Get Info: #japanese

New (Old) 3D Golf: porting PC-9801 & Virtual Boy to Mega Drive

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:26:00 +0000

The Japanese Mega Drive ports of T&E SOFT’s New 3D Golf Simulation series are my favourite golf games, and recently I’ve been living inside their ROMs.

As with all the craziest ideas, it began with a “I wonder if I could”… In the early hours of one April morning I managed to pull a single course out of the game—its terrain and flyby data—and reimplement it in a viewer of my own, written in Three.js. Over the following week or so of continued reverse engineering, that viewer quietly grew into something resembling a 3D golf game running in the browser. Finding the data had some big clues: we know that there are 18 holes, the distances of each hole and their sequence order, and I’d read the courses were made of ~256 points, so adding all these heuristics together meant it was much easier to find the data than finding a needle in a haystack.

Understanding the data that well meant I could go the other way, too—back into the original Mega Drive games themselves. First I added a terrain modifier. To test it I flattened the entire course like a pancake to confirm my understanding was correct, and then cranked it up to 11 into a sort of “Hyperactive Terrain Mode” that warps the fairways into something wild. Both worked well.

An early attempt changed its mind on every run; turned out I was seeding it from an uninitialised memory location. 🤦 With no debugger console to hand, I’d been hunting bugs like this the crude way—scribbling values into the cartridge’s SRAM (its battery-backed save memory) and reading them back out, a poor man’s printf. So it wasn’t exactly straightforward.

Once that was sorted, I gave the 32-year-old game some brand new, custom user interface to match.

Next I wondered if the course data was the same across all of the four Mega Drive games, could it be the same across the games on other platforms? The answer is yes: the same course data format turns out to be used right across the series, from the original PC-9801 games (and almost certainly X68000 and FM Towns) through to the Mega Drive and even the Virtual Boy. If my (little-endian) maths is correct that’s a total of 7 unique courses, all sharing one format. There’s some reformatting that needs to be done, but the data structure is the same. And since I could already read the courses, I could write them too—patching the games to pick a course at random, or to load one that was never available on the Mega Drive in the first place. PC-9801 to Mega Drive required sorting the polygons to match how they were expected to be stored.

But I guess T&E SOFT used the same POLYSYS-CAD software to design all the courses over several years? I love how such a tool could have that sort of longevity.

That last part is the really fun bit. (Can this even be more fun?)

Here are three courses running on the Mega Drive for the first time:

T&E Selection

Extracted from the NEC PC-9801 add-on course disk:

This course is somewhat unique as it has messages spelled using coloured topology:
the 1st has “GO!” by the tee position; the 18th has “T&E” just beyond the final green

Eight Lakes G.C.

Also extracted from NEC PC-9801 add-on course disk:

A fact perhaps only I care about: during development, prior to Feb 1990, it was Seven Lakes G.C.

Papillon C.C.

Extracted from the Nintendo Virtual Boy game T&E Virtual Golf:

It’s called Papillon—the French word for butterfly—because the course holes were laid out in the shape of a butterfly. Which was surely a nod to the shape of the Virtual Boy controller.

That last one needed a little extra work. T&E Golf on Virtual Boy doesn’t have a hole flyby, so I had to generate the camera path myself: a bezier curve from tee to pin, nudged towards the centre point of the visible course as it appears on the mini-map. The flyby path in this video was about half way to my final solution.

Playing these courses on Mega Drive is truly special and the effort was very much worthwhile. 🥰

A few things I learned along the way

Living inside the disassembly for weeks, I kept tripping over the little decisions T&E SOFT made all those years ago. Some are clever, some are quietly bonkers, and all of them made me grin:

The hole is three times too big. The cup grabs any ball within ~6.7 inches—triple a real hole’s radius—so balls drop from further out than they look. A fudge for the 320×224 screen, where ball and cup were both sub-pixel.
The polygons pre-sort themselves. No depth buffer on the Mega Drive, so the draw order is baked into the course data, back-to-front (the painter’s algorithm). The giveaway: it doesn’t match the original PC-9801 CAD order.
Backspin can reverse a putt. Spin isn’t cosmetic: it’s fed back into the roll and can make the ball check up and trickle backwards. Real ballistic physics in a 1993 cartridge. Love it!
Water isn’t a hazard—just very sticky. There’s no “in the water” state; water polygons carry friction so high it kills the ball in one frame. The penalty falls out of the ordinary maths.
Wind is a real force, not an aim fudge. It becomes a horizontal acceleration applied every frame of flight, exactly like gravity.
Augusta’s wind never actually changes. The direction is never written—only strength varies. The arrow only seems to swing because it’s drawn relative to the camera.
Bunkers plug, cart paths kick. Every surface has its own bounce coefficient. The fairway hands back a healthy ~40% of the ball’s speed; a bunker returns only ~10%, so the ball plugs where it lands; a cart path or rock fires it back at ~75% for that horrible hard skip.
Your lie quietly rolls the dice. On every stroke the game picks a random number from a per-(lie, club) range and folds it into your swing power. A clean fairway lie uses a narrow range; a bad lie widens it—so the rough genuinely makes your shots less predictable. The ranges live in a 17×17 table, one entry per lie-and-club combination.

Four volumes, one evolving engine

It’s tempting to treat the four Mega Drive games as a single engine with interchangeable courses. They’re not, and the very first line of the cross-volume notes I kept is a warning to myself: ⚠️ never assume all four ROMs share code or data layouts. T&E SOFT kept tinkering release to release, and you only catch it by dumping the same region in all four disassemblies and diffing.

The ROM headers number them New 3D Golf Simulation Vol.1–4, and each header also carries a build date stamped in YYYY.MMM form. Here’s the curiosity: the volume numbers track the build dates, not the retail release dates. Vol.2 Devil’s Course was finished a month before Vol.3 Augusta—but reached the shops a month after it:

Vol	Title	Japanese	ROM build	Retail release
1	Pebble Beach no Hatou	ペブルビーチの波濤	1993-07	1993-10-29
2	Devil’s Course	デビルズコース	1993-08	1994-01-28
3	Harukanaru Augusta	遙かなるオーガスタ	1993-09	1993-12-17
4	Waialae no Kiseki	ワイアラエの奇蹟	1993-09	1994-02-25

A couple of header quirks fell out of this. Pebble’s stamp reads 1993.JLY—Sega’s own oddball abbreviation for July. And while three of the carts credit SEGA, Augusta credits T&E Soft’s Sega licensee code T-114 instead—a clue that it alone was self-published by T&E SOFT rather than by Sega. The boxes agree: Augusta’s isn’t Sega-branded either.

Two places they genuinely diverge, each confirmed by dumping the same region in all four:

Colour isn’t a plain palette lookup—and the recipe is per-game. A surface byte runs through a little chain of lookup tables before it becomes a pen colour, and those tables aren’t shared: Pebble grades several surfaces differently and even reorders two entries, while Devil’s Course carries its own darker, redder palette. Waialae, charmingly, reuses a single palette three times where its siblings have three distinct ones.
A decoder bug only Pebble could trigger. In the polygon stream, vertex indices are single bytes, with 0xFF acting as an escape prefix—the byte after it encodes a higher index (0xE0 + xx), so a hole can point past the ~254 vertices a lone byte can name. My extractor mishandled that escaped range, but only Pebble’s holes are dense enough to actually use it—so the bug sailed through the other three games and only fell over when I reached Pebble. Same encoding in every cart; one course’s data was all it took to expose the flaw in my reader.

There’s also the US release, Pebble Beach Golf Links (header stamped 1993-11, likely on shelves 1994-04): the same course data on a larger ROM, with English strings present where the Japanese Vol.1 zeroed them. That parallel made a useful “Rosetta Stone” for decoding menus and text.

Inside Waialae

Waialae was my primary reference—1,572,864 bytes, header NEW 3D GOLF SIMULATION Vol.4 Waialae C.C., serial GM G-5529.

Each hole is reached through four ROM pointers, one per data block, and they’re wildly different sizes. Block 0 is the vertex list—244 XYZ points, the ~256-point mesh, about 1.5 KB. Block 1 is the bulk of it: sixteen view-order streams (one draw order per camera angle) that bake in the back-to-front sorting—around 5.5 KB, bigger than the geometry it orders. Block 2 holds the mesh and sprites themselves (230 polygons plus 54 sprites), ~1.8 KB. Block 3 is just the flyby keyframes, a slim ~0.7 KB. For Waialae’s first hole that comes to about 9.2 KB, split like this:

A couple more structural quirks:

A spatial grid, decades early. Immediately after the vertex pool sits a count followed by count × 16 word offsets into the face section—a two-level spatial grid (cell → faces) so the engine can look up the relevant polygons from the ball’s (x, z) without walking the whole hole.
Why the SRAM debugging hurt. Waialae’s battery-backed save RAM is odd-lane only, from $200001. Byte writes have to land on odd Mega Drive addresses; even-address writes to $200000 simply disappear. That’s the real reason scribbling values into SRAM as a printf substitute was so finicky—half my early writes were going into the void. (BlastEm helpfully flushes SRAM to disk on quit, so I could read it back from the host.)

Variable zoom

The shared course format is what let me move holes between platforms, but each machine scales the world differently. The proven case: Waialae hole 1 from the PC-9801 drops into the Mega Drive after a fixed 1.6× rescale on X and Z (Y untouched), plus a little-endian → big-endian flip on the flyby path records.

Lining those transplanted polygons up against the stock Mega Drive ones is also what proved the rendering trick I mentioned earlier: the Mega Drive packs faces in descending max-Z order—back to front, the painter’s algorithm—and the original PC-9801 face id survives the journey as the Mega Drive’s attr1 byte.

Two deeper cuts

The flyby camera, decoded by statistics. Each flyby keyframe carries two mystery bytes. With no documentation, I histogrammed 4,723 of them across every hole and the shape gave it away: one byte is an 8-bit angle (256 units = 360°) for yaw, the other a signed pitch clamped to about ±40, positive meaning the camera looks down. Educated guessing, with visuals.
The Virtual Boy world is built at a different scale. The Virtual Boy stores its courses at 32 raw units per yard, where the Mega Drive works in 17—so Papillon has to be shrunk by exactly 17/32 (0.53) to sit correctly on the Mega Drive, otherwise every club hits too short for the hole. (My first attempt used the wrong unit and reported hole 1 as 321 yards instead of its true 360.) It’s the same idea as the 1.6× I needed coming the other way from the PC-9801—one shared format, but every machine measures its yards differently.

The whole thing ran on rizin and vasmm68k with BlastEm for execution—though frame-time profiling had to move to Genesis Plus GX, because BlastEm freezes the VDP’s HV counter during the long rendering routines I was trying to measure.

What the old magazines turned up

Reverse engineering only tells you what the games do; for the why, I went digging through a stack of Japanese computer magazines from the era, OCRing the scans to pull out the text. A 1989 developer interview about Harukanaru Augusta (遙かなるオーガスタ)—the PC-9801 original that kicked off the series—turned out to be a goldmine:

The 3D engine came first. T&E’s POLYSYS pre-dated the golf games by a couple of years, already appearing—only in the 3D intro logos, as far as I can tell—in DAIVA STORY 7: Light of Kali Yuga and Psy-O-Blade.
Trees were nearly real 3D. They tried modelling trees as polygons, leaves and all—but one tree took as long to draw as a whole screen. So scaled sprites were used instead.
The first game had no hills. T&E’s 3-D Golf Simulation, written in BASIC six years earlier, had no terrain undulation at all—and on the Sharp X1, 18 holes took half a day to play through.
POLYSYS was meant to be general-purpose: swap the data and it renders anything. T&E planned an RPG and a shooter on it and intended to license it to other software houses.
One programmer, mostly: Eiji Kato (加藤英治).

And the Augusta course itself came with a wonderful backstory:

They licensed the real thing. An official contract with Augusta National, working from the club’s blueprints. Staff visited, didn’t play, but “rubbed their cheeks on the grass.”
Augusta sent back ~60 corrections: eg. pine trees too short and too spread out, flowers too pink, bunker sand the wrong colour.
No do-overs, by design. You could save mid-round, but loading erased the save data—so no replaying holes to pad your score.
Best of all: the dev build’s four caddies were all women. Augusta’s are all men, so the final game swapped them. The ladies returned in the expansion courses and Mega Drive games.
The T&E Selection caddies are real people: four women who worked at Brother Industries—whose TAKERU software vending machines sold these add-on course disks.

What Next?

There’s an extra bit of hacking I’m working on but am unsure if it will lead to anything, but if it does it will need a post all of its own. Hold your thumbs. Fingers crossed. 🤞

It would be possible to release a small script which given both original games would do the extraction and patching, but for now I don’t feel comfortable doing that. I still need to figure out the correct tree mapping for each game, decide which of the four Mega Drive games is most suited to each of the three new courses, add new title screens and a few more bits of detail work.

I’d love to see these ported courses released officially some day—the series IP is now owned and managed by D4 Enterprise—so if you know anybody there please hook us up! If you are an employee of D4 Enterprise then please check my request to license the IP. 🙏

There are more period games in the series that I’d like to take a look at to see if they use the same data format, or modify it in any specific way. SNES and 3DO seem to be the most interesting. 🧐

But for now it’s just me, a pile of disassembly files, rizin and vasmm68k, the BlastEm emulator, and a soft spot for blue skies and FM synth — still trying to get the ball in the hole. ⛳️🏌️‍♂️

DÉ DÉ DISCO (DJ mix)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:59:00 +0000

My favourite DÉ DÉ MOUSE tracks seamlessly mixed together with great pleasure! Also featuring hitomitoi, AZK, TANUKI, DENONBU, Aki Shirokane, Yuka Nagase, Shin-ski, Kakeru, and more.

