Get Info: #history

TV’s TV (1987) & TV Games Encyclopedia (1988)

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:34:00 +0000

TV’s TV was a four-hour late-night television program broadcast in Japan on Fuji TV from 01:55 to 05:55 on Saturday, March 14, 1987. It was a televisual predecessor to a book that I also discuss below, and an early sign of the experimental programming that Fuji TV would formalise later that year with its JOCX-TV2 late-night brand—a slot explicitly created to give young creators room to experiment.

The program comprised 100 TV spots, presented as a wall of TVs, showcasing a range of video games from around the world. For many Japanese viewers, it was their first encounter with the Amiga, Apple II, and Atari.

The creative credits read like a who’s who of future Japanese media innovators. Toshio Iwai (Otocky, SimTunes, Electroplankton, Tenori-on) created the CG using an Amiga. Masaya Matsuura (The Seven Colors: Legend of PSY·S City, PaRappa the Rapper, Vib-Ribbon) composed the music. The show’s production was overseen by Tsunekazu Ishihara—now president of The Pokémon Company—who would go on to direct the book that followed.

TV’s TV ushered in a new way of looking at television, not only because it introduced Western computers and games to a Japanese audience, but because it did so in a format that was itself playful and game-like.

There’s a full table of contents in the description of the video below.

But don’t watch the 4 hours yet! Read on.

テレビゲーム―電視遊戯大全 / TV Games Encyclopedia (1988)

The following year, the team behind TV’s TV channelled that same energy into print. The result might be described as a book, but it’s much more than that. テレビゲーム―電視遊戯大全 (TV GAMES: Denshi Yūgi Taizen; TV Games Encyclopedia), published in May 1988 by UPU, ISBN4-946432-31-0, was a seminal encyclopedia of video game history—and perhaps the single most ambitious book about games ever produced.

It arrived right in the middle of Japan’s bubble economy. Between roughly 1986 and 1991, a combination of rock-bottom interest rates and rampant speculation sent asset prices into the stratosphere. Money was everywhere and it was looking for things to be spent on.

This was the era when Japanese corporations bought Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures. When golf club memberships traded for the price of houses. When the land beneath the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was theoretically worth more than the entire state of California. Consumer spending went through the roof: credit card circulation tripled, luxury imports quadrupled, and the art market went berserk—Japanese buyers paid record sums at auction for Renoirs and Van Goghs just because they could.

The cultural side-effects were extraordinary. Bubble-era money funded some of the most ambitious, beautiful, and outright weird creative projects Japan has ever produced. Architecture, graphic design, magazines, vehicles, music, fashion, animation—everything was touched by the sense that budgets were infinite and ambition should match. It’s no coincidence that this period overlaps with the golden age of Japanese game development, or that Fuji TV was handing late-night airtime to young experimentalists, or that someone thought a four-hour TV program about Western computer games was a good idea.

The TV Games Encyclopedia is very much a product of this moment. Its lavish physical production—the frosted plastic slipcase, the variety of paper stocks, the multiple print techniques and finishes—reflects the kind of excess that was not only possible but expected. A book about video games had no business being this beautifully made. And yet here it was, priced at ¥3,500, with the ambition and budget of an art object. When the bubble burst in 1991—ushering in what became known as the Lost Decades—this kind of thing simply stopped being made.

The object

The book is extravagantly packaged in a frosted plastic slipcase and printed on a variety of paper stocks. It contains a host of different print techniques, finishes, and folds—and, most obviously, it is ring-bound with the majority of pages split into three horizontal sections. Unusually for a Japanese book from this period, it reads from left to right in the Western manner.

This makes reading the book an experience like nothing else. Pages are linked with cross-references, giving it a game-like, exploratory feeling. At various points, atmospheric photographs of games taken off cathode ray tube screens are spread across three separate panels, but the panels are distributed almost randomly throughout the book—making it a sort of puzzle to be able to view the whole image.

Imagine a hyperactive version of a choose-your-own-adventure book, or a paper-based website before the age of the internet.

The book was designed by Hitoshi Suzuki (鈴木一誌), one of Japan’s most influential book designers—a protégé of Kohei Sugiura (杉浦康平) known for radical editorial layouts. Phototypesetting was by Masaaki Inoue (井上聖昭), with design assistance from Takao Kabaya (蒲谷孝夫).

The name

The title is doubled: first in modern katakana (テレビゲーム, terebi gēmu) and then in classical kanji (電視遊戯大全, denshi yūgi taizen—literally “electronic play grand compendium”). The former is how Japanese people actually say “video game”; the latter is an archaic, almost scholarly construction. The juxtaposition is deliberately playful.

The structure

The main body of the book is divided into four parts:

KEY	Section	Description
●	History	The history of video games, from Willy Higinbotham’s tennis game through Space Invaders, the Atari VCS, Apple II, and the Famicom
■	Creators	Companies and key developers
＊	200 Games	Two hundred selected titles across all platforms
＋	Interviews & Columns	In-depth conversations with creators and essays on game culture

Because every page is physically split into three sections—and each section carries jump signs pointing to related content elsewhere—you don’t read the book linearly. You follow threads. Top section might be history, middle section a company profile, bottom section a game entry, and the cross-references send you bouncing between all three. It is, in the most literal sense, a hypertext document published five years before Mosaic.

The content

All contemporary platforms of 1988 are covered, and crucially the focus is worldwide rather than Japan-only, making it a comprehensive who’s who from the golden age of video games. The book documents over 200 games, profiles dozens of companies and creators, and contains what may be the richest set of developer interviews assembled in a single volume up to that point.

The people behind it

The book was planned and directed by Tsunekazu Ishihara (石原恒和), now president of The Pokémon Company, and produced by the company SEDIC—the same outfit that developed the musical-platform game Otocky (1987), designed by Toshio Iwai. The creative thread connecting TV’s TV, Otocky, and this book is SEDIC and Ishihara’s circle: a group of people at the intersection of games, art, and media who understood video games not as disposable entertainment but as a cultural form worth documenting seriously. The team were also featured in the Tetris: Heavenly Scrolls book in 1989.

Among the book’s contributors was Satoshi Tajiri (田尻智), who later created Pokémon and is currently president of Game Freak. Tajiri had already established himself through his Game Freak fanzine as one of Japan’s most dedicated game critics, and his presence here—alongside Ishihara—prefigures the partnership that would eventually produce the world’s largest media franchise.

This is also the book that Tetsuya Mizuguchi cites as the genesis of his career in video games. Mizuguchi would go on to create Sega Rally Championship, Rez, Lumines, and Tetris Effect—a body of work deeply concerned with synesthesia, music, and the sensory experience of play. It’s not hard to see how a book this alive to the artistic possibilities of games might have lit that fuse.

A note on names

The book contains several misspellings of Western names, and at least one name that has since changed. For the record:

Dan Bynten in the book → Danielle Bunten Berry (credited as Dan Bunten at the time; designer of M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold, she transitioned in 1992)
Tossio Iwai in the book → Toshio Iwai (岩井俊雄; his own name is romanised inconsistently)
Mark F. Flint — this is the pseudonym of the head of System Sacom, a Japanese game developer responsible for titles including Dome, Soft de Hard na Monogatari, and Xenon 2: Megablast (Japanese release). His real name remains unclear. The book contains what appears to be his only substantial interview—and possibly the only interview with him under any name!

The people list and interview list below use corrected/modern names.

People featured

Douglas Noel Adams · Don Bluth · Bill Budge · Danielle Bunten Berry · Nolan Bushnell · Douglas G. Carlston · Steve Cartwright · David Crane · Chris Crawford · Masanobu Endō · Mark F. Flint · David Fox · Richard Garriott · Nasir Gebelli · Hibiki Godai · Dan Gorlin · Satoshi Honda · Yūji Horii · Haruomi Hosono · Rob Hubbard · Toshio Iwai · Tōru Iwatani · Eugene P. Jarvis · Garry Kitchen · Yoshio Kiya · Timothy Leary · Ed Logg · Alan R. Miller · Shigeru Miyamoto · Kazuo Morita · Paul Murray · Kōichi Nakamura · Tomohiro Nishikado · Kazunori Sawano · Tom Snyder · Kōichi Sugiyama · Takanari Suzuki · Tony Suzuki · Toshiyuki Takahashi · Bill Williams · Roberta and Ken Williams

Companies featured

Accolade · Activision · Artdink · ASCII · Atari · Atari Games · Avalon Hill · Bandai · Beagle Bros · Bothtec · BPS · Brøderbund · Chat Noir · Electronic Arts · Enix · Enzan-Hoshigumi · Epyx · Firebird Software · Free Fall Associates · Game Arts · Game Studio · Hudson · Infocom · Irem · Koei · Konami · Kogado Studio · The Learning Company · LucasFilm Games · Mindscape · MIT · Namco · Nihon Falcom · Nintendo · Optimum Resource · Origin Systems · Sega Enterprises · Sierra On-Line · Silicon Beach · Sir-Tech Software · Sirius Software · Square · Strategic Simulations · Sublogic · Synapse Software · T&E Soft · Taito · Thinking Rabbit · Tokyo-Shoseki · Williams

Interviews

The interview section is the book’s crown jewel. It contains what are believed to be the only interviews ever conducted with several of its subjects—most notably Mark Flint (the enigmatic head of System Sacom). With rare input from people like Fukio “MTJ” Mitsuji (creator of Bubble Bobble, who died in 2008). For a number of the Western developers, these are the earliest known long-form interviews, predating the retro gaming preservation movement by over a decade.

Accolade (Peter Doctorow)
Activision (Jeffrey Mulligan, Richard Larberg)
Activision & Sound (Russell Lieblich)
Atari (Nolan Bushnell)
Atari Games (Ed Logg)
Atari Games Japan (Hideyuki Nakajima)
Atari, Activision, Accolade (Alan Miller)
Brøderbund (Douglas Carlston)
Activision (Steve Cartwright)
Bubble Bobble (Fukio “MTJ” Mitsuji)
Electronic Arts (Trip Hawkins)
Free Fall Associates (John Freeman, Anne Westfall)
Irem (Mitsuri Kawai, Masato Ishizaki, Atsushi Yamazaki)
LucasFilm Games (David Fox)
Mind Mirror (Timothy Leary)
Namco (Masanobu Endō)
Nintendo (Shigeru Miyamoto)
Nintendo Concepts & Future Developments (Hiroshi Imanishi)
Door Door, Dragon Quest (Kōichi Nakamura)
“Dragon Quest” (Yūji Horii)
Galaxian (Kazunori Sawano)
Pac-Man (Tōru Iwatani)
Space Invaders (Tomohiro Nishikado)
Strategic Simulations (Joel Billings, Randy Broweleit)
Wizardry (Sir-Tech)
Q&A (Bill Williams)
“Copywriting” (Shigesato Itoi)
“Future Video Games” (Toshio Iwai)
“Video Games are Borderline” (Rika Kayama)
Taito & PSG (Tadashi Kimijima)
“Kind-Hearted Hackers” (Yūichi Konno)
“Discovering Otaku, 1987” (Hiroshi Masuyama)
“My Soliloquy” (Takao Momozono)
“Invader Now” (Fumihiro Nonomura)
TRON Real Time Operating System (Ken Sakamura)
“Future of Games” (Izuo Sakane)
“Games & Science Fiction” (Takao Shiga)
Music & Games (Kōichi Sugiyama)
“Luxury in Video Games” (Satoshi Tajiri)
“Computer Culture” (Mitsuhiro Takemura)

Authors

Init	Name	Romanisation	Notes
AM	三浦明彦	Akihiko Miura	SEDIC, Otocky. Game designer, Star Craft (MobyGames)
EM	松村英治	Eiji Matsumura	Writer, Amiga consultant (MobyGames)
FF	原田ユニ子	Fujie Fuyouko	Real name Yuniko Harada. Translator
HK	紀伊尾宏隆	Hirotaka Kiio	Freelance writer (MobyGames)
HM	桝山寛	Hiroshi Masuyama	SEDIC, Otocky. Techno/director (MobyGames)
HQ	小泉すみれ	Sumire Koizumi	Editor
KH	平林一則	Kazunori Hirabayashi	Freelance, Yotsuya Bannō Kikaku
KI	伊藤桂	Kei Itō	AV planner, editor of CAFE Magazine
KK	倉繁宏輔	Kōsuke Kurashige	SEDIC, CG engineer
MT	瀧本雅志	Masashi Takimoto	I&S, SEDIC. Now Professor, Osaka University of Arts
ST	田尻智	Satoshi Tajiri	Writer, Game Freak fanzine. Creator of Pokémon (MobyGames)
TI	石原恒和	Tsunekazu Ishihara	SEDIC, I&S. Now President, The Pokémon Company (MobyGames)
TT	田中利昭	Toshiaki Tanaka	PC game reviewer for Bug News, Comptiq (MobyGames)
YI	石井康文	Yasufumi Ishii	Student, Gamer
YK	今野裕一	Yūichi Konno	Editor, Peyotl Kōbō (夜想, 銀星倶楽部, WAVE)
YM	森川倖	Yukihito Morikawa	Manga artist, Yotsuya Bannō Kikaku
YT	田村安史	Yasufumi Tamura	System designer, technical writer
YY	山下由美子	Yumiko Yamashita	Freelance writer

It’s been scanned

There’s a scan on Internet Archive, though this won’t give you the full hypertext experience!

Full scan of the book on Internet Archive

Contemporary references

Buying the book today

The current price for the book is high, and varies quite a lot. It’s gone up since I bought my first copy in 2022. Whilst it’s almost unknown in the West the book continues to be fondly remembered and much sought after in Japan. Today you’re looking at somewhere between £200–600 GBP, or equivalent, depending on the condition. Some have cracked outer case, some are missing the correction insert, some have gone mouldy with age. But, up to now they have come up for sale often.

Yahoo! Japan Auctions
Mercari Japan classifieds
Amazon Japan books
Kosho book store search
From Japan (offers reshipping worldwide)
HOYOYO (offers reshipping worldwide)

Postscript

I’ve been working on this blog post on and (mostly) off since 2022. I’ll try to improve it over time!

Intelligent Agent Technology: Open Sesame! (1993)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:33:00 +0000

After years of unsuccessful attempts to find the name of a long-forgotten app through Google, I tried pasting my query into Gemini:

“Back in my teens I saw a software demo for a Mac/Windows app that tracked what you were doing and offered to complete repetitive tasks for you. Like renaming all files in a folder it would interrupt after a few and offer to do the rest. Maybe late 80s or early 90s.”

Gemini instantly responded with the app by name and with references. (out of all the services I tried, ChatGPT was the only other one to identify the app correctly.)

Open Sesame! was “the world’s first intelligent software assistant for the Macintosh. It observes how you work, learns your repetitive patterns, and then offers to do them for you. Automatically.”

One Thousand and One Nights

I remember seeing a demo of Open Sesame! in the early/mid-1990s. Although the demo failed—the Macintosh was supposed to prompt the user to continue renaming a series of files in sequence—the concept left a lasting impression on me.

Over the years I’ve tried to find the event I saw the app at, the app itself, or any other information. I asked other classic Macintosh enthusiasts. Time after time I failed to find the answer.

So I find it delightfully circular that in 2025 I am using the “ai” benefits of machine learning to find out the name of an app built around machine learning in 1993.

Download

Open Sesame! 1.1 at Macintosh Garden

Talking about Moai in Games on Tokyo Game Life podcast

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 20:56:00 +0000

You may or may not know that I run the website moai.games which features a catalogue of screenshots showing Moai appearances in video games. At the time of writing there are over 1000 games listed going all the way back to the early 1980s. ✨👋🗿✨

Tokyo Game Life reached out and I chatted to them a bit about all of that cool and nerdy stuff. Listen in your usual podcast app or using the embedded player below.

Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons (1994)

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 20:12:00 +0000

After reaching 1 million files in my Macintosh Magazine Media project, I thought it would be cool to post about something I found recently in those discs. I get a real buzz rediscovering something like this after more than 30 years have passed.

It’s a sweet little point and click adventure game for Classic Macintosh called “Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons” by Mitsuo Isaka, about taking train rides through the Japanese countryside. You meet and interact with a variety of people and explore each scene to figure out how to move on.

It was found on CD2 マルチメディアチャレンジ ’94 要賞作品篥 (Multimedia Challenge ’94 Award Winning Works) of MACLIFE Special: Gokuraku Paradise Theater 1994. You can download the ISO to explore that disc for yourself in an emulator or on a vintage Macintosh. I also uploaded just the game to Macintosh Garden so that you don’t need to download the whole CD for just this game.

Play it in your browser

But if you want to try it right now you can do so in your browser thanks to the Infinite Mac website, using this link: KanjiTalk 7.5.3 with the Station disk image already mounted

The game is in Japanese and features mostly voiceover and a little on screen text. Google Translate can probably help with its conversation (audio) and camera (visual) translation modes. Ganbare!

Introduction

In Japanese, it says:

ここは“四季の里”といわれるとこる。昔から一両だけのディーゼル車がのんびりと走っているという。

駅は全部で四つの小さな鉄道だけれど不思議なことに、ひとつひとつの駅にそれぞれのきまった季節があるという。

ぼくは、さっそくその鉄道に乗ってみようと春の季節をもっといわれる“桜ヶ丘”という駅を訪ねることにした・・・

Translated into English:

This place is known as the ‘Village of the Four Seasons’. A single diesel train has been running slowly and leisurely here for a long time.

There are four stations in total on this small railway, but strangely enough, each station has its own set season.

I decided to visit a station called ‘Sakuragaoka’, which is known more for its spring season, to try out the railway…

Macintosh Magazine Media: 1 million files

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:57:00 +0000

I am proud to announce that my Macintosh Magazine Media project has surpassed my self-imposed goal of 1 million files, an achievement that fills me with both immense satisfaction and slight bewilderment. And if you were to decompress those files the total would be 30 million! Woah.

If you’ve never heard of it before: it’s an archive of vintage media containing mostly Macintosh files sourced from Japanese magazines, but featuring content from all over the world. A treasure trove time capsule for vintage computer nerds like myself.

Many thanks to my Patreon subscribers for their support!

Status report

The archive as it stands (updated March 2025):

date range: 1991–2002
total media: 500 discs
total files: 1,086,536 files

New discs

Multiple new discs were added, almost all of them are Macintosh, or Hybrid Mac/Win, but there are a couple of Windows-only discs in there:

Acara Super CD (1998-12)
Acara Super CD (2000-07)
CD-ROM MACLIFE 131 (1999-07)
CD-ROM MACLIFE 132 (1999-08)
CD-ROM MACLIFE 133 (1999-09)
CD-ROM MACLIFE 141 (2000-05)
CD-ROM MACLIFE 152 (2001-04)
Create on a computer: New Year’s Card 1999
Create on your Mac: New Year’s Card 2000
Gokuraku Paradise Theater (1994-10) 2xCD
Mac Fan Internet CD-ROM (1997-12)
Mac Fan Internet CD-ROM (1999-04)
Mac Ga Ichiban! Vol. 50 (1998-11)
Mac Ga Ichiban! Vol. 59 (1998-08)
Mac100% Vol.7 (1998-07)
Mac100% (1999-01)
MacPeople (1998-02-15)
MacPeople (1998-04-15)
MacPeople (1998-06-15)
MacPeople (1998-08-01)
MacPeople (1998-08-15)
MacPeople (1998-09-15)
MacPeople (1998-10-15)
MacPeople (1999-05-15)
MacPeople (1999-06-01)
MacPeople (2000-08-01)
MacPeople (2002-03-15)
MacPeople (2003-05-01) 2xCD
TECH Win (1999-08) 2xCD
Tsukaeru ikinari dekiru homupejipasokon BOOKS 8 (1998)

I also indexed the latest Japanese Macintosh magazine media from redump.

The process

For this many CDs we are talking multiple days of busy work to prepare them for sharing.

If you’re interested in the “process” for each CD here it is:

Find the CD available for sale in Japan (they’re getting harder to find)
Purchase it with cold hard cash
Wait for delivery (I delay shipping until I have enough items to make it worthwhile)
Dump the CD using a suitable reader (fwiw redump project is very specific)
Index the CD filesystem (I created my own software stack for this)
Redo dump of any bad discs (there are always some!)
Scan the CD artwork
Prepare the upload and metadata .csv for internetarchive cli tool
Bulk upload (this takes an absolute age, 30–60 mins per CD)
Redo upload of any failed items (the cli is very error prone)

I’m not sure I’ll buy any/many more discs, but never say never!

Searching the collection

All disc ISO with text listings are available for download at Internet Archive, but wait a minute!

Using my search engine (read more about that) you can search by regex for file/directory name, file type, creator code: gingerbeardman.com/mmm/

Or you can use DiscMaster to search inside content and grab individual files without having to download the whole ISO: discmaster.textfiles.com

Interesting finds

Digging up the past with DiscMaster

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 22:58:00 +0000

DiscMaster is an alternative interface for collections of software that have been uploaded to Internet Archive. It allows you to drill into disk images at the file level and preview the contents in-place, download individual folders, zips, images, or whatever you like. It’s been around for a while but has become bigger and better with the introduction of DiscMaster 2, which is ingesting huge amounts of new files daily. But how to keep up with this firehose!?

Automated Searching

One of the great things about DiscMaster is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of any search result, which means you’ll be notified of new matches as they are indexed without the need to manually search on the website.

I have a bunch of searches including Hanafuda, various computer artists and developers (Thoru Yamamoto), particular apps, specific file types (PICT/SaMe for MaciGame tilesets), and for purely selfish reasons… searches for my own name. It’s fun to see where my early software was distributed decades after the it happened.

Class of ’93

So far the oldest thing of mine is Chaos Calc 2, my fractal explorer, this version from May 1993 when I was 16 years young! I have a pretty good memory and can tell you that I received zero registrations for that shareware app, but I did get one call from somebody who wanted to be certain that their £5 GBP registration fee would absolutely definitely receive a floppy disk in return. I guess they were unconvinced because they never sent me any money!

