Success Mode scenario, and their relationships to each other.
Secret Base (JP) – Data-driven Pawapuro ratings for every MLB player going back years and years.
Mo-san (JP) – YouTube that chronicles and archives tiny details about Pawapuro and Prospi games.
Maru Yakyuu (JP) – YouTube channel with historical content on Pawapuro and Prospi.
Baseball Game Translations – Hunter Baun website with detailed translations for specific modes in Pawapuro and Prospi.
Spirits Translation – A site with translation guides for previous Prospi games.
MLB The Show series
ShowZone.gg – Most detailed general resource for the series, including data and tips for each game since MLB 14 The Show
Backyard Baseball series
Backyard Baseball Resources – An insane Google Sheet with ratings and info on a huge number of the games.
System-specific
PC-98 Emulation for Beginners at Gang-Fight – An indispensable English-language guide to emulating PC-98 computer games.
PlayStation 2 Utilities at Zophar’s Domain – Some great programs for extracting content on PS2 discs. There are similar pages for other consoles on Zophar’s Domain but I’ve used the PS2 ones especially.
X68000 The Game Software Catalogue – Scans of a game catalogue for the Sharp X68000 computer.