High-energy feel-good vibes to fill even the rainiest day with rays of sunshine. ✌️

Listen on MixCloud.

Time	Artist	Release	Song	Year
00:00	w/ Milk Talk	single	Beautiful Criminal	2024
04:11	w/ Yumenokessho ROSE	single	Darling of Shooting Star	2025
07:04	solo	Just Brokenhearted EP	I Want You	2025
10:44	solo	Just Brokenhearted EP	When We Love	2025
13:53	w/ TANUKI & hitomitoi	single	The Night of Neon Light (Extended Mix)	2021
19:06	solo	single	Thanks Tracks	2017
21:33	w/ DENONBU & Aki Shirokane	single	Sweet Illusion (Instrumental)	2022
24:56	solo	Milkyway Drive	Sun End Girl	2015
29:25	solo	Via Alpha Centauri	Star Gazer	2017
32:40	solo	Via Alpha Centauri	Rigil	2017
35:04	w/ hitomitoi	single	Skyscraper Starlight	2024
38:50	solo	To Milkyway Planet	Nobody’s Place	2013
42:30	solo	Sunset Girls	Light Night Dance (Shinichi Osawa Remix)	2008
47:23	w/ Yuka Nagase	single	Lovely Shy Girl	2025
50:25	w/ hitomitoi	single	Love Groovin’	2023
53:07	solo	single	Love Destination (Edit 002)	2020
56:33	solo	Just Brokenhearted EP	Dream About You	2025
59:25	solo	Just Brokenhearted EP	Fallin’ in	2025
62:23	w/ AZK	single	Disco Revenge	2022
65:56	solo	Be Yourself	Lonely If	2020
69:57	w/ Pa’s Lam System	single	Carry On	2025
73:38	w/ SHIN-SKI (Tiny Griffi)	Night Flowering EP	Goodnight Tommorow	2024

The download version is 22 tracks with a duration of 1h16m46s. As always, this was produced using the DJ.Studio app. The mixcloud version has an extra track near the end that I decided to take out.

Let me know what you think of the tunes!

Download

Sun End Girl (2015)

If you want to listen to one track that gives the vibe of this mix it’s this one:

Ambientalmente (DJ mix)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 21:09:00 +0000

My latest mix comprises Japanese ambient music.

Some related non-Japanese tracks also in there, just for kicks. 🔰

Listen on MixCloud.

Timestamp	Artist	Song	Year
000:00	Susumu Yokota	Blue Sky and Yellow Sunflower	2004
003:34	Masakatsu Takagi	Marginalia #5	2018
012:08	Hiroshi Yoshimura	Green	1986
016:56	Satoshi & Makoto	That’s All	2017
019:46	William Orbit	Pure Shores (Backing Track)	1999
023:17	Masakatsu Takagi	Marginalia #144	2023
028:09	Yumiko Takahashi	Natsuno Yakusoku	1991
028:19	Seal	Violet (Premix)	1991
035:51	Satoshi & Makoto	Crepuscule Leger	2017
042:03	Hiroshi Yoshimura	Something Blue	1986
046:56	Pierre Barouh	L’autre rive	1982
051:08	Spooky	Orange Coloured Liquid	1993
055:55	Takashi Kokubo	White Ambient II	1990
060:11	Sawako	Tsubomi Saku	2008
060:51	Susumu Yokota	The Future of Ecstasy	2019
063:55	Mitsuhiro	Infinity	1995
064:32	Shinsuke Honda	Moonlight Night	1991
068:41	Takashi Kokubo	The Story of Calm Forest	1993
076:20	Takashi Kokubo	Catalyzer	1990
082:14	Mitsuhiro	Illusion	1995
084:51	Sawako	April ~ From Sea Shell (with Radiosonde)	2008
087:14	I Am Robot and Proud	When I Get My Ears	2006
087:58	Satoshi & Makoto	Closer	2020
092:05	Susumu Yokota	Saku	1999
096:19	Strange Cargo	Water Babies	1993
099:10	TOMC	Extraverted Feeling (Kudan)	2022
103:20	Hiroshi Yoshimura	Over The Clover	1987
109:21	Hiroshi Yoshimura	Clouds	1982
114:40	Masakatsu Takagi	Marginalia #148	2024
119:28	Shinsuke Honda	Summer Clouds	1991
124:08	Junichi Kamiyama	Aquarius	1993
126:35	Haruomi Hosono	Talking	1984
129:06	Masakatsu Takagi	River Returns (Overture)	2025
130:24	Shinsuke Honda	Dreamland	1991
134:25	Satoshi & Makoto	Reconstruction	2020
137:28	Haruomi Hosono	Honeymoon	1975
138:26	Hiroshi Yoshimura	Feel	1986
142:29	Yasuaki Shimizu	Seiko 2	1987
143:05	Max Richter	On the Nature of Daylight	2004

39 tracks with a duration of 2h29m18s. As always, this was produced using the DJ.Studio app.

Let me know what you think of the tunes!

Download

Catch the Vibe

If you want to listen to a couple of tracks that gives the vibe of this mix try these:

“Blue Sky and Yellow Sunflower” by Susumu Yokota (2004)

“Summer Clouds” by Shinsuke Honda (1991)

Abandoned project: multi-site shopping app

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 10 May 2025 17:35:00 +0000

I order weird old stuff from Japan a few times a year: old magazines, CD-ROMs, digital watches, strategy guides, video games, playing cards, books, artwork and any other old tat that takes my fancy. The way this is usually done is by ordering through a proxy service that receives the goods on your behalf and combines and ships them to you at your convenience.

There are many such proxy services, each with their own website, fee structure, shipping costs, and other pros and cons. I grew tired of tabs from these various sites cluttering up my browser, so I decided to build a bespoke app to manage them. I couldn’t find anything close, other than an app for Russians to more easily shop on AliExpress. So, in September 2024, I built the app I envisioned as a rapid prototype and called it Otaku!

otaku (n.) in Japan, a young person who is obsessed with computers or particular aspects of popular culture to the detriment of their social skills 🤓

Otaku!

The app itself is a customisable set of tabs—one per site—each containing a WebKit view, along with a detailed settings interface that includes an editable list of search terms. So, you could easily do common searches and there was no need to repeatedly type searches terms into each site as they would be automatically be entered when you switch to the tab. Add to that Custom CSS to hide parts of the sites, Google Translate to view some sites in your native language rather than Japanese, currency converter, and several other useful related tools rounded out a comprehensive app.

Postmortem

It worked well, and I used it heavily for the duration of its development. it also gained a number of passionate users on TestFlight. My only criticism is that the specific design of the app and the unreliability of my naive WebKit implementation meant that whilst the existing friction was removed by facilitating easier multi-site management, new friction was introduced elsewhere in the user experience, and at the end of the day you’re still interacting with a bunch of websites of varying quality.

A better solution might be somewhere in between, perhaps using a more modern popover interface paradigm to switch between tabs rather than the back and forth of the navigation controller. Then there are options to capture the results via API and present them in a unified way, but this opens up more questions and friction at the point you want to buy something. In short, it’s a difficult problem!

SwiftUI is fun to work with, despite it throwing its hands up at several points and me having to revert to my last commit to get it back on track. I don’t really enjoy building iOS and macOS apps at this point in time, so Xcode became a bit of a chore and took a lot of the fun out of the project.

After pushing several updates up to the middle of October, I then let that final build expire and have never wanted to push any update or new version.

Thanks to all the users of this app for your valuable testing and feedback.

Video Demonstration

Below is a video of sample app usage. I select a search term (Hanafuda) and then use it on the different tabs along bottom of the screen. I then switch to a different search term (花札) and use that across the same set of tabs. Notice that at no point did anything need to be typed.

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

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.

Shibuya Pixel Art Contest 2024

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:42:00 +0000

For June and July of 2024 the Shibuya Pixel Art Contest has been running, a welcome return after it not happening in 2023. Entries are open all over the world, but can only be submitted to Twitter using the hashtag #shibuyapixelart2024. You have to include a name for the artwork and its original pixel dimensions (though it’s OK to rescale small artwork so it can be seen more easily). There are special categories for 16×16px and 32×32px artwork, and then a category for anything bigger up to the maximum of 512×512px. Full rules at pixel-art.jp/contesten and there’s still time to enter! Selected works will go on display around the Shibuya district of Tokyo in August and September.

For my entries I thought it would be cool to use different, unexpected software to produce my artwork.

PICO-8

These three entries are based on graphics I created for a game I started making when my wife was pregnant with our first child. We were house bound for a while, waiting for the birth, and I drew these cards using PICO-8 for a game which remains unfinished. At least I finished the graphics!

16×16px = 「花見」hanami card, (link)
32×32px = 「花見酒」hanami-sake yaku, (link)
128×128px = 「花札」hanafuda koi-koi game layout, (link)

The smaller cards shown in the full game layout are just the regular sized cards downscaled to 8×11px in code using nearest neighbour resizing. For all cards the border is drawn seperately. One or the other size of card are most likely the smallest Hanafuda ever pixelled!?

Rorschach for Playdate

This entry was created with Rorschach a creative toy/game I made for the Playdate handheld gaming system. This piece was created by moving the “pen” using the accelerometer and relying on the dynamic ink colour which is relative to the movement. It’s a fullscreen grab at 400×240px, titled 「キクぞく」”Kikuzoku” or “Chrysanthemum”.

It would be tremendously complicated and time-consuming to create artwork like this pixel-by-pixel, or even with dither brushes, unless you had some sort of pressure sensitive stylus. But Rorschach and the Playdate accelerometer makes light work of it.

The final image was my 12th attempt at getting a convincing flower! With many of my earlier attempts I was slow to hide the cursor and beautiful flowers were ruined by rogue strokes of ink after I’d technically finished. Perhaps I should have added the ability to record/playback or some sort of undo to the app. (link)

Deneba artWORKS for Classic Macintosh

I thought it would be fun to use my favourite classic Macintosh drawing app—Deneba artWORKS—to create pixel art using vector shapes, its bundled external tools (plugins), and the infinite fills best known from their appearance in MacPaint. There are only 20 objects in this drawing, which is 200×300px in size and titled 「黄金比」 or “the golden ratio”. (link)

Spiral: flower heads (2)
Resistor: hairs (3)
Bezier: stems, branch, leaves (5)
Arc: shoots, stems, midrib (7)
Round rect: planter (2)
Polygon: planter inner shadow (1)

Plus

Calligraphic pen nibs to get variable line thickness
Infinite fills to get dithered patterns and textures

Bonus!

I was having too much fun with dither patterns, so I drew one more piece just for kicks. This one is called 「生け花」”Ikebana” (“flower arranging”) and was exported at 200% because I miscalculated my document size at the beginning. I drew the shears and then transformed them with Free Rotate and Scale. There was minor pixel touch-up after export, and the final thing measures 400×512px. Otherwise I used the same techniques as above. (link)

Extras Bonus!

And I did one more just before the deadline. This is titled 「ラペルピン」”lapel pin” and is 512×512px and was created using the same vectors and fills technique. I decided to work in Canvas 3.0 rather than artWORKS, simply because it has a way of locking objects. The only new thing I did here is that I created two diagonal line fill patterns of my own for the collars. (link)

And here’s a screenshot of my working area, Macintosh System 7.5.5 running in 1-bit colour at 1025x768 in the BasiliskII emulator. This time I created it on my MacBook Pro with external Magic Trackpad, but sometimes I use my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

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.

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 JW 95F word processor. My manual is dated 1989 and scans of it can be found here. Note the inclusion of a seahorse emoji!

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 JW 95F 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”) ↩

JINZO Paint: vintage mobile drawing app

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 20:53:00 +0000

At my core I’m a software guy. I don’t really get attached to hardware: in my mind it exists only as a conduit to software. I use emulation whenever I can to benefit from the increased convenience and reliability. But when I can’t… I buy old devices, and with old devices come old problems.

I’m fascinated by vintage digital art software, from my beginnings on Atari ST, though classic Macintosh and vintage Japanese PCs, to handhelds like Palm devices or, in this case, a PocketPC running Windows CE. As with all software, many great ideas have been abandoned in the name of “progress”.

Zen and the Art of Software Design

Japanese art software is notable in a number of ways because their drawing tools evolved differently to those in the West, at least until Photoshop took hold. In Japan the first breakthrough digital art software was the PC-98’s Multi Paint System (MPS, マルチペイントシステム) released by C-Lab in 1992, though an earlier version was released in 1991 as Maguro Paint System, or Tuna Paint System (鮪ペイントシステム) both of which were programmed by Woody_RINN.

MPS introduced the ability to lock colours and prevent them from being drawn over. You might think of it as a mask featuring every instance of that particular colour. You could also replace colours in a similar way. This was done through an intuitive mechanism of a toolbar button or key press to lock one or more specific colours on the palette, which is quite different to the selection or mask approaches popularised by Photoshop and common today.

Regardless of whether or not the method of handling colours in MPS is novel or unique, it was adopted as a standard by most Japanese art software for many years. JINZO Paint (JZP), a digital art app for PocketPC (Windows CE) created by t-ueno (Tomohiro Ueno), was one such app that adopted the MPS way of doing things and I’ve been using it a bunch recently. It offers first class support for drawing in dither patterns, and you can load in custom patterns. If you like HyperCard, NewtPaint, TealPaint, you’ll love it. Jinzo is the Japanese word for kidney, which is also the icon of the app.