There are references to programs (this is what apps were called on the Atari ST) that I had forgotten about but after reading their names can now recall completely (palette manager, boot tools), some I can recall partially (menu system), and others I have very little recollection of (a front end for a ray tracing program). Curiously I see no mention of the apps I was most fond of at that time: a text file viewer, kids paint program, and my take on Gorillas. Perhaps they came later?

Chaos Calc 2

It’s been 32 years but it only took a moment for me to recall how to use the app and what all the different menu options did, even without consulting the readme. This is running at 32MHz with maths co-processor (compared to stock 8MHz with no co-processor) as your time is valuable!

Wire Hang Redux

Also fun to see my game Wire Hang Redux was featured on the cover media of Retro Gamer magazine issues 7 & 13, which totally passed me by in 2004/2005! No surprise as that game was featured in dozens of magazines around the world: Japan, USA, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Germany. It being Big in Japan is extra fun because it is my remake of a Japanese game by “d2ac”, Masaki Kobayashi.

FAQs

The game guides I wrote and published on GameFAQs ended up on a number of different CD-ROMs. I love the idea of somebody using a disc full of text files as a resource when playing games in the mid-late 1990s.

The making of MaBoShi

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of an almost forgotten WiiWare game called MaBoShi. I’ve posted a review, the staff roll/credits (for the first time in English), written an FAQ strategy guide, managed to score 1 million in its “circle” game on my Nintendo DS, created a way for you to play it more easily on your iPhone, and even finally succeeded to make my own version of the “circle” game over the course of many years. I never miss an opportunity to wax lyrical about its genius, so here I am once again to keep the fire burning.

MaBoShi was published in 2008 by Nintendo and developed by Mindware Corp who have a long and well respected development history. The game was critically acclaimed on release, which might come as a shock if you’ve never heard of it. It was somewhat inaccessible: it was a hardcore arcade title only available digitally on a console that was maligned as being “for kids”. To give a sense of time, the App Store on iPhone was barely a month old at the time of MaBoShi’s release.

As part of the release promotional campaign Micky Albert of Mindware Corp gave an interview with WiiWare World (now Nintendo Life) which can be read in two parts. The team effort of the development of the Wii game is detailed in that interview. However, if we dig a little deeper we can find the true origins of the game in a couple of prototypes created by a Japanese indie developer. Over the years I have pieced together the interesting story of how MaBoShi came to be.

The Long Tail

Kuniaki Watanabe (“kuni”) is probably best known for his PlayStation open world exploration and crafting game Panekit, released in 1999. This was a product of Sony’s ゲームやろうぜ! “Game Yaroze!” development programme (not to be confused with PlayStation’s 「ネットやろうぜ」 “Net Yaroze” dev kit). Panekit offered the type of easy, freeform crafting that would later appear in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and even later in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Most famously Panekit took 13 years to become profitable.

In more recent years he’s written a book on game design, 組み立て×分解！ゲームデザイン (“Assembly × Disassembly! Game Design”), that goes into the mechanics that are used in his games, including MaBoShi. It’s only available in Japanese but has a very friendly manga-style presentation and the game design techniques are easily understood.

Throughout the past 30 years kuni has been an indie developer, developing for many platforms using a range of tools. And this is where we pick up the origins of MaBoShi.

Hot Soup Processor

HSP could be thought of as a Japanese equivalent to something like BlitzMax, given that it started life as a version of BASIC, or perhaps Love2D for a rough equivalent of its capabilities.

ONION software, creators of HSP, hold the annual HSP Program Contest and the results for all of these have been archived over the years. Nice work, ONION! We can do a web search of that domain to find mentions of kuni.

Mosser

We find one entry in HSP Program Contest 2004 called Mosser. A quick look at the image below shows that it was an early version of MaBoShi’s “square” game, which later evolved into Flametail on DSiWare in 2010. Mosser was awarded first prize in the small game category.

One of the judges was none other than Micky Albert of Mindware Corp—the company that would go on to develop MaBoShi! He and the other judges were very impressed with the gameplay and depth even at this prototype stage. Kuni would win a PlayStation Portable and some pinball art donated by Mindware who were a sponsor of the event. You can read the judges thoughts and the game can be run in old versions of Windows.

Circular

Kuni would create prototypes in Flash Lite, which was a version of Flash that was suitable for running on low powered devices, including Japanese feature phones. If we search archived versions of kuni’s old websites we can find a download from 2003 called Circular. You can play this in your browser thanks to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and Ruffle, a web-based Flash emulator.

Circular is obviously an early version of MaBoShi’s “circle” game.

All bar one

So we have found two of the three games in MaBoShi, which leaves us with the “bar” game. I spoke to kuni and he mentioned that this did not exist as a prototype prior to work commencing on MaBoShi, so it was created for the game when it was decided that a third game would be welcome.

Missing in action

At the time of release there were a couple of English videos of a “making of” developer interview shown in both North America and Europe that have since been lost to time. Nintendo Europe were kind enough to respond to my request about these videos, but told me that their archive currently only goes back to 2012 so we’re sadly out of luck. Here are references I have found to the airing dates for video 1 (Dec 2008) and video 2 (Jan 2009).

These include the juicy fact that the game was initially green lit for the Game Boy Micro (a small Game Boy Advance, marketed as being suitable for one-handed play for Japanese commuters) alongside the bitGenerations series, Polarium, Rhythm Paradise, but after the sales of the Micro were less than anticipated the development was moved to DS and eventually to Wii.

Reading list

“1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die” (Tony Mott, et al) right opposite Spelunky
Tiny Cartridge guest review by Anna Anthropy
TV ad/commercial that inspired MaBoShi’s effect system
Patent application US20090093314 describing MaBoShi’s effect system
Patent application US20110165940 describing Flametail’s power-up system

Collins Gem Basic Facts: Computers (1991)

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 21:36:00 +0000

I was rooting around and stumbled across my old Collins Gem Basic Facts: Computers, a glossary or dictionary of computing terms. This “New Edition” is the Third edition, published in 1991, so at this point in time almost 35 years old. That year I read it cover to cover, multiple times. It was around the time my family got an Atari ST. I consumed everything I could get my hands on regarding computers.

Naturally, this being 1991 the “world wide web” was but a twinkle in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, not launching publicly until 1993, so there’s no mention of it or any synonym: network is as close as we get. Regardless, this taught me a heck of a lot and made me curious about even more. A worthwhile purchase!

It would be fun to go through it and keep a tally of how many of the items I’ve encountered or used in the time that has passed since I read it. Perhaps a project for a rainy day.

TETRIS: 1984 is the date of conception (1989)

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:20:00 +0000

Given the ongoing discussion about whether or not TETRIS turns 40 years old in 2024 or 2025, I keep my eye out for early mentions of the game. As a bonus, this is an item that at the time of me posting it to social media a couple of days ago had not been covered in English anywhere else on the internet. As far as I’m aware this is the earliest printed reference mentioning the conception date of Tetris.

It’s a short interview with Alexey Pajitnov in Japanese PC magazine, Oh! X, conducted mid-1989 around the time of the release of the seminal Game Boy version of TETRIS, the first year the game was available outside of the USSR. It contains this beautiful question and answer:

Japanese text:

Q: TETRIS誕生のきっかけを教えてください。

——いまから5年前の1984年に、IQテスト用プログラムを作ろうとしたのが最初です。そのとき、ペントミノというゲームをベースに5～8個からなるブロックを落下させ、それを回転させて組み合わせるということを考えて作ったのがこのゲームなのです。

English translation:

Q: Please tell us about how TETRIS came to be created.

A: It started 5 years ago in 1984, when I was trying to create a program for IQ testing. At that time, I created this game based on a game called Pentomino, where I came up with the idea of having blocks made up of 5–8 pieces fall down and rotate them to combine them together.

Note: pentomino are comprised of 5 pieces whilst tetromino are comprised of 4 pieces, so the version referred to is certainly an early prototype. I’m not aware of a surviving version of whatever TETRIS was first known as that has blocks of 5–8 pieces.

Bibliography

Publication: Oh! X, Vol. 8, No. 8 (August 1989)
ISSN: 0910-7614
Section: TETRISの原作者パジトノフ氏来日 (TETRIS creator Pajitnov visits Japan)
Pages: 89–90
Source scan

Some new old posts you might find interesting

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 22:38:00 +0000

I just added a bunch of backdated posts to the blog, mostly to do with my early games and apps:

2022-04-23 Wire Hang Redux for 64-bit macOS
2015-03-14 Boom Matt
2011-12-12 Wire Hang Redux: update
2004-06-20 Wire Hang Redux
2002-08-23 Terra Firma
2002-03-27 Yaking
2001-02-14 Bendertron
2000-09-29 Simple Soccer
1998-12-01 My old Atari ST software
1998-11-16 My old Windows software

Macintosh Magazine Media: search engine update

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:09:00 +0000

Some time in 2020 I started collecting CD-ROMs from old Macintosh magazines. Whilst the discs are of Japanese origin—because the supply was plentiful during the extended spring clean of lockdown—they contain a great deal of software from all over the world and a lot of it is therefore in English. They’re an amazing source of old gold: sofware, images, demos, documentation, and many other files. As of today I have 460+ discs totalling almost 1 million files.

After the collection was well and truly established I decided to share the contents in a number of meaningful ways to help other preservationists and old Macintosh enthusiats. Firstly, I uploaded pretty much all of my discs to Internet Archive and I also managed to dump the directory listings from these old discs and created a search engine for lookups by file name, type, creator, date.

Anyway, in December 2024 I migrated my websites to an arm64-powered server and whilst doing so I updated a bunch of old pages. The MMM search engine was updated to provide a faster, better, more user-friendly experience on mobile. It now features quicker searching (thanks to multi-core ARM with more RAM for ripgrep), more legible results, and a tappable emoji tooltip to show which. If you run a query with multile thousands of results, the bottleneck will now be browser rendering time. So in that extreme case I would recommend using paged results.

I did experiment with a database version of the search but query time was much slower and server costs were much higher. I can’t beat the performance of ripgrep, that’s for sure!

Try the search here: gingerbeardman.com/mmm/

New 3D Golf Simulation (video game series)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 20:00:00 +0000

Golf video games are one of my passions, ever since World Class Leader Board and Microprose Golf on Atari ST. These days my favourite golf games are still the old ones. In particular I have a soft spot for T&E SOFT’s New 3D Golf Simulation series with its blue skies, bright colours, and FM synth tunes. This series has a long history so I thought I’d do my best to recap and share some little-known knowledge.

Translation Guides

To make it easier for you to play the Japanese games mentioned below, I wrote translation guides: gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/msephton/contributions/faqs

8-bit Computers

The series began in 1982 with リアルゴルフゲーム (Real Golf Game) for NEC PC-6001, a distinctly 2D presentation with overhead view, power bar and course map. Here’s a video of where it all began.

Things got interesting later that year with the follow-up ３Ｄゴルフシミュレーション (3-D Golf Simulation) which was written for the Fujitsu FM-7 computer and published in the 1983-4 issue of I/O magazine. The game was written in BASIC and its source code, including data for 18 holes known as T&E Island Golf Course, was given away in the magazine as a type-in listing. The game was released commercially on a few other Japanese 8-bit computers over the next couple of years, with machine code gradually added to speed up the 3D processing in 1984’s “High-Speed” edition for MSX and 1985’s “Super Version” for PC-6001 mkII. They’re still painfully slow.

16-bit Computers

A break of 4 years should give you some idea as to the work that was going on behind the scenes, culminating in the 1989 release of Harukanaru Augusta for PC-9801. This was an official licensed representation of Augusta National Golf Club, also known as the location of the famous Masters tournament.

This is where the series really hit its stride and made lasting impressions: high resolution graphics using a bespoke dithering system to make the most of the limited colour palette, digitised caddy images and sound effects, catchy music using FM synthesis, detailed real life golf courses, and an engaging control system. The 3DGOLF system software was upgraded a couple of times over the next few years, and a handful of add-on courses were released.

For PC-9801 the total list of available courses counted six:

Harukanaru Augusta (1989)
- “Distant Augusta”
- [System Disk 1.0]
Eight Lakes G.C. (1990)
- fictional course
T&E Selection (1990)
- fictional course
Waialae no Kiseki (1991)
- “Miracle of Waialae”
Pebble Beach no Hatou (1992)
- “Waves of Pebble Beach”
- [System Disk 2.0]
Devil’s Course (1992)
- aka Wicked 18
- fictional course

Harukanaru Augusta and Eight Lakes G.C. were also released on FM-TOWNS and Sharp X68000, but not the later courses. Maybe sales weren’t good enough? Harukanaru Augusta would also see a mail-in upgrade release as a “HD” hard disk installable version, running System Disk 2.5, but this was not backwards compatible with the previous releases. At this point the engine powering the games had been rewritten and was referred to as POLYSYS and made claims of being an “Integrated 3D Processor” or software DSP. The holes were designed in a custom CAD package. Each 3D hole consisted of a mere 256 points!

Throughout this hugely productive Japanese PC period T&E SOFT published a printed newsletter for New 3D Golf Simulation owners called “Top Spin”, which I’m yet to see a copy of. Please do get in touch if you have any information!

16-bit Consoles

The series was eventually ported to console, first to Nintendo’s Super Famicom (SNES), with Harukanaru Augusta arriving early in Japan and Waialae Country Club being a USA launch title. Later, totally different ports were released on Sega Mega Drive, which was lucky enough to get four out of the six courses. Pebble Beach was released first in the USA and later in Japan. Harukanaru Augusta, Devil’s Course and Waialae followed, but only in Japan.

These Japanese Mega Drive versions are my favourite of the bunch. They’re based on the PC-9801 games, right down to using the same course data, and the user interface is a low-resolution facsimile that retains the charm and style of the original PC interface. They really are a work of art. The Japanese versions maintain the dithering effect to show different grass types, but the USA version features only solid colours. The USA version features an easier power meter but removes the special full power shot that the Japanese version had. All in all I’d say the USA versions are easier and less attractive.

Playing them today under emulation I make sure to overclock the CPU (400% is good) to reduce the redraw times, speed up transitions, and make for an altogether more modern and enjoyable experience. You can also hold the B button to speed up ball flight animation, which is even more noticable when running overclocked. Speed runners take note!

Real 3D?

With the arrival of systems capable of real-time 3D came the opportunity for more realistic golf courses, at least. But there was some legacy baggage hanging around. The SNES was still very popular, and it wasn’t obvious how much more powerful the more awkward to program 32-bit systems like the 3DO and Saturn might be. So the final games in the series on SNES and the first in the series on 3DO and Saturn were pretty much the same: 3D but no dynamic camera. Amazing for SNES owners, and perhaps disappointing for 3DO and Saturn owners.

PlayStation and N64, on the other hand, got real 3D versions of the game. Even the Virtual Boy got a decent wireframe 3D version of this era T&E SOFT golf engine, as T&E Virtual Golf (or just Golf worldwide). Quite surprising! All are very much worth playing, though I personally favour the PlayStation games over the N64 games. Virtual Boy Golf is worth a try, just for kicks, and can be played under emulation in 3D using anaglyph red/blue glasses or in glasses-free 3D in an emulator on a Nintendo 3DS!

That said, the Saturn still had a trump up its sleeve. Perhaps because it was very popular in Japan it was the console T&E SOFT chose to release the final 32-bit version of the game, Waialae no Kiseki ~Extra 36 Holes~. As you might expect from its name there were two extra courses bundled with this game. Windy G.C. was a brand new ultra-difficult course, whilst Eight Lakes G.C. was a modernisation of the fictional course featured in the 1990 add-on disk for the original Harukanaru Augusta game for PC-98 and X68000 that released back in 1989. Full circle self-referencing from T&E SOFT—nice!

The engine also powered RPG Virtual Hydlide on SEGA Saturn.

The 19th Hole

T&E SOFT kind of ceased to exist at some point after this, though they managed to spit out a few golf games under one name or another to mixed reviews. Windows 9x got a proper version of the game in Harukanaru Augusta for Windows, which is great. PS2 got Golf Paradise (Swing Away Golf) and a Disney-branded version called Disney Golf Classic (Disney Golf) which are somewhat souless games that really don’t excite me.

The finale was somewhat of a surprise, with the DS getting Touch Golf (True Swing Golf) in 2005, and a DSi version in 2009 as A Little Bit of Nintendo Touch Golf. These are both truly great games, though if I had to choose I’d pick the DSi version as it trims some fat and focuses the game and experience perfectly: a real treat! You can read my review of the DSi version in an older blog post.

Music

The music in this series really is some of the best FM synth you’ll hear. I can recommend this episode of the Pixelated Audio podcast to bring you up to speed.

A bunch of these games share a common music track—I call it the “T&E SOFT Golf Theme”—arranged differently to suit the host sound system capabilities.

Waialae no Kiseki (SFC)
Pebble Beach no Hatou (SFC)
Harukanaru Augusta (PC-98, X68000, FMT)

Here’s a playlist of the 5 versions.

Box Art

Perhaps the box artwork is the most striking thing about the Mega Drive versions, with its classic typography-led design, strong brush-stroked calligraphic logo, and the intriguing hand-painted golf scene.

These paintings obviously represent the real life courses, but further investigation revealed that not only did they show a particular hole but they also showed a famous event that happened on the course (with the obvious exception of the fictional Devil’s Course).

I don’t have much knowledge of real life golf events but I managed to figure them out, I think, using my Google-fu. Though I’d still love to know who painted them!?

Harukanaru Augusta

Pebble Beach no Hatou

Waialae no Kiseki

Devil’s Course (Wicked 18)

TETRIS for Sharp Electronic Notebook (1989)

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 16:47:00 +0000

Sharp’s Denshi Techō (電子手帳) were a range of electronic notebooks or organisers, marketed as Bware in Japan and Wizard or IQ elsewhere. In Japan they won a prestigious G-mark Good Design Award in 1988 and in the USA an episode of Seinfeld was the prize.

As well as being home to some of the earliest emoji these devices could run software from IC cards (solid state storage). There were about 30 games released in this format, everything from classics like Sokoban, Shanghai, Lode Runner, Puzznic, Fortress, to everygreen games like Golf, Baseball, Mahjong, Shogi, Othello, Solitaire, President (card game), exclusive games like Yamamura Misa Suspense – The Kyoto Zai-tech Murder Case, and some contemporary titles like Hatris.

And perhaps most importantly: a version of Tetris, released in December 1989. Tetris-mania was in full effect and the Game Boy had recently received its version of Tetris in April 1989.

There’s not much about these devices online, particularly in English, but two notable places are: HP Museum forum (for devices and IC cards) and Insert Credit forum (for games). The devices are common on Japanese auction and selling websites, but the games are becoming more difficult to find.

This was, as far as I am aware, the second ever handheld version of Tetris. At the time of its release Japan was in the “bubble era” period of economic boom, which lasted 1986–1991. There was so much money floating around they didn’t know what to do with it, so much of it was ploughed into research and development of crazy things in the fields of consumer electronics, computers, engine technology, vehicle design, book design, software distribution, etc.

Without this device there would be no Apple Newton (which was co-produced by Sharp), without Newton there would be no iPhone, and without iPhone there would be no Android. Evolution is necessary for technological progress.

Thanks to Akuji, the collector from whom I bought my Sharp PA-8500 and manual, who is a fountain of knowledge regarding IC-capable devices from a range of manufacturers.

TETRIS IC card

Here it is running on my PA-8500:

Analysis

This version of the game is documented only briefly on Tetris.wiki and even less on Hard Drop Tetris Wiki, so let’s see what we can do to fill in a bit more information.

The device boots straight into the game, but you can switch to calendar, memo, calculator, or other organiser functions whilst it is running. Switching back to the game causes it to reboot, so games cannot be resumed. You cannot skip the BPS logo, but you can skip the credits.

The credits and game area are in the left (or top) half of the display because it can also run on devices with a smaller screen of half the size of the one shown.

There is a touch screen surface on top of where the card slots in and the print on the IC card itself shows the user where to press for each button or function. We can see that the shape of each buttons lines up with the grid of dots of the touch surface. We see the following buttons:

left
right
rotate (only counter-clockwise)
soft drop
start (hi-speed)
start (low-speed)
pause on/off
sound on/off

Scoring, line-clearing, leveling-up are somewhat odd and non-standard. Tetris.wiki has those covered. Notably, the play area reduces in size by the bottom lines filling in as you level-up, gradually becoming less tall and more cramped.

The game seems to have been programmed by BPS (Bullet-Proof Software), though I’m yet to see the manual, but there are no separate programming credits.

Credits

As seen in the video:

™ and © 1987 Elorg.
TETRIS licensed to B.P.S.
© 1989 B.P.S. All Rights Reserved.
Original concept by Alexey Pazhitnov.
Original design and program by Vadim Gerasimov.

TETRIS: Heavenly Scrolls (1989)

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 14:47:00 +0000

Given the ongoing discussion about whether or not TETRIS is 40 years old in 2024 (I say not), I thought it would be cool to add something interesting and relevant to the conversation. As a bonus, this is an item that at the time of writing is not covered in English anywhere else on the internet.

A Japanese book about TETRIS, written in the first year the game was available outside of the USSR:

テトリス10万点への解法 (天の巻)
TETRIS: The Solution to 100,000 Points (Heavenly Scrolls)
“HOW TO WIN TETRIS FOR 100,000,000 TETRISTS”

Edited and translated by 石原恒和 Tsunekazu Ishihara, published 15th March 1989.

Yes, that’s the current CEO of The Pokémon Company!

The book is equal parts strategy guide, love letter to the game, and historical document. It mostly features Spectrum Holobyte’s Macintosh version of TETRIS, but fondly refers to versions on the Amiga and other home computers. At the point this book was published, March 1989, the Game Boy was just about to release, in April, and its version of TETRIS would not arrive for a few months more, in June.

