Get Info: #pc98

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. ⛳️🏌️‍♂️

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

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.