If you’re interested in reading about the interface and functions of JINZO Paint I’ve mirrored the manuals for two early versions on my website as the original location is no longer available. A later version supports full 24-bit colour, but removes some useful functions. Regardless, all versions use a similar interface so they’re easy to use once you’re familiar with the general operation. One thing I would say is that the toolbars can be opened and selected with a single tap-drag-release action, which a huge win for usability and one that reminds me of the original Apple Macintosh and Palm OS. If you’re lucky your operating system today will support such fluidity.

For my next trick I will run it on a Dictionary

My Windows CE device is a bit odd because it’s a Brain. These are a range of electronic dictionaries made by Sharp and sold only in Japan. With a bit of gentle coaxing it can be used as a little computer running Windows CE. My particular model is the PW-SH1 which is a 3rd generation device with a high resolution screen whose hinge can rotate 360° so it’s back-to-back against the keyboard, effectively becoming a tablet computer. Some years ago it was figured out that you could sideload apps and even force these devices to open the Windows CE desktop and do all manner of crazy things. Japanese hackers and modders seem to love using these devices to run emulators for old computers like Sharp MZ-series and NEC PC-series. If you want to know more check out the Brain Wiki and if you want to pick up a device here’s a list of them all (browser translation required for those links).

A problem with file selection

Anyway, I noticed whilst using JZP that the file selector would often fail to open properly. It worked the first time but subsequent attempts saw it open and then immediately vanish. The source code to the first two versions is available, and with the help of Brain Hackers’ @watamario15 the reason for the problem was traced. He found that the value of the parameter being passed to the file selector was invalid, and provided proof by modifying the source code to those versions resulting in new working binaries. But with the final full-colour version has no source code, so how do we fix that?

Multiple solutions

The binaries for my device are ARM so there’s good support for debugging that type of code. I fired up Ghidra and started poking around in the earliest, smallest version of JZP. I quickly found the section of code that defined the parameters, helped by the placement of the setup of the strings used in the file selector. A quick tutorial later and I knew how to use Ghidra to find references to data, patch instructions, and save a new binary. The workaround was to set the parameter to NULL, which works nicely but removes the ability for the app to remember the most recently used directory.

However the source is available for the two earlier versions, which I prefer using, so more complete changes could be implemented. Rather than simply nulling out the parameter we could set it to the correct initial value: the root directory. Additional changes were needed to make sure the program would cope with saving and loading from the root directory of the device directly. And finally, just for good measure, the 16-colour version’s extremely slow bitmap saving has been optimised!

Many thanks to @watamario15 for his invaluable help with debugging and his generous source code wrangling. And to Brain Wiki for being such a valuable resource for crazy old software nerds like me!

Keyboard controls

I’ve also added keyboard control to JINZO Paint 16, with standard Photoshop keys to switch tools, plus keys for undo, set zoom, quick zoom (hold space bar), and more. If I get permission from the original author I’ll release a patch.

Repo

My changes to the 16-color version are now available at the BRAIN hackers GitHub:

github.com/brain-hackers/jinzo-paint/tree/16-color

See the sky: Thoru Yamamoto’s Christmas story, for Playdate

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Thoru Yamamoto (Japanese: 山本徹 or とーるやまもと), born 1955, is a Japanese multimedia artist. Over the years he has released work in many formats including, but not limited to: magazine illustrations, HyperCard decks, interactive CD-ROMs, printed books, websites, digital stickers, and videos. He is perhaps best known for his story books distributed as HyperCard stacks and his unique 1-bit art taking advantage of the limitation imposed by early Apple Macintosh computers.

See the sky is one such story book, a Christmas present released in October 1992 as a series of HyperCard stacks. In 1996 it was re-released in a remastered form: as an interactive CD-ROM, produced using Macromedia Director, which added ambient music and navigation to the original images. Also released in 1996 was a printed book of the story, presented as 3 images per page. Finally, in 1999 a CD-R of the combined HyperCard stacks was released.

A new edition for 2023

I’ve created a new version of See the sky for Playdate. The remastering/remaking/porting process was quite involved, so I’d like to detail it in this blog post.

Extracting the original images

I used HyperCardPreview to export the assets from the original HyperCard stack. I did this back in October 2022, and had to use an old MacBook Pro running Mojave to do it.

Just today, whilst writing this blog post, I figured out that HyperCardPreview will refuse to open stacks if the app Stacksmith is also present on your Mac!? As soon as I deleted Stacksmith, HyperCardPreview opened the files just fine. It seems to be some sort of issue with them competing for control of the com.apple.hypercard.stack uti. Weird.

Anyway, See the sky consists of just over 500 full screen card images. For other stacks, you might get a combination of background images and card images that would need re-compositing - it really depends on the stack.

Thoru told me that when he first started out with HyperCard he wasn’t aware of the benefits of using a common background card and different foreground cards, which is why See the sky consists of only foreground cards. For this reason it was very difficult for him to upload the files, which were rather large for the time. Later productions would make more effective use of background cards to keep the file size as small as possible.

Implementing a viewer

My way of developing is to think of the goal as clearly as possible, then get something up and working as quickly as possible, and after that iterate and refine until I reach the goal. So it was easy to create a sort of slideshow viewer for the images, keeping track of the current image and allowing navigation forwards and backwards with A and B buttons, loading the next/previous image as required. Pretty quickly it became apparent that I could not simply display each screen centred as important content would frequently be out of view.

Adjusting each screen

So I added a table to store offsets for each screen. But defining these manually would be very time consuming so I set about creating an interactive way to do this. I added a debug mode in which I map the d-pad (cursor keys) to move the current image up/down/left/right, along with the ability to save the offsets table to a file. This was a huge productivity boost! But I was still finding it quite a repetitive task, so I added further key mappings so I could use the numbers on the numeric pad of my keyboard to quickly set the offsets for a screen to each of the 8 compass directions, or centred. This increased productivity even more. At this point I found myself setting the same offsets for a screen as the previous screen, so I added to more keys to copy the offset from the previous/following screen. All in all this made setting offsets for 500 screens quick and easy. When I was happy I copied the offset table into the code and that became the default values.

This is all to say that whilst the original Macintosh resolution of 512×342 does not match the Playdate’s resolution of 400×240, See the sky still works on Playdate because every screen has been manually repositioned to keep the important elements in view, a process similar to the “pan and scan” adaptation of movies for 4:3 TVs.

HyperCard look and feel

The most recognisable feature of many HyperCard stacks are the crossfades between screens. This was essential to the experience. Thoru even took advantage of the crossfade in certain scenes by changing only small elements from screen to screen so that the crossfade turned into a sort of stop-motion animation effect.

To achieve the crossfade on Playdate I do the following:

Before the transition I capture the current screen using playdate.graphics.getWorkingImage()
Next I make this image into an overlay, in my case I’m assigning it to a “fade” sprite
Behind the fade image/sprite I load in the requested next/previous image
Finally I use playdate.graphics.image:fadedImage(alpha, Bayer8x8) to fade out the overlay, which happens over several frames and results in the image becoming more and more transparent, eventually disappearing completely

So the crossfade is simply one image fading away and the image behind it slowly being revealed. Magic.

I also added the ability to have slower or faster crossfades depending on your preference. I do this by adjusting the refresh/frame rate of the game itself, rather than skipping any of the fade.

The only other feature I needed to add was a flashing capability. This happens at a handful of places in the story to various degrees, mostly there are a few flashes in places but in one places there are 10 flashes. Given that people with photosensitive epilepsy won’t want to see the screen flash I honour the Playdate “reduce flashing” system setting. If the user has that toggled on the story will only flash once at each instance. The speed of the flashing is quite slow, and not tied to the speed of the crossfade.

Page turn sounds are recordings of the sounds defined in the original HyperCard stack, another essential part of the experience. Thoru describes these sounds as “pipo papo” and that’s how I label it in the settings. I also provide the option to use a more realistic page turn sound, or switch off page turn sounds entirely.

Chapters

I added chapter navigation which unlocks as you go through the story, in a similar way to the 1996 CD-ROM release of See the sky. This means you can revisit any previous chapter, and once you’ve reached the end of the story you’ll have access to all chapters. If you want to reset that progress, for example to let somebody else enjoy the story from the beginning and remove any temptation for them to skip ahead, you can delete the “game data” through Playdate Settings. Chapter title cards are only shown when using the chapter navigation, and not whilst going through the story, I do this by injecting temporary images into the crossfade system.

Progress

I also added a progress bar, shown when you bring up the menu. It’s a vertical bar drawn in the centre of the screen between the menu and faded game image. The bar itself is dithered at 50%, and onto it I draw white markers for each chapter position. The current position is shown by drawing a solid white bar from the bottom of the screen to the current position. This means that the bar “fills” with white from the bottom as you progress through the story.

Experiments with sound

The 1996 CD-ROM release of See the sky has ambient music, but Thoru and myself couldn’t figure out the rights to this so it could not be used. I had done the work, just in case, so I’ll mention it here.

I extracted the audio from the Director files using a technique I’ve previously blogged about. I then converted the audio files to 44.1KHz 16-bit WAV files, and used Ocen Audio to remove the base noise from those files. Basically, you select a part of the audio that contains only noise and it removes this from the entire audio file. Doing this without first upsampling the audio meant it did not work as well or at all. After the de-noising, I converted to ADPCM using adpcm-xq which gave files half the original size at higher quality and with lower noise levels.

Experiments with music

After we realised we would not be able to use the ambient music, I looked at using completely different music, turning to the catalogue of watson @ MusMus. I found a piece of music for each chapter of the story and extracted loops using PyMusicLooper. I then tweaked the loops by adjusting their start point by moving a section of audio from one end to the other so the loop began with the part of the audio I thought sounded best. I use TwistedWave for most sound editing like this. Thoru really liked the music itself but was of the opinion that no music would be more honest to the original release. I can’t argue with that reasoning. Feel free to play your own choice of music whilst experiencing the story.

Optimising for size

The final app binary is tiny but the images are adding up to about 3MB. That’s fine, but I wondered how I might be able to optimise them. I used imagemagick’s montage command to stitch the images together into a grid. In Playdate land we call this an image table, but you might refer to it as a sprite sheet. This reduced the size of 500 separate card images from 3MB to a single image of just 2MB. A nice saving!

The 500 screen image table occupies 10.5MB RAM, so about two thirds of the available RAM on Playdate. Side-effects of bundling 500 screens as single file are a short delay on loading for users, a short delay on building for me as a developer, and the need to regenerate the single image if any of the images it contains are changed.

At this point, I could have stopped. I should have stopped. But, of course, I didn’t.

I’ve often wondered how the dimensions of a sprite sheet grid affect the file size when saved as a compressed format such as PNG. The extreme examples in this case would be having a tall grid of 1×504 or a wide grid of 504×1, and in between we have some exact multiples. I generated one sprite sheet for each grid size and here found that for this set of images a grid of 42×12 resulted in the smallest image file size a saving of a further 4% or so. The savings are similar when converted to the Playdate pdt image format. Note that this sort of optimisation only works for solid images, not for images with any alpha/transparency.

And that’s it. The final size of this new version is smaller than the original, mostly due to the image optimisation. I could make it even smaller by exporting all the final crops of the screen images, create a new image table of those, displaying them with zero offset. But I decided to not go there!

The result

You can download See the sky for Playdate from my page on itch.io, and it is a free download. A present from Thoru and myself. With best wishes for a Merry Christmas.

gingerbeardman.itch.io/see-the-sky

500 screens
10 chapters
~ 1 hour experience
Quick navigation menu unlocked as you go
Position is remembered between launches
Settings for sound and crossfade speed

Credits

Created by Thoru Yamamoto
Edited by Matt Sephton
© 1992 Thoru Yamamoto

Birthday blog post?

Check out my other #birthday blog posts.

Japanese language support on Classic Macintosh

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:50:00 +0000

Collecting Japanese Macintosh Magazine Media was not without its challenges. After buying those discs, and figuring out a way to index the content, I wanted to run some of that software! So I needed a way to work with Japanese files and display them correctly in a real Classic Macintosh environment. For the reasons outlined below I decided to use only System J7.5.3 and Mac OS 9.

System 6

You’d install a third party solution like SweetJAM or GomTalk. This method only for the truly hardcore!

KanjiTalk

You could install KanjiTalk 7 on top of US System 7. It includes all the features of System 7, plus utilities for entering and displaying Japanese.

Native Japanese System 7

Later you could get official Japanese installers for System 7. I’ve found that it’s easiest to install System J7.5.3 and dual boot to it using System Picker. This allows full display of Japanese text, opening of Japanese documents and you can still type in English when you need to, by using the language input method icon in the menu bar.

Language Kits

For later versions of the system you can install Language Kits provided by Apple. For System 7 and 8 the Language Kits had to be bought. For OS 9 they came for free.

Example: Mac OS 9

After installation the process requires some additional steps: set your system to a specific font, and register specific apps to display in Japanese (if they don’t automatically).

Install “Language Kits” Result:
- You’ll gain the language input menu
- You’ll be able to see Japanese in Text control panel
Set “Control Panels -> Appearance -> Fonts -> Views Font” to Osaka Result:
- You’ll be able to see Japanese in Finder
Use “Language Register” to set Japanese on a per-app basis Result:
- You’ll be able to see Japanese in the app menus and windows

Further details at Japanese-ization of OS (Mac OS 9 edition).