It features contributions from the team at SEDIC (most famous for Otocky) in the form of essays, stories, and illustrations about their experience with the game and how it had changed their world view. More on them in a forthcoming blog post. Towards the end of the book there are interviews with the TETRIS creators: Vadim Gerasimov (programmer) and Alexey Pajitnov (designer). Henk Rogers does not seem to be mentioned, though his company BPS is briefly mentioned in passing.

I can’t see any specific mention of the creation date of TETRIS in the text, but there’s a copyright line, most likely taken from the Spectrum Holobyte Macintosh version, that says:

Copyright © 1987 Academy Soft-ELORG.
All rights reserved. TETRIS is a trademark of Academy Soft-ELORG.

Emigre typography and graphic design magazine (1984–2005)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 24 May 2024 20:19:00 +0000

Emigre magazine was a highly influential graphic design publication. It was known for its innovative and experimental approach to typography and graphic design, pushing the boundaries of traditional design norms—for better or worse. The magazine was published from 1984 (year of the Macintosh launch) until 2005, and during its run it played a critical role in shaping the discourse around digital design and typography. It was founded by Rudy VanderLans and his wife Zuzana Licko.

Tell me about it

Emigre is notable for many reasons, and if you’re interested in 80s and 90s design there will surely be something in there for you. I first heard about Emigre when I started work at London graphic design agency Form in 1998, so about three quarters through the run.

Some features that stand out for me personally are:

Early bitmap fonts (1984) and emoji-like pictograms (1986) created by Zuzana Licko
Early 1-bit Macintosh art by John Hersey (1985) and many other lovely period details
Designs by such luminaries as Neville Brody, Erik Spiekermann, and many more
Articles on people like font designer Aldo Novarese
Issues dedicated to the record label 4AD (1988) and The Designers Republic (1994)

Online archives

I recently wanted to read some of the issues again and found a couple of online archives:

Letterform Archive: Emigre Collection (browsable magazines, simplified cross references)
University of Minnesota: Emigre Magazine Index (only comprehensive cross references)

Digital versions

If you want to take the magazine with you today it’s available in the Emigre Fonts app for iPad/iPhone, which allows you to download the issues for offline reading.

If you can’t use, or would rather not use, the official app I’ve converted the issues to CBZ files. Read those with Panels, Simple Comic, CDisplayEx, or another comic reader app of your choice.

Emigre (magazine) at Wikipedia
Emigre entry at Type Design Information Page
Type ‘90 HyperCard Video video of a HyperCard Stack
Designing the Emigre Magazine Index, Jessica Barness, 2016
Merz to Emigre and Beyond Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century
Verbum “The Journal of Personal Computer-Aesthetics”, Michael Gosney, 1986–

Emoji history: the missing years

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 10 May 2024 20:00:00 +0000

During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo functions. I bought a couple of them to see if they did anything cool or interesting. These sorts of devices are pre-internet, so there’s not much about them online, and they can’t be emulated, so the only way to find out what they do is to get first hand experience by reading the manual or, better, using one yourself. It’s difficult to find these devices in working condition, as most of them have screen polarisers that have gone bad over time, but if you’re lucky you can find one.

1994

One such device I bought was the Sharp PI-4000, from 1994. This is a pocket computer that rolled out of Sharp’s involvement in the development and manufacturing of Apple’s Newton MessagePad. In 1993 Sharp did their own licenced version of the Apple Newton MessagePad H1000, the Expert Pad PI-7000, but just like Apple’s device it wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped. But before that, in 1992, they’d made a device called the PV-F1 which was the first touchscreen-only PDA. After the Expert Pad failure, Sharp took another attempt at the concept and came up with the PI-3000 in 1993. This solved all the problems with the PV-F1, most notably size and cost. The device I have, the PI-4000, was released a year later and features higher memory capacity. The PI-3000/4000 devices could transfer data via infrared, connect to a modem to send faxes, and by the PI-5000 in 1995 could connect to cell phones to send emails. They all use a simplified—but still quite complicated—version of the multi-window operating system that had been developed for the PV-F1.

So I was trying out the PI-4000, the memo function is pretty cool allowing you to draw in different dither shades and pen widths, and use stamps to add symbols to your memo. These are mostly map-related things like road and rail junctions, buildings, and train stations. Pretty cool. Then I tried typing some messages on the device and as I explored the myriad of keyboard input mechanisms I came across something rather familiar (sorry about the awful photo—it’s the best I could do, honest—the screen is very reflective and the pixels are so far from the backing they cast individual shadows!):

At this point, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell. 🕳️🐇

1990

A little more reading, and a tip from my friend @chamekan on Twitter, unearthed the fact that the NEC PI-ET1 in 1990 also contained emoji¹. I also found a collector who owned a device, and we’ll hear more from them later on. The device is literally the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. With system software written by video game developer Hudson Soft its character set features emoji that can be typed inline, and it also features a “montage function” that allows you to create faces for each of your contacts—15 years later we’d see something similar in Mii on Nintendo Wii in 2006. The emoji on this device are a lot less well designed, in my humble opinion, than those on the Sharp devices.

A word about word processors

By now I was in contact with Keith at Emojipedia, who mentioned that he remembered a Sharp device with emoji, a word processor. I found one in the Sharp WD-A521, from November 1990, which featured higher resolution versions of the emoji designs found on my Sharp PI-4000.

There’s also the Panasonic FW-U1S50 from 1990, which contains 110 famiiar emoji under a section called “illustrations”, and also contains another 99 “audio/visual” symbols some of which coincide with modern emoji.

Perhaps there are other word processors from around that time that also contain emoji? I understand from my friend Izumi Okano that Japanese software developer Enzan-Hoshigumi, most famous for their Macintosh software and clipart, had created pictograms for one of the Canoword word processors around 1986. So at this point I’m thinking, why would the emoji on a word processor be ignored on the timeline of emoji history? Was there anything else being ignored?

Before cell phones became prevalent there were pagers, or beepers, in Japan these were known as Pocket Bell. Initially they would only beep and show a number, and people would use “beeper slang” to form words by using numbers whose pronunciation was similar to words and syllables. Necessity is the mother of invention! Eventually pagers would be able to send and receive text. It was perhaps only natural that emoji find a home on these devices, with the most notable being the heart ❤️ emoji. But the date of this transition is 1995, which is earlier than the SoftBank emoji from 1997 but later than my Sharp PI-4000 device.

A note about beepers

As an aside, it’s interesting to understand how emoji were typed on pagers/beepers. They weren’t selected using a picker, which would have required cycling through a huge range of characters, but rather typed in numeric digits which narrows the cycling down to far less characters.

The numeric code: 21 91 15 24 12 23 78
…would map to: カラオケイク？
…which means: KARAOKE?

Wild. Typing text this way must have felt like programming machine code directly in hexadecimal!

What makes it emoji?

I was chatting to a fellow designer, who has designed many emoji in his career, discussing the earlier emoji I had found in my 1994 device. They asked me to confirm that I could type emoji inline with text, giving me the example W😲W, which was his criteria for the symbols to qualify as emoji. If I couldn’t do that, he suggested we could only consider the symbols as icons.

So if I can type them inline amongst text on my device from 1994 that was capable of connecting to other devices and sending messages, then surely they should be considered the first emoji? Why do we, currently, only count emoji as emoji if they’re on a mobile phone? I’m also wondering when these emoji might have been designed. Were they created in 1994 for the PI-4000, in 1993 for the PI-3000, or earlier for another device?

1988

So I kept looking. I was aware of another line of Sharp devices, electronic organisers, known as the Bware range in Japan and Wizard in the USA. These were pretty popular at the time, so much so that the USA device even got it’s own episode of Seinfeld in 1998. I’d come back into contact with these devices just last year as they had the interesting capability of being able to play video games stored on solid-state application “IC” cards. You can play a version of Tetris by BPS that is quite different to the Game Boy version, and both were released in 1989. You can also play versions of Sokoban by Thinking Rabbit, and Fortress by SSI/Victor, amongst others.

Thanks to a collector, Akuji, I was able to confirm that the Japanese PA-8500 device, released in 1988, contains emoji² similar in design to those found on my PI-4000 and on the WD-A521. When redrawing these it was obvious that all the Sharp emoji sets are based on the same master design. (I’d love to know more about the Sharp artwork if anybody knows anything.)

And if you need to see the word 絵文字 (emoji) next to these symbols to be satisfied, then look no further than this table column header in the manual of 1988’s Toshiba Rupo JW95F word processor.

How old is an emoji?

At this point we’ve wiped almost a decade off the creation date of emoji, but can we go further? Is there a way to date a set of emoji? In Japanese 絵文字 means emoji — and it turns out that word has its own surprisingly long history, which I’ll come back to at the end of this post.

If we think about the PA line of devices, the PA-8500 was released in 1988, and it’s predecessor the (emoji-less) PA-7000 was released in 1987. So maybe the emoji set was created around this time? We can get closer by looking at a couple of characters present in the emoji that give us a clue to the date of creation. That is indeed the case with the Sharp PI-4000 and WD-A521.

The characters ○金 and ○ビ (maru-kin meaning rich/successful/winner and maru-bi meaning poor/unsuccessful/loser) were invented by the author Kazuhiro Watanabe in 1984 in his book Kinkonkan which was later made into a movie. These were quickly accepted into Japanese vocabulary, winning the 84年の日本流行語 (Japanese Buzzwords Award 1984). And they are right there in the Sharp PI-4000 emoji, represented as characters enclosed in circles. They were in common use throughout Japan’s bubble-era, 1986-1991, but eventually fell out of fashion and are now considered obsolete. It’s interesting to note that they are not featured in either the 1997 SoftBank or 1999 NTT DoCoMo emoji sets.

1986

Around the same time, the day after I published this post, I did a Twitter search and found an image of the November 1987 issue of ラジオの製作 (“Radio Production”) magazine, which featured a full page on a Sanyo SANWORD personal word processor and its emoji table. That sent me hunting for Sanyo manuals.

The earliest I tracked down was the Sanyo SWP-M21 “Sanword mini S”, a budget personal word processor from 1986. It has the usual cast — smiley face, snowman, fleur-de-lis, pointing finger, weather symbols, faces, hand gestures — but the genuinely fun bit is its 外字 editor. Sanyo let users design up to 94 of their own 24×24 dot characters and save them out to floppy. Build-your-own-emoji on a 1986 home appliance. 🎨

The manual shows off the kinds of things you could make: a cat, a turtle, a mushroom, an elephant, a ship, a hand making a peace sign, a heart with an arrow through it, an orca. The accompanying copy brags 「とてもワープロとは思えないような、ユニークな印刷を楽しむことができます」 — “you can enjoy unique printing you’d hardly think a word processor could do.”

Somewhere out there, there were Japanese homes in the late 80s with floppy disks full of personal pictographic vocabulary — family crests, drawings of pets, in-joke symbols between friends. Almost all of those floppies are presumably long gone now. If anyone has one in a drawer, I’d love to see it. 💾

1984

Once you accept that emoji existed in the 1980s, more things come to light. The Ishii Award 「石井賞創作タイプフェイスコンテスト」 was a typeface design contest organised by the community of type designers in 1970. By 1984 it was in its 8th year. Yutaka Satoh of Type-Labo proposed a typeface consisting of emoji. Because they weren’t on screen they were created by arranging dots in various shapes, but they are recognisably emoji.

Coincidentally, I used a hybrid of this sort of approach when I added emoji to my game YOYOZO in September 2023: I plot the emoji as points but define them on a pixel grid.

In Matt Alt’s book “The Secret Lives of Emoji: How Emoticons Conquered the World”, there is a brief mention of ASCII emoticons on the Japanese internet (JUNET) in 1984, and then it fast forwards to 1995 to begin talking about the Pager, missing a decade of emoji usage in the process.

In the Yakumono typeface, created by Yutaka Satoh (TYPE-LABO), we can clearly see many of the key emoji that would persist throughout the years: smiley faces, food, drink, cigarettes, sweat, umbrella, paperclip, lips, envelope, and most interestingly the (not smiling) pile of poo. This typeface received an honourable mention at the awards. Some 40 years later, I think it’s safe to say it deserved more. 🏆

1979

We can see emoji in the character sets of Japanese home computers such as the Sharp MZ-80K, which included a UFO, smiley faces, stick figures, car, snake, and more. I won’t include them here but you can click the above link to see some in a PDF. 💾

1965

“Full Moon With Face”, also known as BA-90 which was listed in a book of typesetting symbols, published by Sha-ken in 1965. A smiling moon is still present in the emoji set today. 🌝

1959

CO-59 is a character set created in 1959 for exchange of data between Japanese newspapers. In it is included a symbol of a baseball, which again is still present in emoji ⚾️ and at Unicode codepoint U+26BE ⚾︎ today.

Comparing Emoji

I was interested in how the emoji that I have redrawn compared to the 1997 SoftBank and 1999 DoCoMo sets, and an early Pocket Bell, so here’s a little table.

	Sharp PA-8500	NEC PI-ET1	Sharp PI-4000	Pocket Bell R-FAHC	SoftBank	NTT DoCoMo
Year	1988	1990	1994	1995	1997	1999
Quantity (approx)	100	130	170	7	90	176
Resolution	16×16	16×16	12×12	5×7	12×12	12×12

A word about the word

A side discovery: the word 絵文字 (emoji) itself has a much longer paper trail. The earliest citation I’ve found is Kenkyūsha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary, 1954—the standard postwar bilingual reference. It defines:

A settled dictionary headword forty-five years before DoCoMo. “Pictorial symbol” is the second listed sense — more central, by lexicographers’ ordering convention, than “hieroglyphics.”

The word kept showing up in places I wasn’t expecting:

1975: A Sony catalogue describes its ETV-4010 school AV mixing console as having 「パネル面の絵文字、色分け表示」 — “emoji on the panel face, colour-coded indicators”. The 絵文字 are the small pictographic labels on the control panel. Same functional concept as digital emoji, applied to industrial hardware, twenty-four years before i-mode.
1984: The graphic designer Kuwayama Yasaburō publishes a 431-page reference book titled simply 『世界の絵文字』 (Sekai no Emoji / “Emoji of the World”) on global logos, pictograms, and trademark design, spanning the years 1970–1983.
1984: ASCII magazine reviews the Canon PW-10 word processor in its August news section, noting that “各種記号、絵文字をワンタッチで表示することができる” — “various symbols and emoji can be displayed at the touch of a button”. Here are some great photos thanks to Marcin Wichary.
1985: MSX Magazine’s MSX 豆辞典 pocket dictionary supplement, distributed via Japan National Railways station kiosks, uses 絵文字 as the umbrella term in its entry for アイコン (icon), and gently complains that American influence has wrongly promoted “icon” into the same umbrella role.
1988: Toshiba’s Rupo JW95F word processor manual uses 絵文字 as a column header in its emoji-input reference table, no gloss whatsoever — the most casual possible use of a technical term.
1993: Nojima Hisao publishes “絵文字の心理的効果” (“Psychological Effects of Emoji”) in the intellectual monthly 現代のエスプリ. By January 1994 it was being cited internationally in the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference proceedings in Honolulu.

What DoCoMo’s 1999 set did was become the international reference point — which is why English borrowed 絵文字 as “emoji” rather than Sharp’s or Toshiba’s or Sanyo’s much earlier sets. The word’s invention is fiction. Its globalisation via DoCoMo is real, but only in English. 🌍

Conclusion

So what does this all mean? I’d say mostly that the history emoji isn’t as clean cut as you might have thought. You can decide for yourself on what you consider to be the first emoji. It depends on our own personal definition, so there is no right or wrong answer. 😎

Personally, I define the start date of emoji as the point in time when sets of these symbols first appeared for use whilst composing text. I don’t think the timeline should start at mobile phones, as this feels like a somewhat arbitrary decision that dismisses a lot of history. It’s like saying music only began to exist from the moment it could be recorded and listened to without the actual muscians being present. 🤔

As to whether the timeline of emoji history will be rewritten with this knowledge, it’s difficult to say. Much of this falls in the grey area of happening around the time the internet was taking hold, plus most things about the origin of emoji are in Japanese language, so there are unlikely to be sources Wikipedia would consider verifiable enough. The best we could do is quote the pages of the manuals for devices, and for the rest hope that there’s some record in Japanese literature that could be cited.

I won’t be running the Wikipedia editing gauntlet, but if you do please let me know how it goes! 🧨

Terms of use

I painstakingly recreated the emoji sets on this page, pixel by pixel, over many days of hard work. I even went so far as adding a new tool to the pixel art app I use, so as to make the task of redrawing hundreds of emoji a little less daunting. Feel free to utilize the emoji images, just remember to credit @gingerbeardman and include a link to this page. With one exception: I object to the use of these images for the purpose of creating NFTs. Thanks for your understanding!

Printed citations

NEC Electronic Tool PI-ET1, Instruction Manual, p.131, システム外字数 (“Non System Kanji”) ↩
Sharp Electronic Notebook PA-8500, Operating Instructions, p.201, 記号一覧表 (“Symbol List”) ↩

Barbara Nessim at The Ginza Art Space (1986)

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 23:22:00 +0000

At the end of 2023 I bought a one-in-a-million find from Japan: it’s a postcard from Barbara Nessim’s residency at The Ginza Art Space, September 26 thru October 19 1986. This residency came on the back of her breakthrough early computer art that was done on a Telidon system, a type of Teletext graphics system that displayed rudimentary vector graphics.

The postcard artwork is not digital and is dated 6-86. The details on the rear are set in the Chicago typeface designed by Susan Kare for the Apple Macintosh just a couple of years prior.

As well as Barbara’s residency there was an accompanying exhibition “The Work of Barbara Nessim”.

Made in Japan

During her time at The Ginza Art Space, Barbara used an NEC PC-100 to draw new work and printed them on one of the earliest wide-format colour inkjet printers, the Fujix JetGraphy 3000 (I’d love to be able to read this article at ResearchGate). Given the use of early technology and non-archival inks, the prints are prone to fading and are now very fragile.

The choice of PC-100 computer is interesting because its display could be rotated between portrait and landscape. In portrait orientation it had a resolution of 512×720, which is seven times more pixels than the Telidon system and twice as tall as the Macintosh Plus. The PC-100 displayed bitmap graphics so it was more similar to the Macintosh than the vector graphics of the Telidon system.

Colours were limited: the PC-100 hardware could display 16 colours from a palette of 512. The printer used CMYK and could produce around 10,000 colours, some of which printed better than others. This combination may have imposed some limitations as to which colours could, or should, be used.

Below are three examples of the work Barbara produced at The Ginza Art Space: they are Flowers in the Wind, Hand Memory, and The Gift. A description of the creative process is featured in Carol Olsen Day’s article “The Art of Barbara Nessim”, in the October 1988 issue of PC Computing.

What software?

My ongoing research into early Japanese pixel art software shows that Barbara most likely used ASCII’s エアーブラシ “Airbrush” painting software on the NEC PC-100, as it is the only graphics software for that platform I’ve been able to find advertised for sale or featured in period literature.

Early computer art by Barbara Nessim (1984)

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 01:25:00 +0000

Whilst searching for something else entirely I stumbled across these images and was struck by just how beautiful they are. The September 1984 (Vol 9, No 10) issue of BYTE magazine features cover artwork by Barbara Nessim and section pages by Liz Gutowski under direction of Barbara Nessim. Larger versions are at the bottom of this blog post.

They were drawn during a residency at Time Life in NYC, simply because that was the easiest way Barbara could gain access to a colour computer with suitable capabilities: a Norpak IPS-2 Videotex (NAPLPS/Telidon) system. This offered 6 drawing modes (arc, rectangle, circle, line, dot and polygon) and 12 colours, of which half where shades of grey, plus black and white. And at a resolution of 256x200. That equates to a computer system roughly equivalent to an Apple II running a rudimentary graphics application, in fact you could get an add-on card for the Apple II to give it full Norpak Telidon capabilities. The main benefit of the Norpak IPS-2 computer system was that it had pen/stylus input. The system comprised two monitors, one showed the artwork and the other showed the software status menu system. The software was controlled by keyboard and the points that specify the shapes were entered using the pen input.

My first thought was “such cool pixel art!” but a little bit more reading shows that they are actually vector illustrations. NAPLPS is an early graphics format which could represent both text and vector graphics with all coordinates and other properties - such as size, fill pattern, density - encoded as ASCII for easy transmission. It was designed to display information on TVs, and also used for display on terminals, in BBS software, and on the Prodigy online service. Readers from around the world might be more familiar with Teletext, which is a close relative of Videotex.

Doing pure illustration using a system meant for creating pages of information is exactly the type of software subversion I love to discover!

Barbara Nessim is a name I was already familiar with, as I’d seen her mentioned and interviewed in Verbum magazine, COMPUTE magazine, in various books about illustration, and regarding her groundbreaking interactive art exhibition/installation Random Access Memories (1991/2) - which addressed world issues such as migration and population growth and allowed visitors to operate a Macintosh containing the work, selecting images and printing their own customised booklet of her work with their choice of national flag on the cover. Source 1 and 2

Whilst I had seen other early computer work by Barbara - portraits, nudes, abstract (all of which are worth checking out!) - I had never seen work quite like these images from BYTE.

The chunky scan-line gaps in between the rows of pixels are the result of these images being photographs of the monitor on which they were displayed. Screenshots had existed since the 1960s but in the 1980s getting such an image off a mainframe was not yet easy or universal. Instead images were saved by pointing a camera at the screen, in this case a Polaroid Palette Video Image Recorder, capturing the image on 35mm slide film, and printing them by cibachrome process. Which is really saying something! Of course, I think the photos are much better than screenshots because of the scan-lines, the phosphor glow, the bleeding of colours, and the general analog feel to the whole thing.