List of vintage Japanese pixel/dot art software

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 15:56:00 +0000

For a while now I’ve been collecting references to old Japanese pixel/dot art software. My main sources of information are the treasure trove of scanned magazines on Internet Archive, Twitter archives, YouTube videos, Yahoo! Japan Auctions listings, and Google search. I’ve been keeping this list for a while, and the release of 16bit Sensation: Another Layer and its inclusion of Multi Paint System made me realise I should make the list public.

A long term goal would be to find files for each of these so they can be actively used and documented more fully. Most have them can be found in archives of preserved software, with clues in the spreadsheet below, and you can try them using emulation or Virtual Machines.

Selected columns from the big list

The table below is a snapshot of selected columns of a Google Sheet that I’m updating over time. The full spreadsheet contains links to downloads, videos, web pages, magazine mentions, and many other references. So be sure to check, bookmark or subscribe to that link for the very latest information. Since January 2024 I’ve been adding some non-Japanese software that was “big in Japan”.

Regarding the empty cells: software missing a Japanese name was mostly referred to only by an English title. The rest of the missing information is TBC.

ドット絵（ドットえ）作成に使えるビンテージ日本語ソフトの一覧です。

Total entries: 272

Platform	English	Japanese	Year	Developer
FM-7, X1	Art Creator		1984	MDBA
FM-7/8	Graphic Editor		1983	Hiroshi Ichikawa
FM-7/8	Super Graphic Editor	スーパーグラフィックエディター	1983	T&E SOFT
FM-77	FM Graphic Editor	FMグラフィックエディタⅡ V1.0	1986	Fujitsu
FM-R50/60	Z’s STAFF Kid FP		1988	Zeit
FM-R60/70	Z’s STAFF Kid FP		1990	Zeit
FM-Towns	ARTemis		1993	Ryosuke Matsuuchi
FM-Towns	DRAW BOARD2		1993	Souji Yamakawa
FM-Towns	G-Pen32K		1995	rice
FM-Towns	many COLORS		1993	Amorphous
FM-Towns	many COLORS II		1995	Amorphous
FM-Towns	Meta Paint 2	メタペイント2	1992	Oizumi Shigeru
FM-Towns	New Transfer	ニュートランスファー	1992	Hiroshi Toda
FM-Towns	Oops, anime-kun	おっとアニメ君	1989	Nihon Mi-Com Hanbai
FM-Towns	Otome / Towns Paint System	乙女座	1993	Yabara
FM-Towns	Power Paint	パワーペインター	1991	Wave Train
FM-Towns	Towns PAINT		1989	Fujitsu
FM-Towns	TownsFullcolor		1993	Fujitsu
FM-Towns	Z’s STAFF PRO-TOWNS		1991	Zeit
Mac OS X	DotEditerSE		2016	tokyoconsaruai
Mac OS X	DotShot X		2007	Studio Shin
Mac OS X	FireAlpaca		2011	FireAlpaca
Mac OS X	PikoPixel		2013	Twilight Edge Software
Mac OS X	PoCo		2005	KAENRYUU Koutoku
Macintosh	BluePaint		2001	Shungo Onozuka
Macintosh	DotShot		1998	Studio Shin
Macintosh	Leo paint		1997	Reona Takahashi
Macintosh	SketchBook 68K		2000	Shibutaro Kimura
Macintosh	Solid Paint		1996	Masatoshi Utashiro
Macintosh	WishDraw		1998	Motoo Tanaka
MPC-X	MPC-X Lightpen Graphics		1984	Sanyo
MSX	ACE-tools DRAW-SET		1997	Akio Hiramatsu
MSX	Animation editor EDDY	アニメエディタＥＤＤＹ	1984	HAL Laboratory
MSX	ANIMECHA Ver. 2.00		1995	MAR’Z PROJECT
MSX	Art Paper	アートペーパー	1986	Mitsubishi
MSX	CHEESE		1984	NEOS
MSX	CHEESE 2		1985	NEOS
MSX	Computer Painting	描きくけコン	1985	Casio
MSX	Creative Tool	クリエイティブツール	1989	HAL Laboratory
MSX	Da Vinci	ダ・ビンチ	1988	Shinkikakusha Corp
MSX	Dot Designers Club	ＤＤ倶楽部	1989	T&E SOFT
MSX	Dream Block	ドリームブロック	1989	Nikkoh Thinking
MSX	EDDY II	エディー	1984	HAL Laboratory
MSX	Gaban	がばん	1988	Micronet
MSX	Garakuta	画楽多	1988	Southern Create
MSX	Graph Saurus 1	グラフサウルス	1989	Bit²
MSX	Graph Saurus 2	グラフサウルスVer2.0	1991	Bit²
MSX	Graph Saurus 2.1	グラフサウルスVer2.1	1993	Bit²
MSX	Graphic Artist	グラフィックアーティスト	1985	YAMAHA
MSX	Graphic Editor	グラフィックエディター	1984	HAL Laboratory
MSX	Graphic Editor ANGLE	グラフィックエディタアングル	1985	Hiroshi Ichikawa
MSX	Graphic Editor XV	グラフィックエディター	1988	HAL Laboratory?
MSX	Graphic Master Lab	グラフィックマスターラボ	1985	HAL Laboratory
MSX	Graphic Studio Pro	カラー・グラフィック・エディター	1985	HAL Laboratory
MSX	Graphic Tool for screen 12	専用簡易グラフィックツール	1993	KNKKY
MSX	Illustration Word Processor	絵はがき用ワープロ	1985	Hitachi
MSX	Joy Graph	ジョイグラフ	1983	Victor
MSX	Kakikuke kon	かきくけこん	1985	Casio
MSX	Leonard	レオナルド	1987	Omega System
MSX	Leonard Plus Kanji	レオナルドプラス漢字	1987	Omega System
MSX	Lightpen Graphics	ライトペングラフィックス	1984	HAL Laboratory
MSX	MOKO		1986	Toshio Tabeta
MSX	MOKO II Improved Version	改良版 MOKO II	1987	Maeda Mameo
MSX	MSX’s TOOLS		1995	Hitori Circle
MSX	The Painter	ザ・ペインター	1986	YAMAHA
MSX	Tiny Joygraph		1985	Victor
MSX	Pattern Editor Robin	パターンエディターRobin	1985	Hirohumi Ino
MSX	Pixel 2	ピクセル２	1985	T&E SOFT
MSX	Pixel 3	ピクセル３	1988	T&E SOFT
MSX	(Graphic Editor) Sha Ga Raku	写・画・楽	1988	Victor
MSX	UniPaint	ユニペイント	1986	Matsushita
MSX	Video Graphics	ビデオグラフィックス	1986	Matsushita
MSX, WAVY	Light Pen Graphics	ライトペングラフィックス	1984	Sanyo
MZ-2500	G-EDIT2500	グラフィックエディタ2500	1987	Data West
MZ-2500	ILLUST BOX		1987	Rhodes
MZ-2500	Palette	ぱれっと	1987	Dynaware
MZ-2500	Quick MZ Paint		1987	Minoru Morinaka
MZ-2500	Super Paint		1987	S.B.C Software
Newton	HexPaint		1997	HexDump
Newton	NewtPaint		1995	Glen Raphael
OS/2	QueenCy		2000	masami
Palm	CLIE Paint		2001	Sony
Palm	MoePaint		2004	Toshiyuki Hayashi
Palm	PenPenCol		2001	Shigeyuki Seko
Palm	PenPenW		2005	Shigeyuki Seko
Palm	PixMarker		2001	wernyv
Palm	Sphere the PAINTER		2001	Katsunori Sakuragi
Palm	yapp		2000	Ines
PC-100	Airbrush	エアーブラシ	1984	ASCII
PC-6001	Picture Editor	ピクチャーエディタ	1983	ASCII
PC-88	Adventure Maker mk2	アドベンチャーツクールmkII	1987	T.Ueno
PC-88	ART MASTER 88		1985	SystemSoft
PC-88	da Vinci ~Super Graphic Tool~	ダヴィンチ	1985	POPCOM
PC-88	Emi	絵美	1990	MIINA
PC-88	HR-PAINT3		1990
PC-88	Ink Pot M		1987	H.Komatsu
PC-88	LALF ~Hyper Graphic Tool~		1989	Technopolis
PC-88	LUNA		1991	MEW
PC-88	Magic Paint 88 v2.0	マジックペイント88	1988	Atsushi Oshima
PC-88	Magic Paint 88 v3.0	マジックペイント88	1988	Atsushi Oshima
PC-88	Magic Paint 98	マジックペイント98	1990	Atsushi Oshima
PC-88	Magic Paint VA	マジックペイントVA	1988	Atsushi Oshima
PC-88	nedi3.bin		1987	TA(O)
PC-88	Super Artist 256		1989	Seed Software
PC-88	Yukara art	ユーカラart	1987	Tokai Create
PC-88	Z’s STAFF Kid VA		1987	Zeit
PC-88	Z’s STAFF Kid88		1987	Zeit
PC-88, X1	Ink Pot		1985	H.Komatsu
PC-98	256 Color Drawing Tool	256色お絵描きツール	1994
PC-98	6 Coloured Pencils	6色鉛筆	1993	tsutosan
PC-98	Actor98	アクター98	1990	Soft Studio Panther
PC-98	Adventure Maker 98	アドベンチャーツクール98	1992	ASCII/LOGiN
PC-98	Akane	あかね	1992	Miruhi Takahara
PC-98	Art Frontier	アートフロンティア	1991	Bijutech
PC-98	ArtCore (Art/V?)		1992	SystemSoft
PC-98	Assist Art	アシストアート	1991	Assist Co., Ltd.
PC-98	Ayako	彩子	1988	Art Function
PC-98	Camel	キャメル	?	Nazca Corporation
PC-98	CANDY		1984	ASCII
PC-98	CANDY2		1985	ASCII
PC-98	Character Maker 98	キャラクターツクール98	1994	Pegasus Japan
PC-98	Doodle Book / Rakugaki-chō	落書き帳	1993	Toshiya Hayashi
PC-98	DynaPix V	ダイナビックスV	1988	Dynaware
PC-98	ESQUISSE	電子水彩エスキース	1989	SAPIENCE
PC-98	Funny		1984	Zeit
PC-98	Garakuta98	画楽多98	1990	Southern Create
PC-98	GIOTTO		1986	Art Function
PC-98	GRAPHIC HENSHIN	ぐらひっくへんしん	1998	Taro Namae
PC-98	GREEN		1993	Yoshito Takemura
PC-98	GREM		1993	Yoshito Takemura
PC-98	Hyper Ayako	HYPER 彩子	1989	Art Function / Digital Arts
PC-98	JEDAI		1994	D.O. CORP
PC-98	Kureyon-chan	くれよんちゃん	1994	Fusao Saito
PC-98	Maguro/Tuna Paint System	鮪ペイントシステム	1991	Woody_RINN
PC-98	Mapping Paint	写像ペイント	1990	CAST
PC-98	Marupa	まるぱ	1993	Ichikawa Soft Labratory
PC-98	MEDI-98 / nedi3		1990	NOZUMU
PC-98	Monopen	ものぺん	1995	OEAO
PC-98	Multi Paint System / MPS	マルチペイントシステム	1992	C-Lab
PC-98	Paint System Tool / PST	似非キース	1990	hironon
PC-98	Paper	紙	?	Irem
PC-98	Penta-kun	ぺん太くん	1994	NEG
PC-98	Sadayan Paint	さだやんペイント	?	Irem
PC-98	SANDY		1994	Wataru Ishihara
PC-98	Small CANDY		1984	ASCII
PC-98	Super Tableau	スーパータブロー	1987	SAPIENCE
PC-98	Tableau		1987	SAPIENCE
PC-98	Tetsujin	鉄人	?	Irem
PC-98	TrueLine		1996	OEAO
PC-98	Z’s STAFF		1985	Zeit
PC-98	Z’s STAFF Kid		1986	Zeit
PC-98	Z’s STAFF Kid98		1988	Zeit
PC-98	Z’s STAFF Kid98 v3.0		1990	Zeit
PS-55	Z’s STAFF TRAD		1989	Zeit
SMC	Graphic Editor	グラフィックエディター	1984	Sony
TRON-OS	Pelistina		2005	KAENRYUU Koutoku
TRON-OS	Pelistina 2		2005	KAENRYUU Koutoku
TRON-OS	Sketchbook	楽描き帳	2011	Satoshi Sera
TRON-OS	Xbrush for Chokanji	Xbrush for 超漢字	2013	Akira Tasaki
Twin Famicom	Game Maker	ゲームメーカー	1989	HAL Laboratory
Windows 2K	4thPaint	よつばペイント	2007	4th Paint Project
Windows 2K	Let’s Draw F		2007	Oscar Creation
Windows 3.1	Daisy Art	デイジーアート	1995	Ichikawa Soft Labratory
Windows 3.1	Draw Unit		1994	Type-甲
Windows 3.1	GOINDRW		1996	Yasuhiro Nakata
Windows 3.1	ImgFinish		1996	Syouichi Hattori
Windows 3.1	Pattern Editor PE	パターンエディタ PE	1995	Windows 3.1
Windows 3.1	Sailing Draw++		1993	Jun Satomi
Windows 3.1	SUPER KiD		1994	Zeit
Windows 3.1	SUPER KiD v2.0		1995	Zeit
Windows 3.1	Tsuruniha○○mushi	つるニハ○○ムシ	1999	Mr Dad
Windows 7	EDGE2		2006	TAKABO SOFT
Windows 9x	1bitPaper		2004	shiden
Windows 9x	ArtistX		2001	ARINOKI
Windows 9x	ArtistX Labolt		2005	ARINOKI
Windows 9x	AZPainter		2006	Azel
Windows 9x	AZPainter2		2009	Azel
Windows 9x	Camel2	キャメル2	1995	Nazca Corporation
Windows 9x	D-Pixed		2000	Jun Doi
Windows 9x	DoggyPaint		2000	HKR.Jon
Windows 9x	Dot Art Kakiko	ドット絵カキコ	2000	YUUKI
Windows 9x	Dot Art Vacation	ドット絵バケーション	2002	Arue
Windows 9x	Dot Editor Ver 4.0	ドットエディタVer4.0	2000	PSIKYO
Windows 9x	Dot Pictureditor	ドット絵でぃた	2000	shishido
Windows 9x	DotPainterALFAR		2003	Herohero
Windows 9x	Easy Paint Tool SAI	ペイントツールSAI	2004	TANE/KOJI
Windows 9x	eco paint	エコペイント	2006	tyty
Windows 9x	EDGE		2000	TAKABO SOFT
Windows 9x	FARLUX	ファーラックス	1997	Studio BullTerrier
Windows 9x	FudeBoard		1998	matumoto
Windows 9x	Gpen96		1999	Hiroshi Igami
Windows 9x	GraphicsGale		2004	HUMANBALANCE
Windows 9x	HappyPaint32R		1997	Isao Maruoka
Windows 9x	Hyper KiD		2000	Fanfare
Windows 9x	Hyper-Paint		2004	kiriman
Windows 9x	iDraw		1996	hawk
Windows 9x	ILLUSTMAKER		2000	matumoto
Windows 9x	Janus		2007	Rigeru
Windows 9x	Kakukakuoji	かくかくおうじ	2000	1BITMANIA
Windows 9x	L-Paint		2001	via
Windows 9x	Let’s Draw		1996	Oscar Creation
Windows 9x	Let’s Draw Z		2003	Oscar Creation
Windows 9x	Light Painter		2000	Yoshi
Windows 9x	LitePaint		2000	Rigeru
Windows 9x	Matilda		2001	ViikiSoft
Windows 9x	mdiapp		2007	nattou
Windows 9x	Mpaint		2001	ura00
Windows 9x	Neko no Mori Graphic Editor	猫の森グラフィックエディタ	2009	Neko no Mori Soft
Windows 9x	PAL Paint 2		2005	Togura
Windows 9x	PictBear		2000	Yasuyuki Kashiwagi
Windows 9x	PictBear 2		2009	Yasuyuki Kashiwagi
Windows 9x	piroPaint		2011	piroyan
Windows 9x	Pixia		1998	Isao Maruoka
Windows 9x	Pointillist Feng Chu 3	点画師鳳雛３	2005	Maya Takimoto
Windows 9x	PRETTY ART		2000	dmms_21
Windows 9x	SPED4		2001	TwinkleSoft
Windows 9x	SUPER KiD 95		1996	Zeit
Windows 9x	SUPER KiD FE		1997	Zeit
Windows 9x	The Graphics		2002	Fanfare
Windows 9x	Ultra KiD	ウルトラキッド	1997	Fanfare
Windows 9x	Ultra KiD v2.0	ウルトラキッド	1998	Fanfare
Windows 9x	Yumeiro no Enogu	ゆめいろのえのぐ	2008	Kengo Watanabe
Windows CE	EDGE Pocket 2		2009	TAKABO SOFT
Windows CE	JINZO Paint 16		1999	Tomohiro Ueno
Windows CE	JINZO Paint 4		1999	Tomohiro Ueno
Windows CE	JINZO Paint full-colour		1999	Tomohiro Ueno
Windows CE	mdiapp mobile		2008	nattou
Windows CE	Pocket Artist		2001	Conduits
X-Windows	Gedo / Graphic EDitor OMNI		1999	Yasuhito Sugiura
X-Windows	Xbrush		2001	Akira Tasaki
X-Windows	xpx		1994	yav
X-Windows	XShodou		1998	Hiroaki Sakai
X1	turbo Z’s STAFF		1985	Zeit
X68000	Art68K		1991	OOYAMA
X68000	Easypaint SX-68K		1991	First Class Technology
X68000	EEL		1994	GORRY
X68000	EX-WIN (EX-System)		1996	Oh! X
X68000	Full Color Paint Tool SAI	フルカラーペイントツール-彩-	1996	TANE/KOJI
X68000	G・TOOL	G・ツール	1990	Zainsoft
X68000	G68KversionII-PRO		1989	OH! Bussiness
X68000	GE		1990	Miki Hoshino
X68000	GLab		1992	Ushi no shizuku
X68000	gm256.x		1993	Kanzu
X68000	Graphics Editor ARTIST		1992	T.Shimanuki/GCC
X68000	Magic Palette	マジックパレット	1990	Musical Plan Ltd
X68000	Matier	マチエール	1992	Meteor Art Tech
X68000	mfged.x		1988	Mamiyu Yuuki
X68000	MONOCRAYON	ＭＯＮＯくれよん	1990	Yasuhiro Sasama
X68000	MONOCRAYON Wide Edition	ワイド版ＭＯＮＯくれよん	1994	Noboru Ishii
X68000	Monotone		1988	GUNchan
X68000	Object Editor	オブジェクトエディタ	1990	Tonbe
X68000	Onazorikun		1990	Muchi
X68000	Prism 68K	プリズム68K	1989	WOLF TEAM
X68000	RG	ＲＧ	1992	RERO2
X68000	RGBP		1994	Tetsuya Kimura
X68000	Usagi	うさぎ	1992	IKUTA
X68000	XGE		1995	KYA!,CHIAKI
X68000	XPST	えせきーすX68	1991	kenna & PUNA
X68000	Z’s STAFF Pro-68K		1987	Zeit
X68000	Z’s STAFF Pro-68K v2.0		1989	Zeit
Zaurus	PetitPaint		2001	TOK
Zaurus	PrismPaint 3		2001	Soga Juroh
Zaurus	PrismPocket		2002	Soga Juroh
Zaurus	Zausuke	ざうすけ	2000	Soga Juroh
Zaurus Linux	CloverPaint		2005	Soga Juroh
Zaurus Linux	PetitPeinture		2004	Sakira
Dedicated	Aniputer	アニピュータ	1982	JVC
Dedicated	Hyper Paint 2		1991	Shima Seiki
Dedicated	Personal LINKS: PFB-2		1991	LINKS Corporation
Dedicated	Pyuta G-GRAPHIC	ぴゅう太 G-GRAPHIC	1982	Tomy
Dedicated	SGI-Pictoris	ピクトリス	1988	LINKS Corporation
Dedicated	SGX-Hyper Paint		1988	Shima Seiki