Barbara was one of few people to embrace computers for art in the early-1980s, when the rest of the art world considered them at best a “fad” and at worst a threat to their existence. Before and after the 1980s Barbara carved out a hugely successful career for herself, encompassing many different forms of art, teaching and activism. She continues to create and exhibit her art.

Scans

Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator (1997)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 21:44:00 +0000

I like to think everybody collects something odd. Me? I collect hanafuda video games: digital implementations of traditional physical Japanese card games. Mostly that means physical copies of games for consoles and computers both new and old, for handhelds like Game Boy Advance, WonderSwan, digital versions for computers, handhelds and smart phones, and sometimes versions for platforms nobody has ever heard of.

Down the rabbit hole

At some point last year (shortly before I began writing this blog post!) I found reference to a hanafuda video game created in 1998 for the Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator on a random old, Japanese website. It turns out this device is a long-forgotten handheld computer that was released in 1997, only in Japan. The device is what you might refer to as a PIM or PDA, roughly equivalent to Apple Newton or Palm Pilot, particularly as it featured handwriting recognition. Not what we would consider powerful in this day and age, but good at running database lookups and any undemanding software written specifically for it. The CPU was Intel 8086 compatible, like other period CASIO handheld personal computers, and an SDK was available. Cost of the device was 47800JPY, which was around 240GBP or 400USD at the time.

The game file came with a reference bitmap showing hanafuda scoring, which was just the type of guarantee and encouragement I needed to start hunting.

Research first

So, after making sure the related web pages were archived to the Wayback Machine, and the downloads backed up, I did a bunch of reading to try to figure out whether or not I would be able to play this game if I bought a device.

It turns out the device arrived around the same time as USB 1.0. So perhaps its development, and most definitely its buyers, existed in a world that predated widespread support for USB. To that end, the device only has a serial connection. And not only that, the serial connection is on a dock that was not always sold with the device. Without the dock there is no way to transfer files to/from the device!

For me to stand a chance at this, I’d need to buy a device with a dock and the software to put files onto the device. After some searching, lots of waiting, and more searching, one came up for auction on Yahoo! Japan Auctions. I bought it.

CALEID GET!

The screen is 320x240 monochrome (1-bit) which exhibits an odd quirk that active pixels cast a shadow because the LCD is clear and the silver backing is some distance away. This is long before the LCD would be fused to the backing. In fact, some units you see for sale have creases in the silver backing, I’m not sure what must have happened to those devices!

The system software is a charming custom OS, featuring a full mobile office suite, and 2MB of flash storage (1.49MB free for user data). Most importantly it allows user-created Add-ins to be loaded onto it, we would call them plugins or apps today. The device even has an expansion port for communications peripherals, enabling it to do email/fax using a cell phone or pay phone as data connection. A salaryman’s dream in late-90s Japan!

My goal: sideload the hanafuda game, along with anything else I can lay my hands on, using the proprietary dock, sync software and a Japanese install of Windows 98!

I love this sort of challenge that requires discovery and understanding of old hardware and software, and a little (but not too much) messing around with old versions of Windows.

Installation

You can follow this process in a Twitter thread I created last year which contains additional images. I’ve also created an imgur gallery of photos and screenshots from the installation process.

I thought it would be fun to try to do this on period correct hardware, so I tried to use my old Sony VAIO PCG-Z600RE from 1999, but the battery is coming up to 20 years old and even with mains power it no longer turns on reliably enough for me to do anything. I would have had to install Japanese language support into Windows. So I quickly gave up this folly.

A better approach would be to use modern hardware running Windows in a Virtual machine, and I already have one set up running Japanese Windows 98. I hit a temporary roadblock whilst installing the DATA IMPRESSION for CALEID sync software: it is date locked to only run between the years 1988 and 2010. And here I am over a decade late! Thankfully a quick date change and we’re back in business.

The first run of sync software post-install requests that you run a Comms check. You have to tap the menu and folder buttons alternately seven times to put the device into a special debug mode, a tip cleaned from an addendum leaflet that came in the box. Without that leaflet I probably would have been stuck.

I used a USB to Serial cable to take care of the connection to the dock and it just worked, though I know from first hand experience that is lucky as some cheap adapters require a bit of fiddling to work with ancient Windows versions. Data transfer is slow at 9600 baud, that’s less than 1KB per second. I’ll try increasing the baud rate later, maybe.

Syncing

Syncing is done using a custom version of Data Impression 2, renamed Data Impression for CALEID. It has an arcane, overly complicated user interface along with a multitude of period and cultural quirks.

After some time spent browsing and translating the menus I found the section of the interface listing Add-ins and imported a bunch that I downloaded earlier. There’s some awkwardness to this process which I’ll describe later.

Syncing was working, but the add-ins were not syncing across for some reason. My thought that it was probably something obvious was correct. In the DATA IMPRESSION app you need to press the button that doesn’t look like other buttons (yellow text) and then enable Add-in syncing! We’re almost there, I can feel it.

Add-ins

The last little bits are worth bullet pointing, as they require some detailed operation:

Launch “DATA IMPRESSION for CALEID”
Select 電子手帳 (“Electronic Notebook”) from the buttons above the clock on the right (2nd from bottom) and then:
1. Make the model selection カレイド (“Caleid”, default)
2. Make the type of communication データ送信 (“data transmission”, dropdown 2, 3rd list item)
3. Click the 動作設定 (“operation settings”, button 3)
4. Check the アドイン (“Add-in”) checkbox (bottom, alt+D)
5. Uncheck all other types of data to disable syncing of those
Select メモ帳 (“Notepad”) from the menu on the right and then:
1. Select the アドイン (“Add-in”) folder
2. Select メモ帳 (“Notepad”) -> アドインデータの読み込み (“Read Add-in Data”) from the menu bar (alt+M, R)
3. Choose an add-in file (*.adi)
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for multiple add-ins
Press the スタート (“Start”) button on the dock. Add-In will be sent to the CALEID.

Gotchas:

Serial ports in VMs can be a hassle, try both the host PC and guest VM ports
DATA IMPRESSION will let you know if it can’t communicate over the selected serial port
Cursor needs to be in the Add-Ins folder for the Add-in menu items to be enabled
Syncing without an Add-in selected will result in a failure message
If you select an existing add-in rather than the Add-in folder, the existing add-in will be overwritten by the newly imported one(!)
If you start with the demo data you’ll have a bunch of test items in the various apps, see note below

Awkwardness: Add-ins have to be transferred one at a time, but a sync of a single Add-in goes fast enough after disabling syncing of all other types of data (notes, calendar, spreadsheets, etc).

Note: the first time I setup the device starting with the demo data it must have been syncing 25 years worth of recurring demonstration calendar events. Each sync of a single add-in took multiple minutes. Maybe that’s why they didn’t want anybody running the sync software so long after the device had been released?

The final, highest supported baud rate is 38400 (4800 bytes/sec theoretical speed, 3840 bytes/s actual speed, that’s 3.75KB/sec). Game sizes range between 3KB and 32KB, averaging 12KB each. So the slowest part of the process is the GUI busy work to install the Add-ins in DATA IMPRESSION for CALEID, and then syncing them one by one.

Game on!

Here’s my Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator running 花合わせ (Hana-awase) a hanafuda game made by すーさん (Sū-san) in 1998. Pixels are slightly wider than they are tall so the cards in the game display wider than in the image at the top of the page.

…I wonder how many other people have played this game in the last 25 years?

In a follow-up post I’ll detail the other games that I was able to install on the device.

CASIO Catalog ‘97-12

Extras

caleid.addins.dim.zip (294KB) a profile for DATA IMPRESSION for CALEID that has all the Add-ins I’ve found so far pre-installed and ready to sync
caleid.portmon-serial-addin.txt (44KB) a portmon serial log taken whilst syncing a single Add-in (the sample card game that comes with DATA IMPRESSION for CALEID)

Tom Moulton, Father of the Disco Mix (1976)

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 17:12:00 +0000

This interview is reproduced from the January 1976 “Disco” issue of Black Music magazine.

TOM MOULTON is the behind-the-scenes figure of disco music. His name has appeared on the credits of discs by Gloria Gaynor, B.T. Express, Bobby Moore, Al Downing, Peoples Choice, South Shore Commission and many others. Yet Moulton’s vital contributions to the hits of a dozen soul acts is in a manner new to an industry increasingly immersed in the complexities of a technological age. For Tom Moulton, a white New York based engineer, is the father of the “disco mix”.

Mixing a record is a complex process. Modern recording uses sixteen or twenty-four track machines, which means that every instrument is recorded and controlled separately, and can be balanced against the others. Tapes can be edited in a variety of ways, and played at any speed. Effects, like echo, repeat and phasing, can be placed on instruments, and stereo separation is exploited to give breadth to a recording. Compression, expansion and limiting are techniques which can firm up a sound by making quiet parts louder and loud parts quieter, or emphasize the dynamic range, or completely remove certain frequencies. Equalizers (which are found on home stereos in the form of bass and treble knobs) can be used on each instrument separately to change its characteristic sound. Most studios have bass, lower middle, upper middle, treble and top frequency controls which provide endless permutations of tone for each track. Tom Moulton has specialised in mastering these facilities, an assignment usually left to the producer. Tom’s services are called for whenever a company wants to perform a magical transformation: changing an uptempo soul disc into a ‘disco record’. Black Music spoke at length to this charming articulate man in his luxurious New York apartment to unravel the mysteries behind the oft quoted but seldom understood complexities of the ‘disco mix’.

BM: Tom, begin by telling us a bit about your background. How did you get into the music business?

TM: When I was fifteen years old I had a part-time job in a record store, and I liked it so much that I left school to try to get into the music business as a salesman. I worked for Seeburg’s (the jukebox company), and King Records. Then I went up to Boston and worked for a retail chain. I got a salesman’s job with RCA, left there, and went into United Artists as a promotion man. By that time I was so fed up that I left the business for about a year.

Then I went to a couple of discotheques, and I noticed how people were really starting to get into music, in a different way than I had ever realised; and I noticed how, towards the end of a record, people would really start to get into it and then, for some strange reason, they’d lose it, because another record would come on, or two records would be playing at the same time. So I figured, God, if people get off that much on music, there’s got to be a way to take them from where that peak is at the end of a record, and hold them, and take them up another level.

I started fooling around technically with tapes at home, and I finally got one place to try one of my tapes. I noticed that by doing edits, and by using parts of the actual record over again, like the instrumental break, people would yell and there’d be an emotional reaction. I just wanted to make people get off on the music, or at least extend that feeling that they had at the end of a record. Say I do a forty-five minute set; you start your records off at one level, and try to build up to a peak. When I do a mix, I try to take that whole forty-five minute trip and put it into one record. You start here, and then by the time the record is over you have them up at the ceiling.

BM: When did you get into the disco thing?

TM: It was 1970.

BM: Are you freelance?

TM: I am; I do a lot for Scepter—and they’ve done a lot for me. They gave me my first chance at something like this, with the BT Express.

BM: What is the appeal of discos?

TM: People go to get away from everything. Here in New York, a lot of people go to the discos to get away from the world, to get away from the city, and be totally free while dancing: being freaked out with the music and the lights. But you watch people, and they come in, they don’t know if they want to dance or whatever, and all of a sudden they’ll hear a record, they get up on the floor, and they totally come out of it. You just watch the expression of how they’re getting into it; I love to see people turn on like that to music.

BM: How do you mix a track for disco?

TM: A disco record has to have excitement, so what I do when I’m involved in a record is, first of all, something has to turn me on about it or I won’t get involved. What I usually do is hear a rough mix, and see what they’ve tried to do with it. Then I take it into the studio, and I try to get the right tempo for it. I slow up and speed up records, which I do on the sixteen track, and I get the right groove. Then I try to make things in there like the guitar, or piano, or something… I try to get some kind of drive going, some excitement. I notice that the beauty of things, like the bells, or vibes, or something, that are in there, or like a guitar that’s playing some pretty chords, I’ve noticed that the contrast has a funny reaction on people. It’s a hard driving thing, but all of a sudden there’s all this beauty there at the same time. I notice things like that really turn people on. And what I also try to do is put in breaks if I can, cause that takes people even higher. It’s down to flow; I try to take people somewhere. I never stay on the same plane because I think that becomes boring.

For example, the People’s Choice record (‘Do It Any Way You Wanna’). You hit them right over the head the first time with that drum beat, and then you build them from there, but you don’t let them go. You gotta keep their attention. When I first heard that on tape, it was the same thing all the way through the record. The same monotonous thing. So I did that record thirty seconds at a time; I started with the drums and the bass, then I punched in the guitar, then another guitar, then the Fender Rhodes. And you go like that. Then you keep bringing the hook back in; I brought the hook back three times. The original was close to that, except I kept repeating things to make it interesting. I’m not sure what the record would have done if it had come out the original way, but I know this way made it more exciting.

BM: Are you involved in computer mixes?

TM: I use computer mixes quite a bit now if it’s twenty-four track; it’s difficult with sixteen. It’s good if there’s a lot of riding to do, like if you want to get certain licks in on the guitar, or maybe the voices. It’s good in that respect, especially if there are a lot of things on there that you want to get out. The other thing I like about computer mixes is that you can use group masters, so you can bring the whole orchestration up at times, or put the strings and horns in something to accentuate what somebody’s singing. I find the computer mixes are fantastic for that; but even now I rely on the computer just as a group master, even on the sixteen track, ‘cause it just makes it easier. The use of computer mixes still isn’t perfected yet; the computer can perform two hundred and twenty functions, and we’re only using about three percent of its total capabilities.

BM: What do you think is your best mix?

TM: I think the most creative was probably Gloria Gaynor. The first one was probably the one I like best. It was just the excitement of taking two old songs that they felt, well, the only reason we’ll let you do them is basically because they’re old, and who really cares about them; they didn’t say it exactly that way, but since they’d already gotten the hit records, I mean, why would anybody want a five minute version of ‘Honeybee’? And I had to convince them into doing that.

BM: Did you change the tempo on that one?

TM: Yeah, a little bit.

BM: Don’t you find that that distorts the vocal performance?

TM: No; I speeded that up a little bit, but what that does is it puts things up in a higher range and makes the drums a little brighter. It makes the voice a little higher, and if you roll off the bottom and put more highs on the voice, you can almost make like she’s really screaming, like she’s really into the record. I’ve done that with a lot of records, where it sounds like they’re singing their ass off, but they’re not, ‘cause it’s done technically. I did that on ‘Leavin’ The Good Life Behind’, by Phyllis Hyman on Private Stock, (unfortunately that one wasn’t a hit) and on ‘Just Can’t Say Goodbye’, by The Philly Devotions. I suppose my all-time favourite mix is ‘I’ll Be Holding On’ by Al Downing. The radio stations here played the long B side on that; they never once played the short one. Stations started playing the long versions, like on ‘Do It ‘Til You’re Satisfied’, what they call the disco mix. I was thrilled when I heard that.

BM: The disco mix on ‘I Don’t Know If I Can Make It’, by Dawson Smith, sounds toppier than the vocal A side, especially the guitar and percussion.

TM: I did a mix on the vocal version as well as the instrumental, but they used the producer’s vocal version. My instrumental was just the track to the vocal version without the voice. My whole number on that was that I wanted to make it more dynamic, rather than just a street record. That guitar is brought out by adding brightness. I like a clean sound on most records; if I’m gonna hear a guitar playing I want it to sound alive; I don’t want it to sound compressed, or so tight in the record that there’s no life to it. When things bounce out of a track it sounds real, it sounds alive. I find also a great deal depends on the mastering of the record. I like to take a lot of bottom off the bass, so I can push it more, and pick up the melody line without destroying the bass drum sound. I like the bass to ride above the bass drum. Now, if you take off a lot of the bottom, roll off the bottom or some of the mid-range, it gets very thin, but it’s clean. Then when you go to master, you push the bottom again, you put the bottom back in, but you get a very clean bottom sound, without it all being boom boom boom, vibration rather than music.

BM: It’s been said that disco mixing is a matter of emphasizing highs to compensate for bottom-heavy speaker systems.

TM: I think I was probably the one that brought back the bright sound on top. The only reason for that is, at that volume, I always like to keep a dry top. I like to keep the cymbals as dry as I can, because when you have a lot of echo on a record, and you play it at that volume, everything just jumps together, and it sounds all distorted. I notice with a dry sound on the cymbals, they cut through, and the cymbal tracks would sort of float across the speaker. And I notice that people react to highs like that.

BM: There was also a lot of top on the Banzaï record.

TM: Yeah, well I think that was the hottest record I’ve ever mixed. That was deliberately done that way. I had a tape of that, and ‘Undecided Love’ by The Chequers, at the same time. I got them from France, and I turned Scepter onto them so they could buy it. But I did say that if you buy them, buy them with the stipulation that we get the sixteen tracks so I can redo them. I feel ‘Undecided Love’ is gonna be a big hit now. And there’s a break in that that never existed, and that’s 5:35, including that. I always try to get records to hit 5:35, it just seems to be a magic number with me. ‘I’ll Be Holding On’ was 5:35, and so was ‘Free Man’.

BM: Is there such a thing as a slow disco track?

TM: It’s hard to say; I feel there’s gonna be a trend towards that, what it is I don’t know, but right now, I would say no, there isn’t. In New York, the gay discos still influence the sound. You’ll find the gay discos are much more into things they’re not familiar with, whereas in the straight discos, people still feel they have to hear something they’re familiar with, and only occasionally can you slip in that new record that’s foreign to them. But now it’s getting to the point where gay discos aren’t gay anymore, they’re mixed. Because a lot of people are getting hip and saying, “Oh, we don’t want the same old music. We want to be able to go where it’s new and fresh”, and that’s what a lot of people do now. But I think you’ll find that in your big cities rather than your smaller towns. They’re not really into that sort of thing yet, and they watch what New York does.

BM: Are there any older records which are natural disco tracks?

TM: Yeah, there’s quite a few of them; ‘Think’, by Aretha Franklin, ‘Just One Look’, by Doris Troy, ‘Who’s Makin’ Love’, by Johnny Taylor. Things like that are really kind of disco records.

BM: When did disco begin in America?

TM: It began in the early sixties; but it really took off around 1971. I feel disco started happening more because radio got very tight with their playlist, and there was a lot of music which just wasn’t being exposed. And of course, the economy doesn’t help either. People want to be able to go out and have a good time. If you believe that history repeats itself, I think we’re going through the dance era of the forties again.

BM: Like the old tune ‘Brazil’ being recorded again?

TM: There’s quite a number of them now; there’s ‘How High The Moon’, on Gloria’s new album.

BM: What do you feel catalysed the new boom?

TM: Everything has an effect, when you put it all together, but I don’t think just one thing does; it takes everybody to get on a good thing, or it’s not gonna work. That’s what I tried to get the disc jockeys here to do; a couple of years ago I said, “Hey, the only way you guys are ever gonna get anywhere is if you all stick together, and then you can become something”. One will help the other this way, rather than each one trying to become a star themselves.

BM: Is that how the record pool came about?

TM: The record pool was really formed because of ‘The Chicago Theme’, by Hubert Laws; let’s say that was the basis of forming it. There was a man who was working for the company, CTI, who was giving out test pressings, and a couple of other disc jockeys tried to get it. The guy said, “I’m sorry, you’re not big enough”. So they called me and said, “I can’t believe anybody would say we’re not big enough”. And I said, “Well, I don’t have a solution to it”. I tried to call him, and he was very nasty about it. So the next thing I know is, “Well look, we’re all gonna get together then, and if we all don’t get it, then none of us are gonna play it”. And I said, “That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say”. That’s the reason they all got together, and of course I tried to help them .

BM: Are there any other disco mixers you admire?

TM: I don’t really know anyone else who does what I do: see, I call myself the objective side of a producer. I’ll go in there being totally objective, and take out everything that doesn’t work, and put in stronger things that are the key to it. And the reason I’ve come to that conclusion is, I’ve tried to produce some things myself, and I found it very difficult in the mixing to be objective, to say it’s not really mine, it’s somebody else’s, and I’m out to get everything that’s good in the record.

BM: Have you ever overdubbed anything onto a record?

TM: Sure, background voices. In ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ by Gloria Gaynor, the drums in the beginning. See, that was only once in the record, so we went in and overdubbed it, put it in again, kept repeating it.

BM: Did you change anything in ‘Call Me Your Anything Man”’, by Bobby Moore?

TM: No, but we had to triple the strings. We did it technically, cause there were only three violins, and rather than… I don’t like to add things to a producer’s record, I don’t think that’s right: if I can do it without that sort of thing, I would rather. ‘Cause I enjoy what I do, but I’m not trying to take it away from the producer either.

BM: ‘Anything Man’ had a lovely summer quality.

TM: I loved that record. Everybody always says the same thing, they always say “summer quality”. I was just fascinated with it. It’s the melody which I think attracted me to that record, and the girls’ voices. It’s like a lovers’ record, I can’t explain it. Like, to me that was a ballad. It wasn’t really disco. The original had a sideman (a rhythm box simulating sixteenths on a closed high hat) up louder, but the whole mix was much harder. And there’s that thin line where you’ve got to compromise, where you still want to retain the feel of the record, but you also want the beauty, and the minute that was up too loud, it clashed with what he was doing, it ruined the intimacy of what he was trying to say. You’ve got to consider the vocalist too.

BM: Has disco affected dance itself?

TM: It has; I don’t think the hustle would have come up without the disco. They call it the hustle, I don’t actually know how it got its name, but I know that a promotion man at RCA was the guy who gave Van (McCoy) the idea to record it. The rhythm is really a Philadelphia sound, what I call pretty soul.

BM: Is the bump surviving?

TM: I don’t think it was ever that big in New York. It was big with the blacks, but not so much with the whites. On a national basis, I’d say the bump is probably still popular.

BM: Has disco transcended ethnic lines?