Kenichi Shinohara’s Pixel Art Ukiyo-e (1987)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 10:43:00 +0000

From LOGiN Magazine (1987, No 5) comes the story of 篠原賢一 (Kenichi Shinohara), a “cheerful uncle” from Hyogo Prefecture, who at the age of 60 years old began using an NEC PC-98 to draw pixel art reproductions of Ukiyo-e. He also printed them and made folding screens and kites! Just “for something to do”. I like his style! What a guy.

His process involved pasting copies of artwork from books and magazines to his monitor screen and then tracing them using the mouse. After that he would clean up, add colour, and after 4 to 5 days print it out on his NEC NM9900, check and repeat. Each piece would take 1 to 2 weeks of work.

This is pretty much the same process I used to create my 1-bit Woodblocks series, though with a more modern set of tools, and similar to what Susan Kare did for her famous MacPaint artwork.

Happy 100th

Given that this feature was published in 1987, when Kenichi was 64, that would make him 100 this year. Happy Birthday for your centenary, Kenichi, wherever you are! 🎂

The Setup

We can read that he used pixel art software such as Z’s STAFF, FUNNY and CANDY2. The kite goes further and advertises that its image was drawn using Z’s STAFF with Pluskit LEVEL 1, an NEC PC-9801E and printed on an NEC MultiImpact NM-9900 dot matrix printer.

Handily, many of these tools are referenced in a repeated feature about ASCII C.G. Tools Festival which ran from the middle of November 1985 to the end of February 1986. That feature was essentially an advertisement for Zeit software company and was sponsored by them.

We can see that Funny was a pixel art package, CANDY2 was a technical drawing app, Z’s STAFF was a pixel art app (Zeit’s most famous, in fact), Pluskit LEVEL 1 was an “image reader” software add-on. Interestingly, Pluskit LEVEL 2 involved an interface board to allow for direct camera input.

Thanks to Gaming Alexandria for scanning the magazine and making it available at Internet Archive: archive.org/details/login-may-1987/LOGiN%20-%20May%201987/page/n169/mode/2up

陽気なおごさんに教わるグラフィックツールのひミーふな使い方
Learn how to use graphics tools from a jolly old man

Click the images below to see a zoomable, browsable version of the magazine.

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)

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.

Ball und Panzer Golf: making a Playdate game in a week

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 22:11:00 +0000

I’ve been following the X68000 Z mini computer since it’s announcement in the hope that it will bring new activity to the X68000 scene and it seems to be having that effect. In one video from the recent 「68の日」(“68 Day”, named after the date written in Japanese order, 6-8, that’s 8th June the most special day of the year for X68000 fans) I spotted a interesting looking single screen golf game:

Hello kata68k

It was Ball und Panzer Golf an indie/doujin game by @kata68k for the Sharp X68000 series of Japanese personal computers and the recent Zuiki X68000 Z mini system, a new emulator based reimagining of the original classic computer. The name is a pun on the anime series Girls und Panzer and its shortened version is BuPG which I assume is a pun on PUBG.

kata68k’s game, as the name implies, is golf but with a tank. It was created in May 2023 and fine tuned for a few weeks, released in time for “68 Day”. It’s a single player game where you use the tank to shoot holes-in-one on a golf course and try to destroy all flags. All this to say it plays like golf, kinda, but with a focus on high scores.

Aside: my favourite source of X68000 content is the PipitanTV YouTube channel, run by @pipixvi, which has a longer, screen capture video of Ball und Panzer Golf.

I played Ball und Panzer Golf v0.94 using an X68000 emulator and was instantly hooked, by the strange mashup concept and also by the scoring mechanisms that were involved. Kata’s game design values and methods align with my own to a surprising degree. kata68k grew up with the X68000 much like I grew up with another Motorola 68000-based computer: the Atari ST. We’re roughly the same age and have similar interests in many ways.

Anyway, I had great fun figuring out the different types of shots and opportunities to increase my scoring ability during my few plays of the game. Once I’d figured them out, it became a task of improving my skill controlling the tank and the shot power. The shot mechanism itself is worthy of a mention: there is no real charging of the shot and the ball starts to move immediately. What you do control is the moment the ball starts to come back down to Earth. It’s a very strange way of controlling the ball, but oddly satisfying. It’s reminiscent of the two tap system that sets power in most golf games, but at the same time feels completely alien.

Enter Playdate

I currently spend my time creating games for Playdate, a handheld gaming system with a black and white screen and a unique crank control that can be used as a method of input. Whilst on a walk in the park I couldn’t stop thinking of kata68k’s game and how it might work on Playdate. When I got back to my computer I wrote a little bit of Lua code to draw an elliptical golf green on screen, then added a hole, a flag pole, and a flag with a number on it. Then I added a loop to generate random positions and drew 18 holes, adjusting the size so they all fitted a bit better. It might just work.

After a quick dinner, it was time to draw the tank. I really didn’t want to slow down my pace of progress so I decided to keep drawing the graphical elements in code using filled shapes rather then have to draw a tank in pixels. Another option would have been to use one of the cars from my game Daily Driver, but the path of least resistance was to draw a filled ellipse along with a line to show the turret position.

Day 1

That first day everything fell into place perfectly, with little friction and no refactoring. I started from a blank file and wrote just under 400 lines of code. The two most complicated elements were the randomised background and limiting the tank to its circular area, but I’d done similar things before so there was no problem solving involved, just pure implementation. In fact, a lot of this quick prototype made use of tricks and techniques I’d figured out over the past few years of Playdate development, in particular during the development of my game Daily Driver.

At the end of the first day you could drive the tank around the screen, fire the ball at an angle selected using the crank or d-pad, and when you run out of balls it would trigger game over. What it didn’t have is any logic that would collide the ball with the holes, point scoring, or any sort of win state. For some reason at this point I thought it would be cool to have a black tank with three wheels.

Day 1: Timeline

Time	Event
15:40	draw a single “hole”: flag, hole, green
16:00	loop to draw 18 holes
17:00	(dinner)
18:00	draw tank
18:20	(ask permission from kata68k)
19:00	background (interesting use of Perlin and random)
20:00	add controls to tank
20:10	(send update to kata68k)
21:00	limit tank to circular area (tricky but fun)
22:00	ball moving
22:10	(kata68k confirms he’s OK with my version)
22:30	add game states
23:00	add ball height capability
23:45	(send update to kata68k)
00:26	tweet about it

Week 1

The following day I added a first draft of collisions and scoring. There was slower progress, but it was still very steady with no problems encountered. I was keenly aware that the collision and scoring were very naïve and that I would have to refine and improve them going forward. But, regardless, at the end of the second day it was possible to play a complete round of tank golf!

The next two days consisted of fine tuning, polishing, play testing, bug fixing, adding sound effects, and so on. I even managed to record a GIF where I got all 18 flags …my first speed run!? I also received some great early encouragement and feedback from Playdate Squad community members: Donald @Guv_Bubbs, Steve @ScenicSoftware, Atsu @SquidGodDev, Neven @neven and of course @kata68k himself! The game was shaping up nicely and coming together very quickly.

Opportune timing meant that I could get the game in the hands of some testers on a live stream, over at IGDA Twin Cities (MN, USA) as part of their monthly Playtest. Thanks to Mark LaCroix for sorting that out! It was great to watch them play the game for the first time as they discovered the details of gameplay, mechanics, controls, and scoring! I even spotted a bug.

For the rest of the week I polished and played, addressing areas that I thought could be improved. I added accessibility improvements, more opportunities to score, better hole randomisation, even wind effects, and so much more besides.

For the last couple of days of the week I kept release notes, as I felt the pace of progress slowing down towards the end of my self-imposed deadline of one week. I would categorise most changes in those final days as either quality of life improvements or minor bug fixes.

I had not optimised any of the code and was targeting the default 30 frames per second. On the final evening I optimised all text drawing in my main update path, as I could see that was responsible for a huge portion of where my game was spending its time, with the CPU pegged at 100% and the frame rate not able to hit the target 30fps. So the flags with numbers on were pre-rendered as images during initialisation, and the HUD is drawn only when its contents change, and the image is cached for use at other times. These two small and quick optimisations reduced the CPU usage by 20% and put me at a solid 30fps.

There are many more optimisations to be made but this is not the time to do them. There’s too much still to do and I don’t want to lose focus. But for example: I’m not currently using the Playdate SDK Sprite system and am instead doing things the traditional way of drawing everything every update, so I’m positive I can get some good gains by drawing to a few different sprite layers. There are also some functions I call regularly, such as one that counts remaining holes, that can be optimised or avoided by improving my game logic. I’m confident I can get the CPU time down a good bit more. There’s no real need to do so, but I figure anything that will help reduce power usage or is good for the player is a honourable responsibility for a developer with a conscience to take on. If that goes well I may even increase the frame rate for smoother ball movement.

Shaping up

All the graphics are still composed with filled ellipses, rectangles and lines, varying their dithering patterns to provide different textures. I really leaned into this and over the course of the week fine tuned the tank from a three-wheeled blob to a high contrast, detailed, carefully animated sprite that you might think has been rendered externally. Maybe in a forthcoming post I can put together an exploded diagram of how it’s drawn?

What’s next?

The only things I didn’t manage to fit in in my week sprint were a couple of animations I think will help make the game feel even higher quality and that will increase players ability to read/understand what is happening on screen. I need to make some more changes to the wind feature and the way the flag flaps in the wind. Currently the flag direction is correct but I’d like the length and frequency to be relative to the strength of the wind.

Pretty much all of the maths in this game is high school algebra and trigonometry, wrapped up in some smoke and mirrors to make it feel magical.

Also on the task list are a couple more sound effects, with the goal being one sound effect for each important event or action in the game. I feel that sounds cues are as important as visual cues and players could pick up on one or the other so there should ideally be parity.

I can’t keep up the insanely fast pace of development from this first week, not only because of the physical and mental toll it would take but also because the quick wins of the prototype phase are now gone. To add the animations I previously mentioned, the first serious refactoring of part of the code will be needed. So there is no choice but for progress to be slower from this point at least for a while.

The big remaining task that will take a lot longer than a week is game structure and progression. I have ideas of how I can package the structure of the game now into a short experience with increasing difficulty level and unlimited replay-ability.

But the bigger question is do I want it to be bigger than that? There are no shortage of ideas how how to mashup to concept of tanks and golf, only a shortage of time and budget to make it happen. I could even add a mini-golf type of experience where you’re playing a round of single screen holes with additional hazards pulled from both the golf and tank world.

Launched!

My version of Ball und Panzer Golf was renamed Fore! Track and is available for Playdate via Catalog play.date/games/fore-track/ or on itch where there’s a bargain offline version.

Preserving the Marguerite Hanafuda browser game

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Marguerite is a defunct Japanese website, previously at marguerite.jp (dead link) that hosted HTML5 implementations of Hanafuda and Mahjong.

Their Hanafuda in particular was very well done, offering a variety of rulesets some of which are difficult to find in video game form and impossible to find in a browser game. The experience was single player versus one or two CPU players.

The complete list of rules offered:

2-player

Koi-Koi
Mushi (aka “Insect”)
Roppyakken (aka “600”)
Hachi-Hachi (aka “88”)
Hachi (aka “8”)

3-player

Hana-Awase
Hachi-Hachi (aka “88”)
Sudaoshi
Roppyakken (aka “600”)

Gone but not forgotten

The site went offline mid-2022, about a year ago at this point, and all was thought to be lost. We had tried the Wayback Machine but the archive seemed incomplete.

This week Marguerite was mentioned on the Hanafuda Discord, so I decided to try again. Taking a fresh look at the state of the site, it seemed to be stalling trying to load two images.

A couple of small changes later (two hard-coded URLs in the JavaScript pointed to the dead website) I managed to get the desktop version of the Marguerite Hanafuda working locally!

It’s alive!

So, I’m now hosting a mirror copy on my website: marguerite.gingerbeardman.com

Notes:

Sound requires Chrome
Safari/Chrome built-in translation works well for this web app
Some links out of the game will be broken
if Marguerite.jp comes back online I’ll remove my mirror

Mobile & Mahjong?

Sadly the Wayback Machine archive of the Marguerite website is incomplete, so Mobile Hanafuda is lost as are both versions of Marguerite Mahjong.

Usajong gaiden ore ga kirifuda! (Game Soundtrack Rip)

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I recently played through COMPILE’s うさ雀外伝俺が切り札！ “Usajong gaiden ore ga kirifuda!” (a ninja-themed Hanafuda Koi-Koi game for PC-98 featured on Disc Station Vol. 10) and took the liberty of recording its great soundtrack as I went along.

Soundtrack download

archive.org/details/usa-suzume-gaiden-ore-ga-kirifuda-pc-98-unofficial-soundtrack

Track listing:

Logo (SFX) 00:02
Intro 03:00
Start (SFX) 00:06
World Ninja Atlas 03:06
Deal (SFX) 00:10
Normal Round 03:07
Final Round 03:05
Chime (SFX) 00:02
Scores (SFX) 00:06
Lose (SFX) 00:05
Win (SFX) 00:03
Ending 01:51

How to play the game

I’m going to recommend using RetroArch to play this:

download RetroArch
download a zip of the game
download PC-98 System files
start RetroArch
system files will need to go into RetroArch System folder, check Settings > Directory > System/BIOS and move them there
download PC-98 core: Main Menu > Online Updater > Core Downloader > NEC PC-98 (Neko project II Kai)
start the game: Main Menu > Load Content > (choose game zip) > Load > NEC PC-98

You can play the game using mouse, though I used the right analog stick and a single button of a game controller…have fun!

Notes

Some interesting things about this game:

a draw results in the round being replayed
koi-koi increases your “level-up” which counts along a sword, pretty cool visualisation
your score doesn’t double if you finish a round after the opponent calls koi-koi
I can’t see any way to check the current score, so i memorise it as i go
if you lose to an opponent you can simply try again by choosing them from the map screen
it has a cool soundtrack!

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)

Ordering photocopies from Japan’s National Library

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I have been looking for a specific issue of an old 1985 Japanese PC magazine, but there are non currently for sale, nor have there been any sold for some time judging by sold listings. Over the past several years what I would normally do in this scenario is play the waiting game and hope one pops up for sale and that I can win it. But this time I decided to play things a little different, after finding a detailed table of contents for the magazine at Japan’s National Diet Library (NDL) and seeing that they offered a remote duplication service.

Remote duplication?

Japan has very strict copyright laws which are obeyed by their citizens and that goes for the library and its employees. Even though the magazine in question had been scanned onto their system the scans can only be viewed in person at NDL. That’s because even though the magazine is from 1985 it’s still in copyright so it’s a breach of that copyright to send the scans digitally: either over the internet to your web browser or by email. But they are totally fine making a photocopy and posting it to you. In this particular scenario, I’m totally fine with that!

Note: the majority of this process happens in Japanese so make sure to use the built-in translation features of your operating system (iOS can translate any selected text), email service (Gmail will offer to translate foreign language emails), or web browser (Safari and Chrome can translate any web page). With that out of the way, let’s go!

Step-by-step

It turns out this process is pretty old-school, powered by a mix of website and email.

Find the item on the NDL website and check if it’s available to view online, if so there’s no need for you to do this process!
If it’s only available for remote duplication you’ll need to set up an account at NDL Online, a little tricky as I could only find the registration form in Japanese and make sure to confirm your email address
Fill out the remote duplication form making sure to specify all details and most importantly the page number range. You can request an estimate up-front or wait for the invoice on receipt. That’s right, you don’t pay for this service until after you receive the material!
Next, waiting for the item to be picked from the shelves and make it to the front of the duplication queue. For me this took about a week, but it was easy to see it progressing as the status the request can be checked on the website at all times
At this point I received an email - in Japanese - asking me to please check my address and make sure that it contains the country. For whatever reason it didn’t have country, so I made sure to correct it and then replied to the email to let them know I’d done it
You’ll receive a final email when the item has been processed and shipped!
Wait for it to arrive, a mere 4 days to get to me in the UK

Costs

My request was only 3 magazine pages which, when scanned two-at-a-time, fit on two A3 sheets.

Charge	Cost
A4 paper (¥43 per sheet)	¥86
Packing charge	¥350
Postage charge	¥400
Total	¥836

Note: they recommend online payment by card as it’s free. If you really need to you can pay by bank transfer, but it costs an extra ¥4,000! Yikes.

Paying

As I mentioned earlier you don’t pay until you receive the material. Included alongside my two photocopies were: a 2-page stapled A4 invoice, a single A4 sheet payment request fax form, and an A5 information slip on how to request an online payment. So, let’s pay online!

Send an email to their email address, with your name and invoice number
They reply confirming and asking you to watch for an email from the payment provider, and reminding you that you need to pay within the 3 days during which the link is active
The payment website is basic but functional and straightforward
It accepted my strange European debit card
Total cost in GBP £4.89

Conclusion

All in all a very useful service, fairly painless process, and one that I will no doubt use again in future!

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.

Japanese music recommendations

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For the past month or so Apple Music has been suggesting new music from Japan in my weekly “New Music” playlist. I’m not quite sure what flipped the bit in their recommendation engine, but I’m happy it did. If I had to guess I’d say it was the music I was listening to whilst finishing off Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate which has an excellent soundtrack by young Japanese musician Yuyake Monster.

It’s so great to receive tailored recommendations of music that I enjoy, and occasionally find so good it has me doing somersaults. I’m attempting to keep the most enjoyable from each week in playlists on my Apple Music profile, so feel free to check them out. There are a lot of artists featured and I only have time to explore those that make the biggest impression.

So, I’d like to mention a couple in particular:

Nathalie Wise

The track 何もない世界の果てに “A world of nothingness” was featured in the third week of recommendations and it immediately struck a chord with me thanks to its lush synthesisers, range of live instruments and the particular poetic style of vocal delivery. I immediately listened to the rest of the EP and it was all equally good.

A quick google later and it turns out that Nathalie Wise is the name of the band rather than an individual, and the EP was a taster for “Open Sky” their first album in 19 years! What a splash.

I figured if the band thought they still had something to say in 2023 then they must have really had something to say back in the day. So I listened to their 2004 album “raise hands high” and …it blew me away. Instant Super Fan!

The “Open Sky” album launched on the May 2023 Bandcamp Friday, and bandcamp is the only place you can get it digitally at this point. Sadly I wasn’t able to watch the live album launch event video stream as it required a Japanese credit card for payment, but I tried my best! I hope the band release the footage after the album launch period.

Masakatsu Takagi

Marginalia is an ongoing series of daily piano recordings made at Takagi’s private studio in the mountains of Hyogo, Japan. He opens all the windows, welcomes in the sounds of nature, and proceeds to play the piano without any further preparation. In these recordings there are no overdubs, no edits or fixes, everything is just …as it happened. I love this sort of passion project!

At the time of writing 130 recordings have been released since April 2017, making up a total of more than 11 hours of music spanning a handful of albums and dozens of singles. Everything is on bandcamp, and I’ve created a playlist of them all on my Apple Music profile.

Since my introduction was to some of his recent pieces, I’ve gone back to the beginning of the project and am listening to every piece in the series in chronological order. I’m only part way through at this point, but am enjoying it immensely.

F-MIN INFINITY an obscure Japanese sprite-scaler racing game

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 13 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is version 2.1 of F-MIN INFINITY, a sprite-scaler 2D/3D racing game by mpulip for Windows 95. You could describe it as Power Drift meets F-Zero.

The copy of its homepage in Wayback Machine was incomplete, as were direct links from an old feature on Vector, so it took a long time to find a copy of the .lzh archive file. Eventually I managed to locate it in an archive of an obscure old type of listing page on Vector.

To run the game correctly it’s best to use DxWnd, which will allow you to play the game on modern Windows with zero configuration, or even through Crossover/Wine and not use Windows at all.

The game includes help files as HTML, the ability create your own tracks, and source code. Let me know if you have more luck running it than I did!

Download at Internet Archive: archive.org/details/f-min-infinity-21

Thanks to my Patreon supporters!

一筆 / Hitofude / Ippitsu Japanese puzzle game

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

一筆 (“Hitofude” = Single Stroke) aka “Ippitsu” is a puzzle game by H.Hirabayashi.

Released in 1995, a decade before Mitchell Corp & Nintendo’s Polarium 直感ヒトフデ (“Chokkan Hitofude” = Intuitive Single Stroke) & Polarium Advance 通勤ヒトフデ (“Tsūkin Hitofude” = Commuting Single Stroke).