TM: I find black music on the whole more effective than white records when it comes to generating excitement. I’ve grown up with black music, and maybe I’m prejudiced, but I prefer black music, only because there’s an excitement there. It’s like the way a black group performs versus a white group. It seems like a black group needs less to make it exciting, I don’t know why that is. Even vocally, they sing between the notes. I guess you’d call it soul. And why should that kind of music be just for the blacks, that’s not fair. I appreciate anything that’s real and exciting. That’s what I try to do in a mix.

BM: Aren’t discos expensive?

TM: No, they’re not. It’d probably cost you around five dollars to get in, then you’d probably spend maybe two or three dollars for a drink or whatever. That’s not a lot of money here.

BM: Are drugs prevalent on the scene?

TM: I think you’re gonna find them anywhere. I don’t think there’s as much as there used to be, but there’s still a lot of drugs around, let’s say grass, or they might be on amyl nitrate, what they call poppers here. But I don’t think there’s as much as before.

BM: Do you think that disco has hurt struggling live acts?

TM: No, because if you look at the charts, there’s still a great percentage of ballads. I just think that disco music has opened a whole new area and created some new record stars. Those small clubs still exist. There’s still a lot of people who like that kind of music.

Maybe it’s hurt them a little bit, but there are still people who want to hear the small trio, the piano lounge. A lot of restaurants have opened discos where before they had nothing. If you’re gonna go the music route, discos are hot right now. Rather than someone saying, “I wanna really increase my business so I’m gonna throw out the small group and start getting discos”. There are still a lot of places that have the small lounge acts.

BM: Do you see any signs of disco fading?

TM: No, because I don’t think it’s peaked yet.

BM: A lot of people have jumped onto the disco bandwagon; has James Brown?

TM: What James Brown used to do really wasn’t disco music. James Brown generates a raw excitement, and that’s a prime reason why a number of his records were played in the discos, because it had that raw excitement to make you wanna move. There’s a certain line there where it becomes listening music, and music where you’ve got to tap your foot or something; and that’s what you try to get out of a mix, to get people, like, to slap them in the face and say, “Hey, come on, let’s move”.

BM: What do you think of James Brown’s two latest disco albums?

TM: I wouldn’t want to comment on those.

BM: What do you think of ‘Bad Luck’, by Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes?

TM: It’s got to be one of my favourite all-time records. That of course was a million seller here. That’ll probably be the biggest record of ‘75 in terms of popularity, because people just don’t get sick of it.

BM: And The O’Jays?

TM: Believe it or not, The O’Jays are the biggest sellers on Philadelphia International. They’re probably one of the strongest black acts around; they do have some white appeal, but it’s primarily the black appeal for The O’Jays. ‘Love Train’ was probably their biggest seller to the white audience, and ‘For The Love Of Money’ was an incredible disco record.

BM: And The Temptations?

TM: It’s funny about Motown. I think the most exciting thing they’ve come out with is ‘Forever Came Today’, by The Jackson Five. That became a number one disco record here in New York; but as for some of their other products, it seems like there’s no excitement anymore. It’s like they don’t take it far enough, they confine it.

BM: Does that hold for The Commodores?

TM: Oh, I wish you didn’t say that. There’s one song I love right now, it’s my favourite song. It’s called ‘This Is Your Life’, it’s a ballad. That to me is one of the greatest Motown records I’ve ever heard. But I didn’t care for ‘Slippery When Wet’. If they applied the same approach to The Commodores’ up records as they did to ‘This Is Your Life’, they would really dominate the disco world.

BM: What about some other groups?

TM: I love Kool & The Gang, always have. I like The Ohio Players, they’re interesting. I’m surprised they’re as commercial as they are, because when you listen to them they’re really not that commercial. Love The Isley Brothers.

BM: Is side one of ‘The Heat Is On’ disco?

TM: Yes and no. That’s a group disco-wise that’s predominant in the straight clubs. It’s too repetitious for the gays. And it’s bigger in black clubs.

BM: And Barry White?

TM: He’s sort of over now. His last big record was ‘You’re The First, The Last, My Everything’.

BM: Are you involved in any work other than disco?

TM: I’ve been doing a lot of ballads lately. I think ballads are much easier to do. You can get more emotion out of a ballad, where, with a disco record, there’s a lot of things that you’ve got to keep going. ‘Cause if I get bored with it, then I know other people are. You’ve got to keep the excitement level up, whereas on a ballad you depend more on the lyrics and the melody.

BM: How do you see the future of disco?

TM: As long as people can go out and have a good time for five dollars, and feel uninhibited, because maybe it’s dark, and let’s say, escape, and just come out of your shell and dance, I think discos are gonna be around. Because it’s really a cheap way of having a great time.

Fake Steve Jobs & Letters from BILL G

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 18:49:00 +0000

On 9th August 2006, “Fake Steve (Jobs)” started blogging at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. The blog featured scathing criticism of Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large, a pinch of political satire, along with many in-jokes and pandering to the zeitgeist. It was, above all else, very funny. A year or so after it began the identity of the ghost writer was revealed as journalist Dan Lyons. The blogging eventually stopped as the (real) Steve Jobs’ health deteriorated, and a single posthumous post appeared the day after his untimely death. I often think about Fake Steve, some of his best lines, some of his funniest observations. It was a different time.

Anyway… imagine my surprise when, earlier this year, I discovered that somebody in Japan had done a “Fake Bill (Gates)” a decade before Fake Steve! Truly, everything is a remix.

Letters from BILL G

ビル・Ｇからの手紙 “Letters from BILL G” was a column that appeared in EYE・COM magazine in 1996 and continued after the magazine was renamed to 週刊アスキー (Weekly ASCII) in May 1997.

The writer of the column was コモエスタ坂本 (Comoesta Sakamoto). Of course, his name is a pseudonym combining Spanish and Japanese. He was a philosophy graduate (Sophia University, 1988), performance artist, actor, punk singer with 坂本プロジェクト (Sakamoto Project, 1989), sports commentator, journalist, author, and all-round troublemaker. Quite a busy man! There is next to no information on the internet about all of this: a single blog post, some reminiscing on Twitter and a short bio. So I’ve done my best to dive deep into the Wayback Machine to uncover what I can.

The Letters from BILL G were eventually published in two books, with Volume 1 appearing in August 1998 and Volume 2 in July 1999. After the column had been running for around 6 months, ramping up to the publication of the first book, a teaser/promo website was introduced featuring a selection of letters. This is cool because internet was still pretty new at this point! Both the books and the website feature letters in their “original” English as well as in “translated” Japanese (of course, this is the opposite of the real order of events).

The Media King

BILL G is quite a character. He proclaims himself to be “The Media King” and claims credit for a whole host of aspects of modern technology some of which are true and some of which are, of course, blatant lies.

I would say that BILL G doesn’t call out specific people or turn to (tongue in cheek) personal insults as frequently as Fake Steve did. But BILL G is well remembered for his brutal opening remarks of many letters were he is condescending to Japanese people in general, explaining how he is better than them. And in some letters he response to “reader’s questions” which are equally scathing.

Of course, in the mid- to late-90s Windows reigned supreme so the butt of the jokes tend to rest on Microsofts dominance in the marketplace and what seemed to be its inevitable encroachment on every facet of computer use. In letter 61, published in 1997, BILL G declares that he “invented the Internet”. A decade later Fake Steve would declare “I invented the iPhone!”

Topics include: Pocket PCs, Y2K, Tamagotchi, IE in Windows antitrust suit, Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, iMac introduction, sports events such as The Masters, and so on. Many topics that were mentioned are still relevant today: Digital currency, Network OS, Pokemon, Global warming, and more.

I recommend browsing the teaser/promo website in English or Japanese, but here are a few of my favourites:

the “true” story of Windows GUI vs Mac GUI
cloning himself into every PC “BILL G Inside”
Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” at the Christmas Party (“he’s dead? no problem we’ll use a hologram”)
comparing a short trip around Japan to “Gulliver’s Travels”
his disclosure that micro drives came out of what “really” happened at Roswell, NM
his brief obsession with the game “Age of Empires”
a brief stint as “Counsellor for Love Affairs”
a virtual interview with Ghandi that ends in a fist fight

End Users

It feels to me that the BILL G column may have fallen out of Comoesta Sakamoto’s digital magazine 末期ユーザー “End Users” (phrased to mean “terminally ill”) that was similarly irreverent.

“End Users” was distributed Mac User’s MACBIN CD-ROMs (supposedly issues 20 to 26, but I can only find it on two of these). On the same discs were some Macintosh apps created by Comoesta Sakamoto, a mix of joke apps (one resets your Mac!), surreal point and click explorations of sound and image, and a text-mode baseball game (seemingly a version of an earlier game he’d made for Japanese NEC PCs). You can also find these on an archived version of his old website via Wayback Machine.

Legacy

BILL G is a product of its time, and neither it nor Fake Steve have the impact today that they had when they were published. But they’re both still pretty funny and seemingly fondly remembered around the world.

The BILL G column was well-remembered enough that it reappeared in MSX Magazine 永久保存版 2 (MSX Magazine Eternal Preservation Edition 2), released in December 2003, and available to read at Internet Archive.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes: Letter from BILL G in MSX Magazine 永久保存版 2 (Dec, 2003)

SameGame

It seems that at some point Comoesta Sakamoto was swept up in the SameGame craze that happened in Japan during the mid-1990s. He wrote a strategy guide about how to play it, and published it in two minor variations: まきがめ必勝ガイド (MaciGame Victory Guide, for Macintosh) and さめがめ必勝ガイド (SameGame Victory Guide, for Windows/DOS).

さめがめ (SameGame) by Eiji “Kyoto” Fukumoto, is a variation of the original game in the genre: Chain Shot by Kuniaki “Morisuke” Moribe (1985, same year as Tetris which would remain behind the iron curtain until 1987).

まきがめ (MaciGame) was an expanded version for classic Macintosh that featured a GUI and customisable graphics. Between them the two games created a phenomenon of Tetris-level proportions.

There have been countless versions of the Chain Shot concept made over the years, most based on either SameGame or MaciGame, including one for Super Famicom (SNES) by Hudson which came about in an interesting way.

The goal of this type of game is to clear the board of blocks by clicking on groups of two or more, empty space is then removed vertical by the remaining blocks dropping down and horizontally by empty columns being replaced by their rightmost column. This means that over time blocks converge in the lower left of the play area.

…I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which book cover is PC and which is Mac.

Illustrator

I have to mention the illustrator of all of these books, 能美勉 (Nomi Tsutomu, also known as: nomitsutomuwaku, NohVenWaku, nomitom). His surreal take on mid-century Japanese advertising illustrations used a combination of scans and Photoshop and gave all of Comoesta’s articles and books a very distinctive look.

Again there is very little about Nomi online in 2023, but you can check out a couple of archived websites. Unfortunately his Instagram account @nmt_waku is private.

Extracting sounds from Macromedia Director files

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:42:00 +0000

For my latest “quick” Playdate project—a remaster of a ~1997 web game by Thoru Yamamoto—I decided to add sound effects. In order to keep it as authentic as possible I decided to use only sound effects created by Thoru Yamamoto that were used in his other productions.

The largest collection of sounds I could think of were those included in his Macromedia Director web experiments which include everything from short animations, through games and interactive toys, to abstract slideshows. The problem is, these Director files are tricky to deal with some 25 years later.

Halt and Catch Fire

A bit of reading and some help from Misty De Méo led me to ProjectorRays which can convert a protected .dcr file into an editable .dir file, and also allows saving of all the individual chunks that comprise each file. Think of it as one chunk for each piece of graphics, sound, and so on.

Once you’ve converted the .dcr to .dir you can open the file in, say, Macromedia Director 2004 and use CastRipperTool to export sounds and graphics and more. But it’s a very manual process and the whole setup is prone to crashing. Crucially, it won’t open some older Director movies so this wasn’t a good enough solution for me.

Chunks

I looked to the chunks that had been dumped by ProjectorRays and some quick experimentation showed that the ‘snd ’ chunks contained raw PCM audio date with a bespoke header. Loading these into something like ocenaudio wave editor was proof enough, but I would need to figure out some of the header to see if I could get the correct sample rate of each file.

With a bit of help bouncing ideas off hikari_no_yume in a bug report on one of their tools I figured out the location of the sample rate. Interestingly, the values were unexpected and not the usual values 11025, 22050, etc. It turns out that classic Apple Macintosh used some slightly different sample rate values: 11127, 22254, etc.

Using the xxd tool I dumped the relevant section of the headers of 1163 sounds from 105 .dcr files. The breakdown in sample rates found was as follows:

Rate (Hz)	Hex	Quantity Found
7,418	0x1cfa	1
11,127	0x2b77	616
22,050	0x5622	31
22,254	0x56ee	515

The lack of any unexpected sample rate values was further proof that this was the real deal.

Shell script

Armed with this information I decided to write a short shell script that would do the following:

extract the sample rate from the ‘snd ’ chunk
create a trimmed raw pcm file excluding the 78-byte header
use sox to add a new WAV header using the correct sample rate

This script allows me to batch process all the audio and that’s much more to my liking: it captures everything compared to CastRipperTool and it’s a lot quicker.

So, dump your chunks using ProjectorRays and then call my script like this:

find . -iname "*.bin" -exec ./bin2wav.sh {} \;

Notes:

I’m assuming 8-bit, mono, unsigned PCM data in the ‘snd ’ chunks and have not found anything else in them.
SoX (Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation) requires the .raw extension for raw PCM audio data, it will refuse to process the files without it.

“The Famous F40” vector illustration by David Rumfelt

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 17:25:00 +0000

I was looking through some old Macintosh CD-ROMs, searching for my usual things that I do whenever I add new discs to my collection: hanafuda, specific artists, favourite software, plugins for said favourite software, and so on. Whilst I was deep in the filesystem I stumbled across some old sample files from Deneba Canvas and noticed how they were all credited to the artist.

Intrigue got the better of me so I did a quick google and came up with a post on the Canvas GFX website (yes, the software still exists!) about David Rumfelt and his most famous work: a cutaway illustration of a Ferrari F40.

Thanks to my Patreon supporters for their help and encouragement with this type of content.

Going back to the files on the CD, I found the artwork for The Famous F40! It was alongside another detailed cutaway piece called The Famous Harley. In the folder containing the artwork files there was an important looking Read Me document:

Effectively immediately, all uses of the F-40 and Harley image by Deneba or third-party vendors MUST include one of the following tag lines in the credits: “Original art by David Kimble. Electronically re-created in Canvas by Deneba Software” or “Original art by David Kimble. Electronically re-created in Canvas by Deneba Software artist Dave Rumfelt.”

These days we would just call it a vector illustration, but at the time I guess there must have been some fun discussions as to both the legality of this piece of work—a copy of a piece of art originally created by somebody else—and also how it should be described to minimise the outrage David describes when he recalls creating the piece.

Original art by David Kimble. Electronically re-created in Canvas by Deneba Software artist Dave Rumfelt.

Time travel

The F40 is a mind blowing piece of work and is reported to feature around 28,000 vector objects. It’s a very good imitation of the original illustration by the legendary David Kimble on which it is based.

I recorded a short video showing me zooming, scrolling, and watching it redraw. Finally I ungroup everything a handful of times to count the total number of vector objects. This is running in an emulator of a Macintosh with System 7.5 and 64MB RAM, though the illustration only requires around 8MB RAM. Maybe this will transport you back through time to when you were young!?

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s Canvas—and most other contemporary illustration software—did not draw lines smoothly using the process known as anti-aliasing. This was for a combination of performance reasons (you need the artwork to redraw quickly) and hardware limitations (computers didn’t have GPU acceleration and displays often ran with limited colours). The resulting image has lines with aliasing—a distinct pixel stepping—and gradient fills that are not very smooth. Though I feel that a lot of the gradient fills in this piece are deliberately using banding for similar technical reasons.

After playing around in Canvas for a while, I decided to see if I could get a higher quality version of the file. Rather than struggle making 30-year-old software do something it would rather not, I exported the Canvas file as an EPS and moved to modern macOS. Importing it into modern Acorn allowed me to export a higher quality, smooth, anti-aliased version of the illustration that you see at the top of this page. But why stop there?

Scrollable 20-megapixel version

You can scroll around this image or right click and open it in a new tab to see it in all its glory.

Notes

Eagle-eyed viewers may notice that this version of the F40 differs slightly from the one shown on the Canvas GFX web page. The Canvas file I have from 1994 is some missing elements, such as the metalwork between the petrol cap and petrol tank. It is also comprised of around 16,000 vector objects, around two thirds of the reported number. Also of note is the image on the Canvas GFX website appears to be either squished horizontally or stretched vertically.

Downloads

The Famous F40, PDF file (2MB, direct download)
The Famous F40, Canvas file as SIT (10MB, direct download)
The Famous F40, Canvas file on CD-ROM (400MB, link to download page)

Five interesting facts about the design of the original PlayStation

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some things you probably didn’t realise about the design of the original Sony PlayStation:

it was inspired by Apple’s Macintosh Plus
the colour is grey with a hint of violet to counteract plastic ageing/yellowing
Sony acquired the PlayStation name from Yamaha
it led to the VAIO range of PCs

Bonus fact:

VAIO was originally an acronym for Video Audio Input Output

Photo reference

Taken from Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center (1999, Paul Kunkel)

IntelligentPad: component-based drag-and-drop software creator

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

IntelligentPad was a drag-and-drop software creator based on the concept of reusable components. Pads could be reused on other pads. There was no programming language so software could be created by anybody, including those without programming experience. It was generally referred to as IP, and often “iPad” which resulted in some users reminiscing on Twitter after the launch of Apple’s iPad device.

History

IntelligentPad was proposed in 1987 by Professor Yuzuru Tanaka 田中譲 of Knowledge Media Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering, Hokkaido University, and implemented using Smalltalk-80 in 1989. All software resources on a computer are represented in the form of Pads. Pads are standardised so that they can be connected to each other and by combining general pads such as text pads, graph pads, and image pads, a program (called a composite pad) is created.

With it being a tool for Rapid Application Development there are some similarities with Jean-Marie Hullot’s Interface Builder (1986), Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard (1987), Denison Bollay’s Action! (video) (1988), Fujitsu’s TownsGEAR (1990), Microsoft’s Visual Basic (1991), Borland’s Delphi (1995), and also Apple Research Labs’ Squeak (1996, which also happened to be created using Smalltalk-80).

IntelligentPad could be used to build a variety of software from a working calculators and digital clocks (as shown in the documentation/tutorials), through to fully blown applications such as a database of nuclear reactors. Examples quoted in early-1999 included a Kyoto culture database “THE MIYAKO” (pdf, p.13) and IntelligentPad’s own “Piazza” project. But, both were still under development at that time.

Desktop software

Implementations of the IntelligentPad standard were available for multiple platforms, and all could mutually exchange pads. Hitachi were most active, creating versions for Mac (as both Shareware and limited demo), HP workstations and a version for Windows with Fujitsu. To add to that Fujitsu created a version for Solaris workstations. Elsewhere K-Plex released a commercial version under the name PlexWare (Japanese).

From 1993 the standard was overseen by the IntelligentPad Consortium, a non-profit organisation aiming to promote and standardise IntelligentPad. The consortium is made up of 36 corporate members and individual members, including Fujitsu, Hitachi Software Engineering, Fuji Xerox, NTT, and NEC. The same year a live-demo was presented in Kobe at the first TED conference held outside of North America (pdf). The proliferation of the world wide web at this point meant the beginning of some adjustments to the concept.

The “Piazza” project

Given that the core concept meant Pads were freely redistributable components, a problem arose that software made using IntelligentPad was difficult to sell. The software was free, Pads were free, and there was no distribution or billing system available.

So, the IntelligentPad Consortium proposed a virtual space for content distribution called Piazza, which was presented at the NicoGRAPH conference of art and science in 1998. Users would gain the ability to place their own applications and image data in the Piazza space in the form of pads, and have other users download them. The proposal was complicated by Japan’s copyright laws, which caused the need for a middle-man clearing house to be involved issuing copyright registrations, as well as distributors who would encrypt the content. It makes the single point of contact for modern App Stores appear to be the ultimate in luxury!

In March 1999 this was all just an idea, with no working prototype available. Piazza version 1.0 was released in November 1999.

Reinventing the internet

Further proposals included an “internet sandbox” that used the Piazza to connect elementary schools over long distances, enabling them to exchange content and communicate with each other, and the development of a search engine for content distributed on Piazza. To me this sounds a little like reinventing the internet.

Download

My interest in IntelligentPad begun when I found Japanese version 2.0.1J in my archive of Macintosh Magazine Media on a Japanese MacUser magazine CD-ROM from 1996. With that knowledge I headed over to DiscMaster and found English version 2.0.1 on a 1996 CD-ROM sold by German Apple reseller GRAVIS that contained their catalogue, software and updates. One world!

You can download those Macintosh files at macintoshgarden.org/apps/intelligentpad and try it in a classic Macintosh emulator such as the Infinite Mac web-based emulators (System 7, KanjiTalk 7) and do make sure to copy the files to the emulated hard drive before expanding and running IntelligentPad. Documentation is included and there are Tutorials to create a variety of things from a simple calculator, to a more advanced digital clock, and even a full software application in the form of an interactive map with database browser.

For Windows, IntelligentPad version 4 released in 2000 still works on Windows 8 in XP Mode. There’s also a Java version of IntelligentPad. Both can be downloaded from the Consortium website though I am yet to try those specific versions myself.

Demonstration

Aftershock

In 1995 the concept was reimagined as IntelligentBox, which added an extra dimension as it was capable of displaying and manipulating 3D models. An internet-ready version used the phrase Web Pebble (“Webble”) instead of Pad or Box, and yet another version used the phrase “Meme Media” to refer to reusable components comprised of parts of web pages.

IntelligentPad today

By now you might think IntelligentPad is long forgotten, but I’m here to blow your mind. The IntelligentPad Museum/Palace website is still being updated.