As huge fan of the Polarium games this discovery has rocked my world.

You can read about it in this 1997 feature at Vector and download it from its listing page. The author’s website is archived in the Wayback Machine. It will run on Windows 3.x and Windows 95, at least. I’m running here in English Windows 95 through DOSbox-x.

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:

Where can I see Hokusai’s Great Wave today?

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been obsessed with The Great Wave (or its more literal title: Under the Wave, Off Kanagawa) since the mid-1990s. This Japanese woodblock print designed by Katsushika Hokusai is one of the world’s most iconic works of art. You’ve probably seen it crop up in a whole host of scenarios.

The interesting thing about woodblock prints is that the original piece of art was destroyed during the act of mass production. In the case of The Great Wave, there are around 100 known, publicly viewable, early impressions that were made around the time Hokusai was alive. And there are very many impressions made after his death, not to mention modern prints that are not made using woodblocks.

The trick to seeing one of the early impressions is being in the right place at the right time, because they are sensitive to light and will fade with over-exposure. Most are stored away for several of years, make a brief appearance, and then go back into long-term storage.

These early impressions vary in their details, colours and condition, so it’s worthwhile seeing more than just one. I’ve been lucky enough with timing to get to see two different impressions: the first was at The British Museum back in the early 2000s, and the second at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in 2018. But in 2021 I missed seeing a different impression at The British Museum, one of three in their collection.

Missing a viewing made me think about all the impressions in galleries and museums around the world, and which of them might currently be viewable. So I made a list of known impressions, with thanks to Capucine Korenberg at The British Museum for a head start. I spent time digging up their respective pages across the various museum and gallery online collections, which was the most laborious part of this project. After that I set up some automation using Huginn to alert me when an impression is pulled out of storage and put “on view”. This doesn’t happen very often—every few months or so, if we’re lucky—so it’s a nice surprise when a notification pops up. I also monitor Japanese press releases and news websites. If there’s any interest I’ll write a separate blog post about the automation I put in place for this project.

Of course, there’s no fun in keeping this to myself so I put together a website containing the places where you can see The Great Wave today:

greatwavetoday.com

As well as checking the website you can also subscribe to its RSS feed, so you’ll also receive those lovely surprise notifications! Both the web page and RSS feed are automatically generated.

Thanks to Soleio for thinking of such a great domain name!

Final thoughts

Please do let me know if this project helps you see an early impression of Hokusai’s Great Wave.

If you’re a museum or gallery and would like to have your impression tracked, please click this link and follow the prompts.

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.

Macintosh Story: Sweet or Sour Apple?

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Macintosh Story “Sweet or Sour Apple?” (マッキントッシュ物語リンゴ甘いか酸っぱいか) is a comic strip drawn by Hitoshi Tanaka for the 1993-11-25 “MacBoy” issue of Japanese men’s lifestyle magazine POPEYE (widely known as the “Magazine for City Boys”).

The comic strip details the history of Apple and the Macintosh from 1970 through to 1993, and features a whole lot of history over its four pages:

reality-distorting Steve Jobs
angry Steve Wozniak
a strangely ginger-bearded Doug Engelbart
Xerox PARC
Dynabook-dreaming Alan Kay
Bill Gates in shorts
a strangely blonde Bill Atkinson
Pepsi-sipping John Sculley
hand-drawn renditions of the 1984 ad, MacPaint and HyperCard
the break-up
NeXT
Knowledge Navigator
DynaMac (a Macintosh 512K marketed by Canon in Japan)
successors to the Macintosh
Apple prototypes
Newton
and more

I scanned these images today from my copy of the original magazine.

Thanks to my patrons for making this possible. More patrons means more cool stuff can be preserved/released.

High-resolution scans are available to my patrons.

Hope you enjoy it.

Aquaplus P/ECE (vs Panic Playdate)

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The P/ECE was a Japan-only handheld/mobile gaming console released in late-2001. It was created by Aquaplus, a company better known for visual novels, so it carries with it a certain oddball charm. After 20 years I find it heart-warming to see that the official website is still online!

What is it?

An early preview of the P/ECE referred to the P/ECE as a portable game console though the water was somewhat muddied by the fact that one of the built in apps, Picket, was a PIM (Personal Information Manager). This means it was often referred to as a PDA. It has a d-pad, start and select buttons, and you can play games on it—that makes it a console in my eyes. But a console where each unit could be used as a development device by connecting it to a desktop computer.

Looking back at the P/ECE it was ahead of its time in many ways. To get a feel for what was going on when it came out:

the most popular phone manufacturers were Nokia and Sony Ericsson
the battle between the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast was ongoing
ICO was the latest PlayStation 2 game
Rez was the latest Dreamcast game
the iPod and Game Boy Advance had both just launched
YouTube and Facebook had yet to be created

…it really was a different era!

Discovery

I learned of the P/ECE several years ago when looking at the output of one of my favourite video game developers, Kuniake “kuni” Watanabe. He’s probably best known for Panekit, and open-world sandbox game on PlayStation. Though my favourite of his games is MaBoShi on Wii (and DS via download play) which is a razor sharp focussed set of three games that interact with each other in an innovative (and patented) way. I’d go so far as to say that Circle mode in MaBoShi is my favourite game concept of all time.

The same preview article I mentioned above also says “in terms of specs, (P/ECE) comes above the PocketStation and below the Game Boy” though I think that’s selling the P/ECE a little short. The CPU was quite fast and efficient for its time, and the fact that it had no specific graphics hardware meant that people had to get creative and optimise. Some of the results, seen below, would have been very tricky or impossible to achieve on the original Game Boy.

Over its short term of popularity the P/ECE platform had a vibrant homebrew scene and received ports or demakes of everything from Mitchell Corp’s masterpiece Polarium, through arcade gems like Flipull (aka Plotting), to console classics Panel de Pon (aka Tetris Attack) and more besides. It was home to proper Japanese RPGs and small arcade games and the number of games stretch into triple figures.

Selected Games by Kuniake Watanabe

Anyway! During his indie days, Kuni developed for a range of platforms and in a variety of languages and wrote several games for the P/ECE. Here are my favourites:

spout

A lunar lander style game where your thrust can destroy the scenery. Your task is to get as high as possible, though that is much easier said than done as the scenery becomes gradually more complex and time is always ticking away.

This is perhaps the most famous P/ECE game as it was released with source code for an SDL version and received ports to GP32 and related platforms. There’s a modern remake for iOS and Android by a different developer, though it keeps the same title.

edit: kuni’s game design notes

fencer

A snake type game where your head has momentum and your tail length depends on your speed, allowing fine and fluid movement. The goal is to avoid bombs and use your tail as a barrier that will destroy them. Chaining together multiple explosions is the key to high scores.

There was an official updated version for iOS, titled fencell, but it’s not longer on the App Store due to Apple removing all 32-bit games back in 2017. Yet the 20-year-old P/ECE version is still available for download. There’s a lesson for us all.

edit: kuni’s game design notes

interground

In this game you must use a rotating stick to push sand around in an attempt to bury the little people running on top of it. If the stick touches a moving enemy or you run out of time that means game over.

edit: kuni’s game design notes

Selected Games by Kenta Cho (ABA Games)

Whilst digging into P/ECE forgotten history, I also found several old games by Kenta Cho (then: Saba, now: ABA Games) who even today continues to crank out brilliant little games at an inspiring rate.

Barrage Reactor

A twin-stick shmup played with a d-pad and two buttons! The d-pad moves your ship around and the buttons rotate your aim as you fire automatically. Waves of enemies appear and a surprisingly tactical game ensues.

Speed Barricade

A 3D “Tron” light cycles game where the aim is to stay alive for as long as possible whilst outwitting an increasing number of computer controlled players. Quick reflexes are definitely needed for this one!

Re: W32/Badtrance

A 3D demake of Rez where the Microsoft Outlook(!) icon produces waves of enemies that need to be shot down as efficiently as possible by locking on to multiple enemies before firing your missiles. With the strap line “Gentlemen, open your Outlook. Go to Cyberterrorism.” maybe Kenta Cho was sick of email back in 2001?

If there’s enough interest I’ll feature more P/ECE games in a future blog post. Let me know on the comments link at the bottom of the page.

20 years later

Here we are in 2021 and Panic’s Playdate will soon be shipping. By now I’m sure you’ve spotted several similarities between the P/ECE and Playdate. The main one being that both devices offer immediate, unfettered access to developers wishing to make their own games, and those games can be side-loaded.

Of course, 20 years is a long time in technology so the Playdate has many improvements compared to what the P/ECE achieved in 2001. More storage, faster CPU, better connectivity, plus a bigger and better screen. Playdate offers cross-platform development using either C or Lua and, and you won’t need a device to develop for the platform. In contrast, P/ECE offered development only for Windows and only in C, plus you needed a device to test your code. A homebrew emulator was eventually released, which is what I’ve used for the screen recordings shown earlier.

Oh, and both devices have names that make web searches a bit tricky. 😅

Specifications Comparison

	Playdate	P/ECE
Manufacturer	Panic	Aquaplus
Release date	2021	2001
Battery (active)	8h	2h
Battery (standby)	2w	1w
Battery (type)	Rechargeable internal battery	1×AA
CPU (type)	STMicroelectronics STM32F746 (ARM Cortex-M7F)	EPSON S1C33209 (32-bit RISC)
CPU (speed)	180 MHz	24 Mhz
Storage (RAM)	16MB	256KB
Storage (Flash)	4GB (3.9GB usable)	512KB (348KB usable)
Device (colour)	Yellow	Silver
Device (dimensions)	76×74×9mm	101×65×17mm
Device (inputs)	D-pad, A, B, Menu, Sleep, Accelerometer, Crank	D-pad, A, B, Start, Select
Device (weight)	85g	92g
Data connection (wired)	USB-C to A	USB-B to A
Data connection (wireless)	Wi-Fi & Bluetooth	Infrared (IR)
Sound (type)	Software synthesis, Digital audio	Software synthesis
Sound (speaker)	Mono	Mono
Sound (headphone)	Stereo	Mono
Display (technology)	Sharp Memory LCD	FSTN LCD
Display (size)	59×35mm (2.7” diagonal)	45×31mm (2.15” diagonal)
Display (resolution)	400×240	128×88
Display (colours)	2 (1-bit)	4 (2-bit greyscale)
Display (rendering)	Software	Software
Software (bundled)	24	6
Software (SDK)	C & Lua	C
Launch price	$179 (¥19000)	¥11000 ($100)

Aquaplus P/ECE: Game Reviews Vol. 2

Interest-specific Search Engines

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favourite Google products is their Custom Search Engine (CSE) feature. It allows you to create walled-garden search engines that return results only for chosen selection of websites. This is ideal for creating interest-specific search engines.

These days they seem to be calling the feaure Google Programmable Search, though I’m not quite sure where the programmable aspect comes in? Back in 2006 the feature was introduced as Google Co-op, but whatever. I mention those only for SEO purposes! Cheeky.

I’ve been using CSEs for years to help with finding files related to my various hobby interests, mostly retro gaming and computing. Heck, for a few years a decade ago my way of downloading music files was through a CSE I called “one click wonder”. They work really well.

Given the nature of the web, and the fact that CSEs benefit from continued maintenance, a lot of mine have gradually withered away. But a few of them have survived the test of time.

Listed below are a handful of what I would consider are the most useful CSEs I’ve created, I won’t list the domains involved because the information would need to be updated over time, but you can try each one and use the top tabs to get a handle on exactly which sites are being indexed.

Classic Macintosh

Software and PDF books downloads for pre-OSX Macintosh systems.

bit.ly/searchclassicmac

PalmOS

Software downloads for PalmOS-based devices.

bit.ly/searchpalmos

Japanese Software

Software downloads for vintage systems: Windows, Macintosh, Sharp X68000, PC-98, Palm, etc.

bit.ly/searchjapansoft

ROM Finder

Classic/retro video game ROMs, ISOs, disc images.

bit.ly/searchroms

Manuals

Consumer Electronics operation manual or user guide PDFs.

bit.ly/searchmanuals

Ace Answers

Vintage FAQs and repair guides for the Toyota TownAce and Space Cruiser vehicles.

bit.ly/searchaceanswers

Asanegami (Morning Hair)

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Second in my series 1-bit Woodblocks.

I’ve just finished “Asanegami” (Morning Hair) so I thought I’d go into a few of my favourite details!

eyes
eyebrows
background
lips
comb/history

I spent a long time adding and refining eye details, my reasoning being that these are the first thing you look at.

Also I went without “blusher” skin tone shading around the eyes, the amount of which varies depending on which impression of the original you’re looking at.

The eyebrows were quite tricky, I tried layering multiple dither patterns but was never happy with how they looked. In the end I cheated by copying sections from the shadowy area lower down the image that had just the right gradient! Everything is a remix.

The original background is quite busy. I tried being faithful to it but I was never happy with how it looked. Too noisy.

So I used one of my own “noise” dithered patterns. I’m quite proud of these patterns and wonder if they are unique? They strike a good balance of order/chaos.

On most impressions of Morning Hair the lips are a graduated pink fade, so I spent a while finding two complementary dither patterns that would give the same effect. Getting the exact shape of the lips was the moment I realised I was on the home straight with this drawing.

In 1930 authorities considered “Morning Hair” too provocative and banned it under the Peace Preservation Law. Seventy of its hundred copies had sold and the remaining thirty were destroyed. 😱

I thought it would be a fun modern twist to replace the comb with an iPhone showing Instagram!

As always I used a mix of old and new technology to create this piece.

Old: UltraPaint on Macintosh System 7.1 New: Macintosh emulator on iPad Pro 12.9”

My interpretation of Torii Kotondo’s “Morning Hair” will be available to purchase as print “1-bit Woodblock: Asanegami” very soon.

Kamisuki (Woman Combing her Hair)

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Woman Combing her Hair (Portrait of Kodaira Tomi) original by Hashiguchi Goyô, 1920. This work-in-progress by me, 2020–date. First in my 1-bit Woodblocks series.

My process involves both modern software (custom image processing tool & custom build of a Macintosh emulator) and old technology (1992 Macintosh Classic & period Wacom ArtPad II tablet, Deneba UltraPaint, Dave Theurer’s DeBabelizer) it’s such a zen experience.

This piece will be for sale as a print very soon.

A little more about the back story of this piece. I was inspired by @SusanKare’s interpretation of Goyo’s “Woman Combing her Hair” drawn on the original Macintosh, featured as part of its launch, and later on the MacPaint packaging.

Band-kun バンドくん musician simulator (1990, KOEI)

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing an old (1990, KOEI Co Ltd) Japanese NEC PC-9801 game バンドくん [Band-kun; Mr. Band; Band Man] where you start a band and have to recruit members, make some recordings and live a life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. It was also available for the Fujitsu FM Towns and Sharp X68000 Japanese personal computers.

Band-what?

Band-kun is a hybrid simulation/adventure/rhythm game. You explore a fictional city taking to various inhabitants, learning about the music and the music industry, recruiting band members and performing and recording music. You perform the music using mouse gestures, so it’s possible to ad-lib and receive better/worse results a little like playing a musical instrument. After recording you need mix the song in a studio, then get your friend Bob Marley to sell your CDs on the street corner, or figure out how to get the music played on the local radio station which is, of course, broadcasting from a zeppelin riding high above the city.

You need to work dead-end jobs to pay your way, and repeat the recording/gigging process to work your way up through soul-destroying small club gigs to a big arena gig, and allegedly you can even die from the excess partying.

Playdate version?

It’s originally B&W so I figured it would look great on Playdate, so I made a little proof of concept.

Band-kun required a MIDI-capable sound card PLUS an external MIDI sound module - a very expensive 30,000JPY piece of equipment back in 1990. So it wasn’t a success and was forgotten about. But it eventually led to Guitaroo Man and the birth of the music game genre on PlayStation.

Anyway! I’d love to licence Band-kun and re-release it on a modern device that can do the original concept justice. The Playdate crank and accelerometer could be used to perform the music!

I wondered if anybody knows KOEI founder Youichi Erikawa (aka “Kou Shibusawa”)? Hook a brother up! バンドを組んでメンバーを集め、レコーディングをして、セックスとドラッグとロックンロールの生活を送るという昔（1990年、KOEI）のPC-9801のゲーム「バンドくん」をプレイしています。@koeitecmogames からライセンスしたいので、襟川陽一に協力をお願いします。

Edit: since I originally wrote this twitter thread and blog post, contact has been made with KOEI’s licensing department. 🤞

Period reviews

Detailed review from the 1991-01 issue of #マイコンBASIC micomBASIC

Courtesy of a scan at Internet Archive.

Super Soft Hot Information: Band-kun #バンドくん in #micomBASIC1990/12

Courtesy of a scan at Internet Archive.

“SLG in which you form a band, gain experience through practice and live house performances, and aim to win a contest. After winning, the game turns into a highly flexible session software. MIDI compatible.”

Review of Band-kun #バンドくん in Technopolis #テクノポリス 1991/01

Courtesy of a scan at Internet Archive.

“We borrowed a studio and practiced hard with our friends to win the contest. Hone your skills!”

“In the city, you’ll try to win a fight against a band member. It’s hard to get them to play with you at first.”

Translation (WIP)

I’ve been poking around in the Band-kun game files.

Everything is stored uncompressed in very simple structures across a few files. I’ve not figured them all out, yet, but can see graphics (done), dialogue (partial), music (to-do). Band-kun ships with Scenario 1 “ZAP CITY 1991” and is able to play additional scenarios, but none were released.

Regardless: it should be easy to create a translated version of the included scenario. And maybe even create a new scenario (varying difficulty depending on changes).

User Manual

A scanned PDF for Band-kun #バンドくん is available with thanks to the Neo Kobe project archive.org/details/band-kun-manual

Promotional leaflet

Download the game

Get the disk image at Internet Arcchive for PC-9801 or FM-Towns

All the faces

Here are all 120 “famous” faces, extracted from PC-9801 Band-kun, thanks to @fukui_keeekn on Twitter.

Birthday blog post?

Check out my other #birthday blog posts.

デイリードライバー

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The last couple of months have been tough going for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, a new version of the Playdate SDK broke my game in a couple of important ways: my method of targeting 60fps stopped working, and more seriously the controls stopped working. The workaround for both of these issues was long and drawn out, but here’s a quick summary:

Until this point I was waiting for the next frame update using the SDK wait() function: one line of code that waits for a required amount of time. A change in how this works meant I was stuck. My workaround was do it in a more naïve way - just constantly checking the system timestamp to see if the allowed time for the current frame has passed. Keep it simple, I guess.

The overhead of idling the CPU—the time it takes for it to wind down, do the wait, and then wind back up—is actually quite substantial when it takes a few milliseconds and you only have sixteen of them for each update!

The end result is that the game is now running… better than ever. Even after these issues were resolved at a higher level by the Playdate SDK team, I have kept using my workarounds as the game runs faster. So, silver linings and all that!

Secondly, an important issue that remains unresolved is exactly how—and when—Daily Driver will be released. I’m hopeful that will be as part of a Playdate Season, where games are delivered to the device on a schedule and you don’t know what game you’ll be playing until you see the light flash and you pick up and wake up your device. That’s the magic I want my players to have a piece of. That might turn out to be later rather than sooner, so we’ll have to be patient.

Anyway, other news: I’ve been trying to decide how to render the name of the game in Japanese. The English title uses Futura Bold Oblique which is a style that does not translate directly into non-Roman typefaces. I had found some bold Japanese fonts, with a little bit of character, but they seemed too cute and not geometric enough. After much investigation and many mockups I opted to draw the necessary katakana characters by hand, on a grid, and it’s turned out rather well. I’d love to expand this into a full typeface, but that’s a project for another time.

Doing this sort of graphics work, or car design/rendering, are my goto procrastination tasks when I don’t have enough mojo to dive into the code and tackle the remaining work. So I’m sort of treading water on the final push of work needed to get the game over the line.

My “Bubble Era” T-shirt Store

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

I’m relaunching my “bubble era” T-shirt store on @teespring with international shipping in time for Christmas! teespring.com/stores/gingerbeardman

Retro games, computers, scooters and other cool logos on your favourite colour T-shirts!

These T-shirts have been a side-project of mine for many years—I redraw old logos as vector art, just for kicks! The oldest designs—CHOP and SPRINT—date back over 15 years to the time when I realised how easy it was to get T-shirts printed

Every so often I pick a design out of my folder of ideas and draw it up as vectors. I find the process of redrawing shapes with “good paths” quite relaxing and therapeutic, kind of like an open-ended puzzle game. (glyphsapp.com/learn/drawing-…)

Hachisuke (ハチ助 in Japan; Hu-bee in USA) was the mascot of HUDSON SOFT. Apparently a mixture of bee and mouse or cat! Sometimes referred to as “a fanciful depiction of a bee”. After seeing this vintage T-shirt I set about redrawing it using old photo ref

The main outlines of Hachisuke were easy enough to draw, but the halftone dots on the hat took some thinking. Eventually I achieved the effect using a series of dotted lines. And I found a bug in @affinitybyserif Designer whilst doing it! (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

One of my other favourite logos is for an old game called BILLIARDS which features a balloon style typeface. At this time magazine layout and graphic design was likely to have been done using phototypesetting rather than using computer. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

DENGEKI G’s ENGINE magazine evolved from covering just the PC-Engine and games by NEC, to a broader range of games. The G in the title refers to Gals and Games which means there is often a broad range of content in the magazine, if you get what I mean. 🍑 (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

HIPPON SUPER! magazine was known for having a different tone than its main competitors, such as (Weekly) Famitsu and GAMEST. It had a whole bunch of logos over its lifetime, but I think the first one is by far the best. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

As much as I enjoy figuring out the best paths to represent a shape that was probably originally drawn/cut by hand, I’m happy to take some short cuts at times. Here on MSX・FAN I use two rectangles to cut into neighbouring shapes when I should have just used thick strokes

The “Oh!” series of home cpmouter magazines are some of my favourites, and each of them (there are dozens!) had wonderful logos. I redrew a handful of them in black and white so they work on dark or light coloured T-shirts. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Oh! MZ is probably my favourite of the bunch, featuring amazing cover art including Syd Mead’s Blade Runner concept art for no reason other than it looked cool.

The Sharp MZ-series of computers couldn’t do bitmap graphics so everything had to be done using the character set, which lead to this genius set of Hanafuda cards:

Oh! HIT BIT is a magazine specific to Sony’s line of MSX computers and was a real joy to redraw as it’s geometric nature allowed me to use a grid! I LOVE GRIDS. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Speaking of grids, there’s a cool app for macOS called KARO GRAPH which is a “graph paper” vector drawing tool with always-on grid and snapping to encourage structured drawing. I really dig it; you might too: (apps.apple.com/gb/app/karo-gr…)

This next logo, for PASOCON SUNDAY, was spotted in a YouTube video of an old PC-focussed TV show. After spotting it there I managed to find higher resolution versions of it in Japanese magazines from the same era: (youtu.be/Bwpsbg6j0DI?t=…)

I should mention the custom type old Japanese video game magazines used to headline articles about various games. SO COOL. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Articles often contained custom illustrations. I chose to take them out of their original context and surroundings and place them as large as possible on the front of a T-shirt. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Another love of mine are “bubble era” Japanese vehicles, from crazy vans with skylite roofs to cute scooters. All of which seem to have the coolest names. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

If you’re into those check out my collection of old Honda scooter brochures: (flickr.com/photos/emsef/s…)

Moving from Japan to USA @scottekim has kindly given me permission to reproduce some T-shirts he designed in the 80s for CGDC (Computer Games Developer Conference, which became GDC after they realised games are also on consoles) and HACKERS’ CONFERENCE (as worn by @AndyHertzfeld)

Back in the UK 80s music TV series “The Tube” had a logo that was actually a neon tube light. Drawing this was similar to the previous BILLIARDS logo, but its more freeform nature actually made it more difficult! (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

UNITS “digital stimulation” is the album cover for the 1980 release but I added to the bottom of the design to make it look better on a T-shirt. The original artwork was created with strips of translucent plastic and the print on the T has the same effect! (discogs.com/Units-Digital-…)

Japanese Windows 98 SE (VMWare)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently created this Virtual Machine of Windows 98 SE (Japanese) because one did not exist. Download should be on winworldpc.com soon, but you can grab it now at: archive.org/details/windows-98-se-japanese-vmware

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

Hanafuda by ZAT SOFT

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

These beautiful cards were created in 1983 using only characters, without bitmap graphics. This was because the Sharp MZ-700, like many home computers of its era, couldn’t do bitmap graphics.

Here is a download of the Playscii art files for the above cards: Sharp MZ-700 Hanafuda.zip

Also included are a set of blank cards so you can try creating something yourself.

I encourage you to at least try as you’ll encounter some of the genius design decisions made by the original creator!

“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!

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.

Hanafuda Discord

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I created a Discord server for discussion of traditional Japanese flower cards.

discord.com/invite/mKbdwy9

Door Door redrawn

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I redrew the box art from Door Door (1985, Famicom). It’s a great game and worthy of your time.

Door Door was designed by Koichi Nakamura, known as one of the creators of Dragon Quest. The game was the runner-up in the Enix-sponsored “First Game and Hobby Program Contest” in 1982, winning the “Outstanding Program Award” with a prize of 500,000 yen. Enix was given the rights to the game and ported the game to several Japanese home computers.

Out of all the versions I think the Famicom one plays best, even though it has an annoying squeaky walking sound. I just lower or mute the audio.

Affinity Designer is my tool of choice for doing most of my vector illustration work. Below are the vector outlines for the above drawing. As you can see I like to keep things fairly minimal! Lots of gradients were used, and the noise function to give things a bit of texture.

The coloured image was originally posted on my Dribbble account, but the outline image is new for this blog post. I hope you like it!

Polarium Advance: Daily Puzzle Challenge

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I started a new job at Apple in June 2013, and seeing as I was living away from home a fair bit I had a bit of free time and the hunger for a big puzzle game to get my teeth into. So I bought an extra copy of Polarium Advance. I’d played the game before but had never finished all of the puzzles.

It’s a typically brilliant game by Mitchell Corporation which was in development for Game Boy Advance when Nintendo saw it and requested a version for their new handheld: the Nintendo DS. After that version was released the team returned to the GBA version, which probably explains why it’s a more fully featured and all round better game than the DS version.

The game’s Daily Puzzle mode has 365 puzzles and I started playing them on 8th August 2013. I made quick progress: by 13th August I’d done 87 puzzles and after a week I’d done more than one hundred. The half way point of puzzles was reached within two weeks! Things slowed down during September as the puzzles became more difficult.

I’m writing this looking back and the first mention of finishing it by New Year was on 11th October 2013. But I have to think I’d considered before that point.

Anyway, it was a bit of a squeeze in between Christmas and New Year but I managed it!

You can download CSV data of my progress.