MaciGame user created graphics

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 04 May 2023 12:00:00 +0000

I recently collected over 250(!) sets of user created graphics for MaciGame the classic Macintosh tile-matching puzzle game by Takeshi “KEN” Takahashi.

まきがめ (MaciGame) was a wildly popular game worldwide in the mid-to-late 1990s, and there was even a play guide book published about it in its native Japan! The game is a variation of さめがめ (SameGame) by Eiji “Kyoto” Fukumoto, which is in turn a variation of the original game in the genre: Chain Shot by Kuniaki “Morisuke” Moribe.

The goal of this type of game is to clear the board of blocks by clicking on groups of two or more, empty space is then removed vertically by the remaining blocks dropping down and horizontally by empty columns being replaced by their rightmost column. This means that over time blocks converge in the lower left of the play area.

The user-created graphic sets were all sourced from the amazing Vector.co.jp, extracted from all manner of esoteric vintage archives, organised and packaged as a single compressed disk image to make using them much quicker and easier. Download it at Macintosh Garden.

Tips: you can browse the folder as a GraphicConverter slideshow to more quickly and easily figure out which you’d like to use or install. The easiest way of using a graphics set is to double click it and it will open MaciGame with the new graphics loaded. A few images may not have the correct SaMe creator code so may need to either have that set, or be loaded manually using the game menu.

Thanks to Izumi Okano for letting me know about this archive of user created graphics, and also my Patreon supporters for allowing me to preserve this type of content.

DiscMaster

User created graphics can be found and viewed in DiscMaster using this search: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?format=pict&detection=PICT%2FSaMe which indexes and makes browsable all of my Japanese CD-ROMs as well as many more uploaded by other people.

My Favourites

As well as recovering the infamous Panty Cat graphics set—which was removed after version 1.74 of MaciGame—I also discovered all manner of beautiful, clever, and some times brain-melting graphics.

Tile sets with 16 cells allow tiles that change their appearance based on matching neighbours. That means melting faces, multi-headed xenomorph, water pipes, DNA sequences, impossible key chains, mutant fish bones, weird blobs with faces, intertwining branches, mole burrows and more.

A small selection of my favourites are below:

The biggest crime in pop music?

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The re-recorded version of “Ride on Time” (featuring an uncredited Heather Small on vocals) released in the UK on Deconstruction Records.

It was (re)made as the original samples couldn’t be cleared. The track’s success is what gave us M People, for better or worse. 😅 Sadly this version is the one you hear today on UK radio.

And here’s the original version of “Ride on Time”, released in Italy by the real BLACK BOX in 1989.

The original Italian version of “Ride on Time” can be found today because the samples of the Salsoul Records classic, Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation”, were eventually (finally!) cleared in 2018!

The Sample

Working with classic Macintosh text encodings in the age of Unicode

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 12:34:00 +0000

One of my “lockdown projects” is a collection of media from vintage Japanese Apple Macintosh magazines. These are mostly CD-ROMs but there are some floppy disks too. I started the project in July 2021 and have so far collected an archive of over 250 items spanning just over a decade, uncovering many long lost classic pieces of software in the process. I call the project Macintosh Magazine Media and contributions are always welcome.

The Relentless March of Progress

Accessing vintage Macintosh media from the “classic” era is more difficult than it should be. This is largely due to Apple removing support for accessing the HFS Standard format in modern macOS, since Catalina. My guess is that the feature comprised of 32-bit code and the move to 64-bit and Apple Silicon meant it would have to be rewritten, so instead they removed it completely. You can still access HFS Standard disks in Mojave, but there are problems when exotic text encodings are used.

Before Unicode

Classic Macintosh was created before the world moved to Unicode. But of course many languages existed and people speaking those languages wanted to use Macintosh computers. So Apple were forced to provide support for those languages. They did so by offering their system software in multiple languages. If you think of how embedded Unicode is in our software today, it was the same sort of thing: only repeated for each individual language!

For European, Western, or Latin-based languages you’d be forgiven for not noticing the differences as most of the characters are the same. The problem comes with non-Latin languages, like Japanese.

Opening Pandora’s Box

I figured out quickly that the correct way of viewing the contents of media containing Japanese files was to use a Japanese version of Macintosh system software. It sounds obvious in hindsight, but it was not at the time! Seeing as I prefer System 7 to later versions I installed System J-7.5.3 in the BasiliskII emulator, alongside my existing systems so I can switch to it on demand. Emulation makes the whole thing so much easier by removing the friction of old, slow, possibly failing hardware.

There are many apps capable of cataloguing removable media, but it took me a long time to find one that could cope with Japanese. I learned an important lesson here: if you’re dealing with Japanese look for apps made in Japan! More on that later. DiskCatalogMaker (formerly DiskChoboMaker) was the cataloguing app that I settled on that worked for my needs. In fact, it’s still being updated today and can even import files created with much older versions, so I can copy my database from classic Mac OS to modern macOS and “it just works”, at least it does if you do that with modern macOS set to Japanese locale. That said, as good as DiskCatalogMaker is it still has problems with some filenames resulting in missing or duplicate entries, it uses a proprietary database format, it has cumbersome way of exporting plain text listings, and does not support bulk operations. I did go so far as scripting an automated bulk export solution using Keyboard Maestro but that was slow and tedious to do whenever there were changes or additions to my collection.

DIY

With no better solutions to be found the only remaining choice was to do it myself. This decision was made in October 2021.

I found two apps that can be used on modern operating systems to view HFS format media, both of which seemed like good places to start. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel:

HFSExplorer - a Java GUI app
hfsutils - a command-line suite of tools

HFSExplorer

This app opened a lot of my HFS media, but failed on others for reasons I didn’t immediately understand. I field an issue on GitHub and to my surprise it was quickly resolved. This led to the discovery that the filenames on the media were in MacJapanese text encoding, so that capability was also added to HFSExplorer. Things went well for a while until certain other media failed to be read completely. Characters in certain filenames were out-of-range for MacJapanese. A workaround was to read the filenames as MacJapanese and drop down to MacRoman for any filenames with out-of-range characters. This worked well enough.

At this point my attention moved on to wanting to search the contents of all media. It was possible with DiskCatalogMaker but I was limited to using apps on classic Macintosh or modern macOS. Ideally I’d want the search to be web based. So I needed to generate text file listings of each disk. This was the end of the line for HFSExplorer for me, as I found no easy way of exporting full listings.

Aside: out-of-range characters

You might be wondering: how can there be out of range characters in text of a specified encoding, and what the hell are they? Well, there are a few scenarios that cause these problem characters to appear in filenames:

Files originating on other systems that are encoded as MacRoman, Shift-JIS or some other encoding can be copied onto a computer running MacJapanese, but the filenames are not re-encoded.

Pressing forward delete key on an extended keyboard whilst renaming a file inserts an invisible DEL control character into the filename, rather than doing any actual deleting!

hfsutils

Next, hfsutils. It’s trivial to export the contents of a disk image as a text file—using the command line tool hls—but I couldn’t make sense of the contents. It didn’t seem to adhere to any one encoding. I had no luck with the best text editors on classic Mac OS: BBEdit, Nisus, Tex-Edit Plus, even Japanese apps like LightWayText couldn’t deal with the text. The same can be said for a bespoke text conversation app called Cyclone Classic, but it hit the same problem as HFSExplorer when it encountered out-of-range characters.

The modern tool iconv couldn’t deal with the listings as it has no support for MacJapanese. I could get by processing as Shift-JIS and forcing unsupported characters to be ignored. But it wasn’t a good enough solution: MacJapanese is not Shift-JIS.

Thinking back to using Japanese apps to work with Japanese text I looked for any modern Japanese text editors for macOS. There are a handful and I eventually stumbled across a modern Japanese text editor called CotEditor which handles old Macintosh text files with aplomb. This app is now my default text file viewer and it comes highly recommended. I can’t go so far as to use it as my work editor because it doesn’t support opening folders or projects containing multiple files. It still has problems with my directory listings but at least it’s a modern way to view the majority of Japanese text files.

At this point, I was at an impasse and couldn’t think of any way to proceed. Eventually, after ruminating in the problem for some months I had a couple of breakthroughs.

ScummVM

What on earth does a point-and-click video game engine have to do with text encoding? Well it turns out that in July 2021, at the same time I was trying to solve this problem, the ScummVM team were also trying to solve it! They needed a tool to be able to handle Japanese media that contained games the wanted to run on their engine. Their solution is dumper-companion and once it had support for MacJapanese added,in the same way it had been for HFSExplorer, it was a reasonable solution. But it was far too slow, reading the whole disk image into memory at once—no mean feat for a bunch of 650MB CD-ROM images—and it also had the same problem with the out-of-range characters.

Tickle

From time to time I would search for possible ways to deal with MacJapanese encoding. One day in November 2021 I stumbled upon Tcl (pronounced “tickle”) which has support for a whole bunch of text encodings, including MacJapanese! What’s more the encoding maps were written by Apple in the mid-‘90s, so it’s likely to be as correct as can be. Note: Peter Edberg, who wrote the Tcl mappings, is still working at Apple after almost 35 years!

The Tcl solution to convert from MacJapanese to Unicode is a beautiful one-liner:

puts out.txt [encoding convertfrom macJapan [read in.txt]]

…so much effort to arrive at this simple solution!

convert2unicode

From here I wrapped the Tcl one-liner in a bunch more script so that it can handle both files and directories, as well as wildcards and stdin. It can also list all known encodings, and can take an argument representing the source encoding (of course it defaults to MacJapanese). Essentially, I made the one-liner into a proper command-line tool.

I have a secondary shell script that runs convert2unicode against my drive full of disk images, along with some housekeeping and maintenance functions. The whole process of listing the disks and converting the resulting text files takes less than 30 seconds for 250 items.

Let there be search

So, at this point I can generate text files with the contents of each disk, but to get sensible search results each filename would have to have its full path. So I rolled my sleeves up and forked hfsutils to add a “full” output mode to display the filenames in exactly the way I needed. My C skills were really rusty so this work was quite a challenge.

Finally, I created a fairly naïve web-based search engine that can search through hundreds of files, totalling almost half a million lines of text, in a fraction of a second.

Future

I’d like to offer the ability for individual files to be extracted from a disk image so they can be downloaded by interested parties. This would be similar to the way Internet Archive allows individual files to be downloaded from inside ISO disk images. However, this involves further challenges with text encoding and I would also have to address potential bandwidth concerns.

Whilst the Tcl solution is great, it is not quite perfect. Currently the behaviour of the encoding convertfrom command silently ignores problem characters. Future versions of Tcl will have the option of displaying errors. I’ll keep an eye on that progress and upgrade my scripts when the time comes.

Tomoya Ikeda - Macintosh Artist

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
Berkeley Systems
Enzan-Hoshigumi
MacWorld EXPO
Selected Works
Mandala
Timeline

Introduction

Tomoya Ikeda (池田友也) might not be a name you’re familiar with, but if you used a classic Macintosh computer at any time during in the 1990s you’re likely already familiar with some of his work.

Berkeley Systems

Tomoya Ikeda played a key part in the evolution of After Dark’s world famous Flying Toasters. The original prototype artwork was done by Jack Eastman, at which time Ikeda-san was brought in as a contractor to draw the final 1-bit artwork. Later versions of the toasters were drawn in colour by Igor Gasowski and eventually rendered and animated in 3D by Jarir Maani.

Tomoya Ikeda also did the artwork for the Fish! screensaver module in Macintosh After Dark 2.0, once again replacing existing artwork from its life as Mac Fish! by Tom & Ed’s Bogus Software.

Enzan-Hoshigumi

We need to travel back in time a bit, to the days before Ikeda-san was living in California. When he was in Japan he worked for a company called Enzan-Hoshigumi (演算星組). The company name is best translated as “Computer Gangsters”.

They became well known on the early Macintosh scene by providing collections of extremely high quality Clipart in a traditional Japanese style, Dennou Emaki (電脳絵巻 or Cyber Picture Scroll), mostly drawn by Ikeda-san. And also their MacCalligraphy package that allowed drawing of traditional Japanese calligraphy using only the Macintosh mouse, with the thickness and subtleties of each stroke being controlled only by the speed and movement of the mouse.

MacWorld EXPO

The 1988 MacWorld EXPO held in San Francisco was attended by over 45,000 people and hosted over 400 exhibits, one of which was Enzan-Hoshigumi. The hot topic of the time was the new, colour and expandable Macintosh II. Photos courtesy of Izumi Okano.

The Boston MacWorld EXPO event later that year also had an Enzan-Hoshigumi stand, accompanied by a 7x12 feet multi-panel Japanese folding screen comprised of a sheet-by-sheet assembly of thermal prints from an enlarged Tomoya Ikeda PixelPaint illustration. The screen was later shown at the “imagine” event organised at Boston Computer Museum by Verbum Magazine.

Selected Works

Below are some of my personal favourites.

“The Golden Dragon” drawn in 1987 by Tomoya Ikeda (Enzan-Hoshigumi Co., Ltd.) using PixelPaint, the first full-color paint application for the Macintosh.

Mandala

From 1988 Ikeda-san became fascinated with mandala—the circular figures representing the universe in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism—and would go on to draw many of them. A handful have survived in print, scattered across Macintosh graphics books published at the time. I’ve scanned those that I’ve found so far.

The life and times of Tomoya Ikeda

Timeline and memorial details taken from the p-media web site.

1959: Born in Tokyo
1983: Graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Department of Design.; While studying at the University, he became interested in computer graphics, and upon graduating he began creating his own works.
1984: Won the Grand Prix at the 2nd ASCII Software Contest for “Coron” (link).; Designed the arcade game “Dai-Kaiju no Gyakusou” for Enzan-Hoshigumi which was released by Taito.
1985: Awarded the Silver Prize at the International Exhibition of High Technology Art, for the work ‘Reincarnation’.; By 1988, he had designed many software products for the Macintosh, including “Dennou Emaki”, “Mac Shodo”, and “CyberSpaceDeck”.
1989: Moved to the United States.; Started CG production in Berkeley, California.; Designed “Flying Toaster” at Berkeley Systems, known for After Dark.
1994: Began translating and designing game software at the request of Palm Software in Silicon Valley.
1997: Planning and production of “Type Designer” at Palm Software.
1998: 1,000 typographic designs for the “Type Designer” are created. Type Designer is released simultaneously in the US and Japan.; Sudden death from cancer in October, aged 39.
1999: Memorial exhibition “The World of CG: Tomoya Ikeda’s Digital Communication” held at the TEPCO building, Ginza, Tokyo.; Memorial speech delivered by Kazutoshi Otani (大谷和利)

Birthday blog post?

Check out my other #birthday blog posts.

Japanese text support on English Palm OS devices

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of great Japanese software for Palm OS. It has arguably the best selection of Hanafuda games on a single system, and more besides.

Palm OS took a lot of inspiration from the original Macintosh system and it shows. The OS can be hacked, edited and otherwise modified at runtime which allows for a lot of cool stuff to happen. In the days where the operating systems that we use are ever increasingly locked down (“for your own good”, they cry!) this type of low level access to the system seems really exciting and daring.

Anyway, Japanese Palm OS apps expect to be run on a system capable of displaying Japanese text, naturally. So running them on English Palm OS results in garbled text.


Official Japanese: goal	English: garbled

Solutions

There exist a number of solutions that will allow Japanese text to be displayed correctly, though each has their own pros/cons. I originally wrote about this in an issue on GitHub.

I had to survey them all just to be able to sleep at night! 🤣

app	pros	cons	availability
J-OS	works, good bundled fonts	multiple versions for different devices, uses multiple apps to achieve goal	discontinued, time-limited, but easy to reset trial (delete pref: Psys)
CJKOS	works, OS4 (4.23) & OS5 (4.63) versions	finding good fonts, managing fonts, bad default options	discontinued, time-limited, but easy to serialise
JaPon	slick installer, great minimal UI	doesn’t localise launcher app names, limited fonts with trial version, OS5-only	supported
Yomeru 5	open source	doesn’t localise launcher app names, default fonts are very poor	discontinued, time-limited
Yomeru 4	none	OS4 version crashes for me	discontinued, broken

Results


CJKOS + FJIS10L	Official Japanese: goal	CJKOS + Mplus10

Recommendations

OS5 or CLIÉ: J-OS (choose correct variant)
OS4 or when using both OS4+5: CJKOS

Notes

CJKOS My only comment would be these fonts are not as legible as the official Japanese font. So, you can install additional/replacement fonts: palm.roguelife.org/cjkos/. And uncheck both CJKOS > Support CJK boldFont and Enhance > Add Horizontal Spacing in CJK for better display.

J-OS (J-Suites for CLIÉ) Install two additional fonts: elisa.prc and dasaji-l.prc and convert them to J-OS format using the option in PowerFONT. You can delete choose to delete the originals after conversion. By setting these as the standard small and large fonts for lo-res any apps that run in low-resolution will look great. The bundled J-OS fonts are already great for stuff running in hi-res.

AsistantPickle desktop toy for Macintosh

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

AsistantPickle was a desktop toy by Thoru Yamamoto, released for Macintosh in September 2000, featuring a suite of tiny applications:

TinyMemo
TinySketch
TinyPiano
TinyWatch
TinySchedule
TinyEmail
TinyAddress
TinyClip
TinyTimer
TinyAudioCD
TinyCalc
TinyPrinter
TinyLauncher (use the blue arrows)

It can now be downloaded at: macintoshgarden.org/apps/asistantpickle

This copy of the previously lost app was found on Japanese Macintosh magazine MacPeople2000 No.22 CD-ROM which was recently acquired for my Macintosh Magazine Media collection.

An informational web site existed at eggegg.co.jp the text of which is archived. Images and additional files also existed but they have sadly not been archived.

Thoru also created PalmPickle a similar suite of apps for PalmOS.

Pickle is probably Thoru’s most well-known character. Pickle’s Book was a masterpiece of interactive media, released for Macintosh in 1994 and available for iPhone and iPad since 2014.

Note: the typo in the title (Asistant) is as it has always been.

Roly-Polys World Tour (Demo)

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A previously unknown/lost demo of Roly-Polys World Tour (ローリーポーリーズの世界旅行) [aka Banabana’s First Big Adventure] has been found in my Japanese Macintosh magazine CD-ROM collection. It was featured on CD-ROM MacPeople 1998 No.2 1.15 in a folder of product demos.

Creator Osamu Sato is best known for cult game LSD: Dream Emulator released for Sony PlayStation in 1998.

Thanks to both the Shockwave and Osamu Sato Discords.

Mouse-controlled Super Mario Kart clone for classic Macintosh

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It doesn’t get much more Japanese Macintosh than this!

There were only two mentions of this game on Google at the time of writing, and only one screenshot. So I felt it was worthwhile documenting the game in some detail.

My copy of the game, version 1.0, came on CD-ROM MacLife No. 161. This disc was included with the January 2002 issue of the Japanese magazine MacLife. This specific issue was released 9 months after the launch of OS X, so it’s interesting to see the magazine staff providing content - a folder labelled “Vintage”—for users of the older Mac OS, whether that was using the Classic environment of OS X or on legacy hardware.

HyperKart?

えもらのカート (Emora Kart) is a racing game created in June 1994 by OYU!-san (土屋悦男). It is named after the lead character, a somewhat dinosaur-like creature called Emora, who would go on to star in further releases by the author.

The game starts with a short qualifying course, which doubles as a tutorial. Finishing first on this course will unlock four further courses that are substantially bigger and more challenging. Finishing first on all courses unlocks a special course. Whilst the speed of the game is limited by the performance of the host computer you should be able to find a speed that is neither too slow nor too fast and have an enjoyable time with the game.

Your character automatically accelerates and you use the mouse to influence its direction. If the mouse pointer is too far away then it will have no effect, so it’s better if you trail the mouse pointer in front of the character at a short distance—a bit like a carrot on a stick - which gives the feeling that you’re almost pulling them around the track. The player can only move in straight lines and at 45-degrees which affects possible driving lines. And just like in Super Mario Kart there are coins littered around the track and they can be collected, not only by driving over them but also by clicking on them with the mouse pointer.

It’s interesting to note that this type of pointer control feels very much like a Wii game, which was a nice surprise. In particular I’m thinking of the way you guide your player in Pro Evolution Soccer, and the way you pick up things with the pointer in Super Mario Galaxy.

Fastest lap times are recorded and you need to make sure you do proper laps for them to register properly - cheating and shortcuts are discouraged! Driving off-road will cause you player to slow down and it will take time for them to accelerate back up to cruising speed once they are back on the track. Hitting track side obstacles will cause you to spin out and slow down. If your player stops completely, you’ll need to click on it to get it moving.

Features:

1-bit monochrome graphics
Created using HyperCard
Inspired by Super Mario Kart
Mouse-controlled aiming/steering
CPU-controlled opponent
6 characters with different stats
6 tracks of varying complexity
Construction guide included

The construction guide is really interesting addition. It’s an illustrated document that details how the game can be comprehensively modded using nothing but the game itself running inside HyperCard.

Where did this come from?

I found this game in my collection of Japanese Macintosh Magazine CD-ROMs, which at the time of writing consists of over 120 discs and almost 500,000 files. It’s a real treasure trove of old software that has many more secrets waiting to be rediscovered! You can help me preserve more lost software by joining my Patreon.

How can I play this game?

You can play the game in your web browser at archive.org/details/emora-kart though be warned it runs very slowly in this emulator.

Alternatively, you can download it to play on your real Macintosh or in a different emulator.

Shifting perspective

A sequel of sorts was made a couple of years later, in 1996. えもらのバギー (Emora Buggy) which shifted the camera to behind the player and featured simultaneous 2-player operation. Controls are now via keyboard, the window is much smaller, and the courses are shorter. The vibe is a mix of Out Run and Micro Machines and quite different to the first game.

HyperCard Hanafuda

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Good news, everyone!

For over a decade I’ve wondered if there was a 1-bit Hanafuda game for Macintosh made by somebody in Japan back in the day. It turns out there is!

It’s called 花札スタック (Hanafuda Stack) and was created by Kenji Chihara (千原健次氏)in 1992/3 using HyperCard. YES! ✨🎴✨

I couldn’t find a single thing about this game online. My first Googlewhack!

According to menu system on the disc it came on, this game was the Winner of the Miyuki Oshige Award, the judges’ prize in the “1st HyperCard Stack Contest” which was sponsored by Japanese Macintosh magazine MacPower Monthly.

Where did this come from?

How can I play this game?

You can play it in your web browser right now at: archive.org/details/hanafuda-stack

Alternatively, you can download it to play on your real Macintosh or in an emulator.

Version history

This page refers to version 0.6. However, the DOS game HP-華時雨 (HP-Hana Shigure) from 1997 says that it reuses, with permission, the card images from version 0.8 of Hanafuda Stack.

Hanafuda Resources

If you’re into Hanafuda, be sure to check out the Hanafuda Discord and Fuda Wiki where a fantastic group of people from around the world are building a comprehensive resource for these traditional Japanese flower cards. There are rules for a multitude of different games (not just Koi-Koi), a list of over 300 Hanafuda video games and so much more. Come on!

I’m preserving vintage Macintosh magazine media

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 12:34:00 +0000

For a while now I’ve been collecting CD-ROMs and Floppy Disks that came with Japanese Macintosh magazines for the sake of preservation of classic Macintosh software and games.

These magazines were released before widespread adoption of the internet, when it was tricky to discover new software and even more difficult to obtain it. Buying a magazine with a disc containing hundreds or sometimes thousands of files was an easy way of getting the latest software. Of course, more than twenty years have now passed and software that was once common has all but disappeared. These magazine discs provide time capsules inside which live many long forgotten secrets.

This is such an amazing treasure trove of files, containing many long lost files of both English and Japanese origin. The scatter chart shows the range of date coverage of the collection, full file listings are searchable by file/directory name, file type, creator code at gingerbeardman.com/mmm/, by content at DiscMaster, and all files are uploaded to Internet Archive.

Archive status report

The archive as it stands (updated March 2025):

date range: 1991–2002
total media: 500 discs
total files: 1,086,536 files

Notable finds so far

JapanEase rolling demos of two gorgeous language learning HyperCard stacks from the early 1990s (one previously lost)
Hanafuda Stack from 1992/3 (previously zero google search results)
Emora Kart from 1994 (previously three google search results)
Unyo! 2 the infamous HyperCard stack version of the famous UNO card game, from 1995 (previously lost)
Tower Xmas Demo, a demo version of Yoot Saito’s Tower ~Christmas Disc~ add-on from December 1995 (previously lost)
Fans of Macromedia Shockwave and Osamu Sato uncovered a 1997/8 demo of Roly-Polys World Tour which is hugely exciting as the complete game remained lost to time (it has since been found, May 2023)
Pickle’s Pocket from 1998 is the first desktop toy and suite of tiny apps by Thoru Yamamoto (previously lost with zero screen grabs online)
MacCalligraphy Sansui Demo, version of Japanese calligraphy tool by Enzan-Hoshigumi from 1999 (previously lost) I also uncovered a promotional leaflet and demo guide from Wayback Machine
AsistantPickle from 2000 is a more advanced desktop toy and suite of tiny apps by Thoru Yamamoto (previously lost with zero screen grabs online)

My Patreon enables me to buy more discs to build out the database, finding more lost gems and sharing them once again with the world. I add missing discs to Internet Archive and the redump project and upload individual games to various Classic Macintosh archives.

Thanks for being on this journey with me!

Playing old 32-bit iOS games in 2021

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 23:59:00 +0000

With the introduction of iOS 11 in 2017 Apple stopped supporting 32-bit apps on iOS. This event came to be known as the app-ocalypse with users forced to stay on iOS 10 to keep their apps or upgrade and abandon them. I seem to remember I stuck around on iOS 10 for a while but eventually succumbed to the upgrade and said good by to a bunch of stuff.

At this time, I was still managing my iPhone and app updates through iTunes, with a weird ritual of downloading the latest updates to my Mac. It was useful for keeping on top of what I had installed and deleting apps I was no longer interested in. Around the same time Llamasoft were disillusioned with the App Store and pulled all of their games.

Anyway, I took one or both of those things as a sign to download and backup a couple of games in particular: Llamasoft’s Minotron: 2112 and Gridrunner, part of their Minotaur Project series of games. I bought a few more from that series but I only kept my two favourites.

Earlier this year I uploaded them to internet archive as an act of preservation. Somebody recently downloaded them and was trying to make them work on their devices, without much luck. It seemed that the apps were tied to my account and I’d have to share decrypted versions. I’d need an old device capable of running iOS 10 or older, and one susceptible to jailbreaking. I figured that would be a fun afternoon. Here’s the process I went through:

Restore working system

Bought a used device that supports iOS 10 (or earlier, if you prefer)
Downgraded my device to iOS 10.3.3 using leetdown
Installed my two .ipa files using Apple Configurator 2
Confirmed that the games work by playing a little of each

Jailbreaking the device

Installed sockH3lix
Did jailbreak with sockH3lix (only takes a second or two!)
Noted that Cydia has been installed
Installed Clutch (took a couple of tries to find a working repo)

Decrypt the Minotron game

Installed OpenSSH via Cydia
Logged in over SSH from my Mac
Ran Clutch -b uk.co.llamasoft.minotron
SFTP in from my Mac and copy the decrypted .ipa to my Mac

Video

I could capture the attract loop using QuickTime Player but for some reason the recording crashed whenever a sound was played.

And here’s an Instagram video of me playing the main game, albeit quite badly is I’m only using one hand!

Gridrunner

For some reason Clutch and other decrypting apps don’t work for me with Gridrunner. Since then, somebody was kind enough to create a decrypted version and upload it to Internet Archive.

A movie made using MSX2 computers: The Flying Luna Clipper

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Flying Luna Clipper (フライングルナクリッパー) is an animated movie produced by Kan Tsuzurahara at Sony and directed by Ikko Ohno. It was released—only in Japan—on 8mm, Betamax, VHS, and Laser Disc, in October 1987.

It’s a quite surreal but relaxing 55 minutes, and well worth a viewing. If you plan to watch it, I’d suggest to do so now before reading any possible spoilers below. Come back later to read the rest of this post.

In 1987 Ikko Ohno was an illustrator and contributor at MSX Magazine and was well respected and well connected in the Japanese creative and computer industries. The artwork featured in the movie is typical of Ikko’s style at the time, visible in his frequent MSX Magazine column Ikko’s Theatre. Indeed, various artwork from The Flying Luna Clipper was featured in MSX Magazine as teasers, features and advertorials around the time of the movie’s release. It was announced after Ikko’s Theatre had been running for 6 months, as a 5th Anniversary Project of MSX Magazine, and was dedicated to Ichiro “お探り” Furutachi.

To me the piece feels like an extended intro sequence to a non-existent video game, a strange visual novel on automatic playback, a surreal slideshow, or megademo. There are several intermissions that can leave the viewer confused, unsettled, pondering the meaning of life itself. I feel that is quite apt as The Flying Luna Clipper was planned to celebrate the birth of Ikko’s first child, with work commencing shortly after he learned of the pregnancy. The movie was completed one month before the birth. Ikko told me: “I love this work like my child”.

The movie was created, incredibly, using only an MSX2. All artwork was drawn on that type of computer, and post production completed with additional video editing equipment attached to such a computer. I won’t go into the plot specifically, but it features a travelling snowman, performing bananas, the titular Flying Luna Clipper, and plenty of sun, sea and surf. It’s one of those things that could only come from bubble era Japan, and as the final credits rolled I felt incredibly lucky to have been able to witness it.

In 2004 an elaborate effort was made to promote a sequel to The Flying Luna Clipper, with an article in MSX Magazine Permanent Revival 2 that laid out the story alongside still images and included a set of calendar postcard, all curiously missing the month of October. Production of the follow-up movie never went any further due to issues with the feasibility of using the ancient MSX graphics tools. Though Ikko has since told me he dreams that someday Luna Clipper will fly again！

In 2015 Matt Repetski and Matt Hawkins at Attract Mode were kind enough to share a copy of the movie that had been ripped from Laser Disc by an anonymous source. Thanks to all involved for preserving this wonderful work for all time. And, of course, arigatou gozaimasu Ohno-san! 🙌

Watch the movie

My System 7 software choices

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

System 7 is a great operating system. The experience using it today remains very close to modern macOS. It’s surprising how little has changed on our Desktop in the 30 years since. That said, the experience can be improved with the judicious use of additional software.

When adding things to the system my goal is always to increase quality of life and improve user experience. Functionality is key and nothing is added without careful consideration. If I can install one package to add several functions I’d rather do that than add several individual packages. If I can install software to match modern macOS features or muscle memory then I’ll do so.

Below are my personal choices that improve my time spent using System 7.

Control Panels

Better Edit Keys - adds modern text editing and selection keyboard controls, such as the ability to grow the selection by word
Capture - screen grabbing software
Capture AE - logger for Apple Events calls
Desktop Makeover - provides custom Finder features such as menu shortcuts, enhanced diskette icons, allows you to hide Balloon Help
DragAnyWindow - adds solid dragging of any window, apps can be excluded
Hidden Finder Features - enables hidden Finder keyboard shortcuts to create aliases by dragging, reveal alias original, and move file to Trash
KeyQuencer - macro and automation utility, the ultimate tool for power-users
PopupFolder - allows access to folder contents from hierarchical pop-up menu without having to drill down into folders
QuicKeys - macro and automation utility, I use it only for composing Apple Event calls
Smart Scroll - live scrolling and proportionally sized scrollbar thumb
SmartLaunch - application launcher, I launch this using Cmd+Return KeyQuencer macro
Snitch - Get Info extender, can do batch type/creator changes by summoning whilst holding Shift
Symbionts - occasionally used to troubleshoot Control Panels and Extensions
WindowShade - collapse a window into its title bar by double-clicking
YesNoCancel - adds modern keyboard control to dialog boxes

Extensions

2020Patch - fixes year 2020 date bug
About - replacement for About This Macintosh window, with task manager features
Apollo - pop-up menu at any location to select and launch apps
CopyPaste - multiple clipboard manager, works everywhere but ResEdit!
DirtyDesk - disables Clean Up Desktop menu item
Natural Order - improves sorting order in Finder

Text Editors

Alpha - programmer’s editor, includes TCL scripting
Anarcho - has a few unique features
BBEdit - packed with features
Eddan - has a way to summon THINK References

Word Processors

Take your pick of the best:

Other Utilities

CompactPro - file compressor/decompressor
GraphicConverter - image file converter
DiskTop - file manager desk accessory
Greg’s Browser - file manager with StuffIt integration
MasterFinder - multi-column file manager
MindExpander - file decompressor
(Super) ResEdit - resource editor with built-in code viewer
Resorcerer - resource editor with built-in code viewer
ShrinkWrap - disk and archiving helper
ShowSizes - disk usage analyser
Type Resolve - drag-and-drop type/creator changer

Operating System

System 7.5.3 plus updates - Apple released this version for free!
Japanese Language Kit - adds support for Japanese, I use this on a duplicate System folder
System Picker - choose which system folder to boot from
AppleScript 1.1 - to enable Finder Scripting on System 7.1

Macintosh drawing software compared

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Below is a list of various drawing applications that are available to use with System 7 (68K).

I’m mostly interested in apps that can do both pixel and vector, and that support layers and transparency. The table below might be useful for at-a-glance comparisons. Apps run in both mono or colour, unless stated otherwise.

Deneba artWORKS can do both pixel and vector, has layers and partial transparency. The bottom layer is opaque and all layers on top are transparent. Collections of pixels are managed as a special object, and there’s a limit of 8 layers. The user interface is brilliant.

SuperPaint has two layers: pixel and vector with transparency in all but the base layer. Though it allows cut/copy and paste from the pixel layer to the vector layer at which point those collections of pixels are managed as SuperBits objects and can be edited in isolation.ref

Freehand is king of the vector apps. It really was so much better than Illustrator. Such a shame that it’s no longer around. To use it on iPad is quite something!

Also interesting is how many early versions of successful apps didn’t support layers (Photoshop, Freehand) or full transparency (Photoshop).

Almost every app has only a single level undo, with only Expression and Freehand offering multi-level undo. This is probably why everybody was using Freehand when I started work in graphic design in the mid-late 1990s.

One small disappointment: Macromedia Fireworks requires the PPC architecture so won’t run on my iPad System 7 setup. Sad face. (But we can use infinitemac.org)

APP	PIXEL	VECTOR	LAYERS	TRANSP.	UNDO	NOTES
artWORKS	●	●	●	○		Many layers, many objects
BluePaint	●			○		PPC-only
Canvas	●	●	●	○		Many layers, many objects
ClarisDraw	●	●	●			Pixel drawing within specific objects
Cricket Draw		●
Draw It Again Sam		●	●
Drawing Table		●
Expression		●	●		●	Colour required
Freehand 1.0–2.0		●	○		●	Layers not managed visually
Freehand 3.1–5.5		●	●		●
Illustrator 88–3.0		●
ImageStudio 0.6	●					Custom brushes
LightningPaint	●					Polite palettes
MacDraw Pro		●	●
MacPaint	●
MacroPaint	●			○		Transparent patterns
Photoshop 1.0–2.5	●
Photoshop 3.0	●		●	●		Full alpha channel transparency
PixelPaint	●					Special brush effects
ShareDraw		●	●
Studio/1	●					Animation, 1-bit
Studio/8	●					Animation, 8-bit
SuperPaint	●	●	●	○		Two layers, many objects
UltraPaint	●	●	●	○		Eight layers, many objects
Zeus	●					Animation

Key: ● full support, ○ partial support

History of DenebaCAD

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently stumbled across a series of Facebook posts about the origins of DenebaCAD, from humble beginnings as MasterCAD on Atari ST, of all unlikely places. The app still exists today as DCAD VectorSpace. Here I provide the story translated from Spanish into English.

Year	Title	Platform	Distribution
1988	MasterCAD	Atari ST	Retail
1989	User’s CAD	Macintosh	Beta
1991	ArchiDOT 2.0	Macintosh	Retail
1992	ArchiDOT 3.0	Macintosh	Retail
1997	DenebaCAD	Macintosh	Retail

This breakthrough CAD software was created by Hernán Pisani at INDI C.A. (Calle Madrid, Qta. El Pilar, Las Mercedes, Caracas, Venezuela).

The below is taken from Metamorfosis 3D on Facebook with the text presented in full below, albeit translated from Spanish using DeepL.

In 1988 and MasterCAD was sold to the world by several @ATARI distributors. MasterCAD was present in several industrialized countries and version 2.0 was presented at the COMDEX in Las Vegas from November 14 to 19, 1988. In that year the program was reviewed in different specialized publications such as ST WORLD of England, ST INFORMER, STAR, CURRENT NOTES of the United States totaling 17 pages of dedication by them. Due to the limited presence of Atari computers in the professional world, despite the power of the Atari 1040 ST, it was decided to opt for the support of the Apple Latin America initiative for local developers and an agreement was reached with Atari Venezuela leaving them the MasterCAD product in the ATARI environment as far as the development had reached and continue with the technology they had developed in Macintosh, which was undoubtedly a larger market. Thus began the development of a beta version of ArchiDOT which they called User’sCAD, a considerably more powerful and user friendly product.

In 1989 the development of the pilot project of a product that was thought to be called user User’sCAD and that later would be launched on the market under the name of ArchiDOT (Architectural Design Oriented Tool) began. Already here it was realized that the development of the product should be oriented only to architectural design and not pretend to solve problems of other engineering, in order not to complicate the tool pretending to also solve different thought processes and running the risk that the tool would no longer be intuitive. The program was based on Mac II and Mac SE hardware with the support of the A.C.E. program of APPLE Corp represented in Venezuela by PLUS SISTEMAS. This development, still in Alpha phase, was presented at the WORLWIDE DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE held in San Jose California in May 1989, receiving comments of praise from the representative of APPLE Latin America and other members of the Apple Staff as well as from the representatives of the Tecnológico de Monterrey.

In 1990 the CADD Room was inaugurated at the Simon Bolivar University. Hernan to date had spent 20,000.00 architect-hours of analysis and 11,000.00 hours of programming accumulated from the origin to User’sCAD, an architecture-oriented CAD. Its version ß3 participated in the Latin American Software contest in May 1990, competing with the finished applications and being in sixth place with mention (first place in CAD), receiving comments of praise from Apple Computer’s staff representatives. In December 1990 it was presented with a booth at the DATA 90 exhibition in Miami, Florida. User’sCAD was selected in 1991 as the resident application in the laboratories of advanced design techniques at the School of Architecture of the Simon Bolivar University, Caracas, as a subject of the curriculum for two quarters. At that time the application, for marketing and identification reasons, the name User’sCAD was replaced by ArchiDOT 2.0 (Architectural Design Oriented Tool). In Venezuela alone, 150 architecture and construction companies successfully produced drawings with the program and successfully with Hernán’s program and consulting services.

In 1992 a work done in ArchiDOT was presented at Harvard University. Diego Diaz, using a Mac IIci of the time and ArchiDOT version 3.0, presented his independent study work as part of his master’s degree at Harvard University and received an evaluation and recommendation of the software by the computer lab of the GSD (Graduate School of Design).

In 1993 CADSOFT, the company founded by Hernan, starts again the international marketing with the opening of the Spanish market and ArchiDOT passes the necessary quality control tests for this demanding market. Our distributor in Spain: The company Microgestió in Barcelona is in charge of distributing the software in their authorized Apple stores. On the other hand, also in 1993, Architect Carlos Pollak (Head of CADD USB Room) recently presented a paper at the World Congress of Architectural Education (Prague 1993) on the use of ArchiDOT in design education. As a result of the good role played by the product, Apple Czech Republic showed interest in distributing it in that country.

Between 1994 and 1995 ArchiDOT was shown to several software houses in the United States and attracted the interest of Deneba Software. ArchiDOT was written up to that time in Symantec Pascal, a good language that was used to its full potential but was clearly insufficient for the development of a world class CAD version. They ported, through the use of the PtoC converter, the Pascal code and the mathematical algorithms of ArchiDOT to the C++ language in its implementation “Code Warrior” of Metrowerks, to give birth to a much superior application in speed and performance, generating laboratory versions that were tested by several users among which I was. It was amazing at that time the image quality that we could achieve with that version that could only be surpassed with render engines years later. The conversion process from Pascal to C++ was in charge of Eng. Federico Zappi. The next step was the development of the new interface that was in charge of Architect Hernan Pisani and Mr. Doug Levy, vice-president of Deneba Software. All this happened after signing a publishing contract with Deneba Software, which gave birth to Deneba CAD.

UltraPaint Manual

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I received a package from America: the 30-year-old manual for UltraPaint, Deneba Systems’ Macintosh graphics program. It doesn’t get much more exciting for me than this!

I love how the Option key in printed material from this era looks more like a 2-way switch symbol from an electrical circuit diagram than it does today.

Similar Books

The contents of the manual are very naïve compared to today, talking you through how to use menu items and dialog boxes. UltraPaint (and it’s follow-up artWORKS) was a sister app to Canvas. If you’re looking for something with the same tone and content as the manual, check out Deke McClelland’s Canvas 3.0: The Book over at Internet Archive.

Dear Reader

If by chance you have some old Deneba Systems software for Macintosh that you’d be happy to sell then please get in touch. Specifically I’d like to buy copies of UltraPaint, artWORKS and Canvas 3.0 or 3.5. I don’t mind what condition they are in, I’m sure it adds character!

Two Old Llamasoft iPhone & iPad games

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2017 a large number of games and apps were rendered obsolete when iOS 11 removed 32-bit compatibility: the appocalypse. At that time I was still downloading apps into iTunes as backups, and seem to have put aside these two great Llamasoft games. What foresight!

You should be able to side load them onto any jailbroken iOS device running iOS 10 or earlier, like an iPad mini (1st generation will be usable as-is; later generations may need to be downgraded), iPod touch (1st to 5th generation will be usable as-is; later generations may need to be downgraded) or similar iPhone.

I’m still hoping for an easy way to play these on modern devices, so let me know if such a thing exists!

Minotron: 2112 (iPhone, iPod touch & iPad)
Gridrunner (iPhone, iPod touch & iPad)

Edit, 2021-09-13: I’ve added a decrypted version of Minotron that should be easier to install on a jailbroken device.

Edit, 2025-02-06: I can’t remember when exactly, but a kind somebody provided me with a decrypted version of Gridrunner which I’ve now uploaded to its page.

For more info on generating a decrypted IPA file: /2021/09/13/playing-old-32-bit-ios-games-in-2021/

Nintendo’s first US trademark

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Nintendo's first USA trademark, dated 4 Oct 1955: https://t.co/9ONME6pgTL

The first use of the word @Nintendo in US press is a description of this trademark in the 8 Oct 1955 issue of @nytimes (see quoted tweet)

thanks to @suryongchan for digging digging this up! https://t.co/XZhiotm5ZA pic.twitter.com/Uscxvbv0DP
— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) January 14, 2021

SkateBoarder Magazine

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

SkateBoarder Magazine (1964–1980) scans at Internet Archive, these include pages missing from the official website.

Here’s a quick link to the famous Dogtown articles in these specific 9 issues: 2-2/5/6, 3-2/4/5/6, 4-1, 5-7

PC Engine Fanatics, Console Ma’zine, Electric Brain & Games Amusement Pleasure

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This collection is a British video game fanzine/magazine that ran from 1989 to 1993 for an almost uninterrupted total of 35 issues.

The first 8 issues went by the name PC Engine Fanatics which was a hand made fanzine/newsletter that was promoted in period magazines. The following 10 issues received a name change to Console Ma’zine along with expanded coverage of Sega’s Mega Drive, Atari’s Lynx, and Nintendo’s Game Boy as well as NEC’s PC Engine. The “final” 17 issues went by the name Electric Brain (taken from the Chinese word for computer) and it was during this run that, at least for a brief handful of issues, the fanzine turned into a proper magazine that was available to purchase from major newsagents on the high street.

After Electric Brain there was a year silence until GAP (Games Amusement Pleasure) followed for one last 5 issue finale, by which time the Internet had started to go mainstream and editor Onn Lee’s momentum finally waned after more than 15 magnificent years.

This publication is little known even in its native United Kingdom, but it is notable for featuring an English translation of an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto from the time of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past_. This interview was next translated into English over 20 years later. There was a wiki page about these publications, but it fell victim to deletionists—but that’s a story for another day.

I’d like take this opportunity to thank Andy Harris for loaning me the majority of his collection of issues so I could scan and share the complete run rather than my few issues. I tracked him down a couple of years ago and thankfully managed to persuade him I wasn’t trying to steal his stuff! Thanks for trusting me Andy.

Enjoy!

archive.org/search.php?query=%22electric+brain%22+%22Onn+Lee%22&sort=titleSorter

Atari ST: Music Software Manuals

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I scanned these a while ago, but dealing with a troll in an online Atari ST community made me forget about them for a while. Not out of spite, but more because I don’t have time for toxic people so I just dropped what I was doing and changed direction when I encountered this particular person. Remember: be excellent to each other! Be nice.

Anyway! Three manuals were scanned from my ring binder hard copies, as always they are uploaded to Internet Archive as Searchable PDFs:

Cubeat 2.0 (338 pages)
Notator Alpha 1.1 (258 pages)
Notator SL/Creator SL 3.1 (770 pages)

Plus a disk image and zip of the relatively rare Cubeat 2.0:

Cubeat 2.0 Disk (720kb)

The BeOS Bible

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I spent a few hours last night unbinding The BeOS Bible (1999, @ScotHacker) using a hairdryer and putting it through a feed scanner, making light work of 994 pages!

The resulting 100MB Searchable PDF is now on @InternetArchive & @OpenLibrary #preservation https://t.co/b8ypsCNHwZ pic.twitter.com/vN1cQ487OO
— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) November 11, 2020

Found whilst backing up an old PC

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Backed up a very old laptop and found a bunch of cool old stuff from 15-20 years ago! #thread

2003-04-25: Custom Fruit Labels for a Zelda: Wind Waker competition (I think in Official Nintendo Magazine?) I sent them a fake plastic pear with one of these these stuck on.

2005-01-18: grid-based music puzzle game called BEAT HIT

2004-12-24: game mockup “Katamari Christmasy” 2D side-scroller

2004-07-11: reverse engineering “Mini Golf” JAVA cell phone game to make custom levels. w/ hyphz

2004-03-10: Atari arcade game Super Sprint themed T-shirt

2004-07-22: source code (Blitz Basic, Windows PC) for my game Wire Hang Redux, which you can still grab and play for free at (gingerbeardman.itch.io/wire-hang-redux)

2004-12-21: various themes for Sony Ericsson K700i cell phone

2002-01-15: source code for my Futurama-themed Robotron clone “Bendertron”

2001-04-24: WIP Mode 7 style kart game “Manga Kart”

2002-03-04: source code for Pang style bouncing ball physics

2003-07-02: beach-themed QIX clone “QUARTZ”

2003-07-02: source code for rainbow block matching puzzler “ROY” - it’s not balanced, or much fun, but it’s still downloadable at (gingerbeardman.com/archive/roy/)

2000-2003: source code for my Sensible Soccer clone “Simple Soccer” (gingerbeardman.com/archive/soccer/)

2002-09-17: source code for aborted attempt at bringing @armyoftrolls mockup “Space Squad 5” to life

2002-08-23: source code for my entry into the BlitzCoder Stupidest Game competition, Summer 2002. “Terra Firma” still available to download and play at (gingerbeardman.com/archive/terraf…)

2002-08-24: source code for my kayaking simulator “yaking”

hurrah! was hoping i’d find this. will rinstate working download ASAP at (gingerbeardman.com/archive/yaking/)

2000-06-10: photos from my first digital camera (a Fujifilm FinePix 1400 Zoom) including some of my first car (a 1972 FIAT 500)

1995-1998: my University Comp Sci directory photos (I was age 18-21)

2002-05-23: original artwork for my Sensible Soccer T-shirt that was sold in River Island stores across the UK (still a shame they didn’t print the lines on the neck and shoulders!)

2000-08-06: email attachment ATT09176.jpeg a photo of forest fire. (Bitterroot National Forest, Montana, on Aug. 6, 2000) (earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/843/bit…)

…plus tons of work files, game screenshots and ROMs, failed prototypes, and random stuff I found interesting. Which goes to show that half a lifetime ago I was exactly the same person I am today. Phew. #end

OK, a couple more…

2003-06-29: me taking photos of a big old widescreen CRT showing the Samsung N504 Virtual Light Machine (VLM-2) - still got it the NUON - no it’s not for sale ;)

2005-09-05: my favourite game at the time was a Japanese skill game called “Pendulumania” (version 1.3 A) still downloadable from (vector.co.jp/magazine/softn…)

2000-10-16: the original Fontographer .fog .fon .ttf files for my font BLOCKOUT (inspired by The Designers Republic but - contrary to their threatening legal letter - actually designed on a completely different grid system!) (flickr.com/photos/emsef/5…)

POPEYE Big 100th issue (1981-04-10)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a special 100th issue of POPEYE a Japanese lifestyle “Magazine for City Boys”: archive.org/details/popeye-magazine-for-city-boys-1981-04-10/mode/2up

Only very minor game related things in this, but I thought it worth posting. There’s a Game & Watch as a selectable reward/prize in a competition by Puma. Plus a “how to” for Hanafuda (the reason I bought the issue) and reviews of various physical card games. Plus lots more besides!

If you don’t have time to flick through 276 pages, then I created a twitter thread that summarises the most interesting stuff: twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/1235585813137756161

Searching for: The Claque Beignet

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday on Twitter I spotted a plea for more information on an old Flash game “The Claque Beignet” - a game in which you slap singing characters with an extended arm. Apparently there was no maker’s mark on the game nor ties to any website. I was intrigued!

Here are the steps I took to trace the creator of the game.

1. Searching with Limited Knowledge

The earliest mentions of the game I could find with a simple date-range google search were from 2004 and 2005. The game had been pegged as possibly from 2003 so I was not happy and kept on going!

2. Obtaining the Game

I did a simple Google search for the game and found a site with the game, then saved the SWF file locally by inspecting the source to grab the URL of the SWF file. Here I assumed that the game was a self-contained single file.

You can check that assumption by playing the game in Chrome (at least whilst it still supports Flash!) and checking the web inspector network tab to see if any other files are loaded during play.

3. Decompiling the SWF

I have the tools to decompile SWF files so this was an easy fist step for me. I found minimal interesting information, but it turned out to be enough.

There were indeed no maker’s details or credits, but some interesting variable naming (noise spelled noize) and some relative URLs for the online high score system. These URLs involved the .php3 file extension, which was a good clue.

PHP3 was around from 1997–2000, followed by PHP4 from 2000–2004. One thing we can assume is that the developer was active during the lifetime of PHP3, so it gave us a window of years to look at.

The online high score system could have pre-dated the game, so it was not safe to assume the game was developed in that period.

4. Searching with Learned Knowledge

So, armed with some idea of the year the game was made it was simple enough task. Let’s start with the last year PHP3 was available. I went to Google and entered:

“The Claque Beignet” 2000

Halfway down the first page of results:

Bingo!

The game was published on 21 November 2000 by Raoul Sinier. His older website domain is on archive.org going back to 2001, so it can be confirmed.

And there we have it. C’est ça!

Iwata Asks Downloader

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This tool downloads the Iwata Asks series of interviews, saving as Markdown and HTML with images. ePub files are optional and can be generated in a secondary post-process phase.

I created this tool in Spring/Summer 2019 so that I could more easily read and search the Iwata Asks interviews.

More details: github.com/gingerbeardman/iwata-asks-downloader

“Game Machine” magazine archive

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

343 issues of Japanese arcade magazine GAME MACHINE spanning 1974/08 to 1988/12: https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/archive.html

Mirrored as one archive: https://archive.org/details/game-machine And as a collection at: https://archive.org/details/game_machine_magazine_jp

Interesting issues:

Yoshikazu Endo honors Special Issue (No. 72 May 15, 1977) https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19770515p Invaders boom heyday (No. 117 April 15, 1979) https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19790415p Video game machine Special Issue (No. 201 November 29, 1982) https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19821129p Thanks to the fine folks at ONION software / onitama and Amusement Press Inc. for making these available. The scans are well done with OCR selectable/searchable Japanese text.

I took some time to mirror the collection at the Internet Archive. Enjoy!

Update, May 2023: A further 269 issues of Japanese arcade magazine GAME MACHINE spanning 1991/01 to 2002/06 have been uploaded to Internet Archive, which brings the current total to 612!

List of video games featuring Moai

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I created a website mashing up a bunch of things that I love:

Moai
Videogames
Lists

moai.games

Verbum “The Journal of Personal Computer-Aesthetics”

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Verbum “The Journal of Personal Computer-Aesthetics” (1986–1991) was an early computer lifestyle magazine focusing on interactive art and computer graphics.

All issues (well, except issue 4.3): archive.org/details/verbummagazine?&sort=date
Table of contents for all issues: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbum_(magazine)
Podcast interview with its creator Michael Gosney: www.drfutureshow.com/drfutureblog/interview-media-pioneer-michael-gosney-on-the-renaissance-of.html

Back In Time: Vintage Maps of Akihabara (1976–2001)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 11 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I often browse old Japanese console and computer magazines. I’m mainly searching for old Hanafuda Koi-Koi video games, but sometimes I stumble across something else that is interesting in a totally different way.

In May 2019, whilst browsing an old issue of POPCOM over at the wonderful Internet Archive, I found a period map of the Akihabara 秋葉原 district—famous for its multitude of stores selling electronics, video games and other otaku goods.

I shared the map on Twitter, where it was well received, so I decided to go into this a bit more deeply here. Every so often I add any maps I find and there are now over 20 covering almost every year throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Get in touch if you have a map of Akihabara from the missing years. The Japanese あきはばら地図 or 秋葉原マップ mean “Akihabara map”.

Further reading in Japanese: there’s a great article at NIKKEI that’s well worth a read. If you want something heavier, there’s a blog post with history of the area and its name change.

Thanks to my Patreon supporters for funding this research. New supporters are always appreciated!

Browse by Year

1976 … 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1987 1988 … 1991 … 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

1976

The November 1976 issue of I/O magazine included a map of Akihabara which at this point was mostly radio electronics shops, with only very early signs of DIY computers.

Two maps can be seen in the combined book of issues from 1976 and 1977 that is available at Internet Archive. Hurrah!

1981

A map was featured in だからいまマイコン “So now Microcomputer” by the University of Tokyo Microcomputer Club, Shueisha, 1981. Amazon Japan link. Thanks to a generous Twitter user for posting this photo at my request.

1982

Missing: another one from 1982 on Twitter, if I’m reading correctly it’s from the book こんにちわマイコンに載 “Konichiwa Microcomputer”. Amazon Japan link.

Here’s a map from the January 1982 issue of I/O, also featured in the March 1982 issue which has different article about the shops so both are worth reading. Contrast with the much expanded map that appears further down this page in the 1984 section.

The first ever issue of Technopolis, in August 1982, featured a lovely map.

archive.org/details/technopolis-volume-1-august-1982/Technopolis%20-%20Volume%201%20-%20August%201982/page/154/mode/2up

Such maps make frequent appearances in Technopolis the one below is from an issue dated November 1982. Given its illustrated nature the map is somewhat stylised but the landmarks are easily recognised.

archive.org/details/technopolis-volume-4-november-1982/page/101/mode/2up

1983

A map was included with the January 1983 issue of Micom BASIC magazine. The below image is saved from a Yahoo! Japan Auction listing.

The map below is from POPCOM 1983-05 and is followed by 4 pages of listings that refer to the map using the A/J–1/10 key along its edge just in case you want to look some things up.

archive.org/details/POPCOM198305/page/n73/mode/2up

1984

This one from I/O 1984 May issue was found through Google and Wayback Machine, and I was lucky enough to be able to find matching scans on from Internet Archive. Compare with the earlier 1982 map from the same magazine.

1985

Missing: Weekly GENDAI 週刊現代 featured a map in issue 206, 13th July 1985. Auction link and image here.

This one I found referenced on Twitter, a lovely map from the April 1985 issue of POPCOM (complete with cover artwork by Hiroshi Okamoto)

archive.org/details/popcom-198504/page/122/mode/2up

1987

Missing: I found mention of maps in a 1987 issue of Be-VAP　ビ・バップ magazine, in fact there seem to be two. Auction archive is here with incomplete image one and incomplete image two.

One from 1987 on Twitter. This one I have tracked down as being from ラジオ技術　1987年6月号 the June 1987 issue of Radio Technology.

1988

Missing: I found one on Twitter from a 1988 issue of ぴあ “Pia” magazine, but so far I’ve been unable to find scans of it.

This one from Google, but thankfully also present on Internet Archive. From I/O アイ・オー 1988年07月号 the July 1988 issue of I/O magazine.

1991

Through Google I found a map featured in “AK gazette” from Winter 1991.

asahirom.blog28.fc2.com/blog-entry-58.html

1994

A partial map is featured in this article by NIKKEI which details the history of Akihabara and the phases of changes that happened throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Essential reading!

1995

There are three really cool maps in ゲームウララ Vol.1より Game Urara Vol. 1 featuring PC, video game and food/amenities. One was seen on Twitter and the other two were a happy discovery after finding the scans on Internet Archive.

archive.org/details/gameurara-vol1-1995-600DPI/Game%20Urara%20-%20Vol.%201/page/n101/mode/2up

1996

Whilst searching my ever-growing archive of Japanese Macintosh Media I found an archived copy of the Akiba organisation website on the Nikkei MAC CD Vol. 9, from 1997-02-15.

「ボーナスは大切にネ！!　秋葉原を上手に歩こう」 (“Take care of your bonus! Walk well in Akihabara.”) is a copy of the Akiba website dated June 1996, some four months before the earliest version in the Wayback Machine. A lot of the files that comprise the website are dated 1993, which I assume is when the site was first created. This sort of hand-built site really brings back some fond memories of the websites I built in the mid-90s: image maps, optimised GIFs, no content management system. Ah! The good old days.

The 250+ maps it contains are hyperlinked in a multitude of ways and the website navigates quite well considering its age. I’ve had most luck browsing using Netscape Navigator 3.01 (ja). The whole thing is quite comprehensive: maps are split into geographical zones and are detailed to a building floor level. Alternative lists by category and product type are also included. There are a total of 221 stores, of which 68 are member stores and receive more in-depth coverage with their own page and photos.

Check out screenshots of the website home page and main map page.

Another one from 1996 via Google, which was featured in the 「ASCII-DATES 1996」 notebook.

1997

From Google, I found a map featured in either PC自作派 “PC DIY” Vol.1 (1997) or Vol.8 (late-1998).

setoalpha.hatenablog.com/entry/2019/08/12/024509

1998

This new discovery reminded me of another vintage map of Akihabara that I had seen recently, only this time it was digital and available for platforms that were popular at the time: Palm OS (as a native app), Macintosh and Windows (as a FileMaker Pro interactive database).

All versions of these interactive maps can be downloaded at the following links:

I think of this map as the DogCow Map due to the domain it was hosted on at the time, but its official name is Kosapi’s Akiba Map 「こさぴーの秋葉マップ」named after the group of fans that created and curated it by documenting their trips to Akihabara.

web.archive.org/web/20041207024829/http://homepage1.nifty.com:80/akiba/index.html

1999

This one found on Twitter. A 1998/1999 issue of PC magazine DOS/V POWER REPORT featured a detailed map and list of stores. It would be really interesting to see if any of those stores still exist.

2000

Missing: around this time you could buy the 秋葉原攻略ハンドブック Akihabara Strategy Handbook which included comprehensive maps and shop guides across hundreds of pages.

The HTML version was typical of websites at the time: way too many HTML files and images with image-maps presented as a frameset that makes specific pages pretty much impossible to bookmark. Ah, the heady days of Y2K web development!

web.archive.org/web/20050212144103/http://homepage1.nifty.com/akiba/akibaweb2kr1.zip

2001

The digital download versions of Kosapi’s Akiba Map were updated until around 2001, when I guess easy access to the internet made offline maps like this somewhat less useful.

But the FileMaker Pro database is interesting, as it can still be loaded and viewed on modern macOS. Using a vintage Trial version of FileMaker Pro 11 from 2010 which just about manages to run on macOS 10.13.6—the database can be converted to a more modern format. You can click around hyperlinks to navigate and view business details in a very CD-ROM kind of way.

Anyway, I did a bunch of image grabbing and assembling to put together this large 27.8 megapixel version of the map (click the image below):

Aside: 1999–2009

For 10 years, an interactive online map was published by Impress Corporation under the title of AKIBA PC Hotline! It’s similar to Kosapi’s Akiba Map and arguably better made.

web.archive.org/web/19991012053357/http://watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/map/index.html

More?

I’ll be sure to add to this post if any other interesting vintage maps of Akihbara come to light. Especially for the years we’re currently missing maps.

JUS4QIX: the story of a classic arcade video game

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 22 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of the 1981 arcade game QIX.

Back in 2003 tracked down the author of the game, Randy Pfeiffer, who had moved on from the video game industry to run his own business creating CAD software for model railway enthusiasts. I asked him some questions about the game and he was gracious enough to answer, albeit a little puzzled why anybody would want to know!

I’ll outline a few facts here:

The game is credited to the programmer, Randy, and his wife, Sandy
Randy created the bad-guy, or QIX movement as a simple programming demo
Sandy suggested making a game out of it, “sort of like video-game etch-a-sketch”
Their eureka moment came in the jacuzzi with a bottle of vintage champagne
Being a pretty successful silicon valley programmer, he did so for Taito America
QIX was one of only a few games made by the US division of Taito
The game was named after his car licence/number plate at the time: “JUS4QIX”, which was pronounced “Just For Kicks”

In all the time since the game was made in 1981, he said to me that I was the first person outside of Taito to ever contact him about the game. The first person in over 20 years!? This was a shock to me, but perhaps I’m living in a dream world thinking such a classic video game should get more attention? Sometimes the game is more famous than the creator, Tetris being the best example of that.

After finding out this information I added it in various places, such as in the MAME notes for the game. This interview is the original source of “JUS4QIX” and the other facts about QIX.

Cease & Desist: The Designers Republic

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 17 Jun 1997 00:00:00 +0000

A letter I received from The Designers Republic after creating a font inspired by their work. They chose to order a cease and desist, rather than fostering creativity.

Matt Sephton created an original font called Block Out–a techno font that can still be found here. He had used Fontographer. It was, as he put it, influenced by the tDR font in the Wipeout series of games. He placed a free truetype font on his web site, but was confronted with a threatening letter from tDR and was forced to take down the free .ttf font from his site. They claimed their font 6x6 (even though Matt’s is based on a 7x7 grid) was what he was trying to sell. Another instance of corporate bullying. —Luc Devroye, from luc.devroye.org/fonts-72415.html

My font was drawn completely from scratch using Fontographer 4.1, so I find it perplexing that glyphs I had created straight from my own imagination were the same as those in the apparently identical font. I offered my font as a free download on my website, under the concept of Shareware which encouraged others to also share the font for free, and if anybody felt like sending a donation they could do. As you might expect, this is a bit of a hippy thing to do and nobody ever donated anything! And I never did hear from the Head of the Department of Computer Science.

An archived copy of the font can be found on this CD-ROM from 2007.

Get Info: #history

TV’s TV (1987) & TV Games Encyclopedia (1988)

テレビゲーム―電視遊戯大全 / TV Games Encyclopedia (1988)

The object

The name

The structure

The content

The people behind it

A note on names

People featured

Companies featured

Interviews

Authors

It’s been scanned

Contemporary references

Further reading/viewing

Buying the book today

Postscript

Intelligent Agent Technology: Open Sesame! (1993)

One Thousand and One Nights

Download

Further Reading

Talking about Moai in Games on Tokyo Game Life podcast

Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons (1994)

Play it in your browser

Introduction

Macintosh Magazine Media: 1 million files

Status report

New discs

The process

Searching the collection

Interesting finds

Further reading

Digging up the past with DiscMaster

Automated Searching

Class of ’93

Chaos Calc 2

Wire Hang Redux

FAQs

The making of MaBoShi

The Long Tail

Hot Soup Processor

Mosser

Circular

All bar one

Missing in action

Reading list

Collins Gem Basic Facts: Computers (1991)

TETRIS: 1984 is the date of conception (1989)

Bibliography

Some new old posts you might find interesting

Macintosh Magazine Media: search engine update

New 3D Golf Simulation (video game series)

Translation Guides

8-bit Computers

16-bit Computers

16-bit Consoles

Real 3D?

The 19th Hole

Music

Box Art

Harukanaru Augusta

Pebble Beach no Hatou

Waialae no Kiseki

Devil’s Course (Wicked 18)

TETRIS for Sharp Electronic Notebook (1989)

TETRIS IC card

Analysis

Credits

TETRIS: Heavenly Scrolls (1989)

Emigre typography and graphic design magazine (1984–2005)

Tell me about it

Online archives

Digital versions

Related reading

Emoji history: the missing years

1994

1990

A word about word processors

A note about beepers