Get Info: #preservation

Shark Turtle: a modern version of SameGame/MaciGame

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:44:00 +0000

I’m releasing an expanded version of my game Shark Turtle for macOS and Windows. Grab it at itch: gingerbeardman.itch.io/shark-turtle-desktop/

The result is a feature-rich, native desktop version of SameGame with fast calculation, animated block removal, mouse/keyboard control, incremental scoring, variable grid sizes each with their own high score table, multi-level undo, lots of options, and great music. It’s a lot of fun and ideal to play little-by-little when you have a spare moment, as you dictate the pace of the game turn-by-turn.

About the icon

I couldn’t find the exact licence for Google’s Emoji Kitchen, it’s either SIL as part of the Noto font or CC BY 4.0. But I did find a comment by a Google staffer saying that it would be a good idea to draw a custom version that was less generic—I read that as unique and yours—so that’s exactly what I did. There was no choice but to do this, as I needed a vector version to generate an 1024×1024px icon. I like to think that with the raised eyebrow and slight smirk there’s a bit more personality in my version.

What’s in a name?

This concept was originally released as Chain Shot! in 1985 by 森辺訓章 Kuniaki Moribe “Morisuke” and went on to become very popular, mostly through a version known as さめがめ SameGame. The game was at one time more popular than Tetris in Japan and even made its way onto consoles like the Super Famicom and even as recent as Wii.

In English we pronounce the name as it is spelled: same game. But in Japanese it sounds just like the words “same” さめ (shark) and “game” がめ (sea turtle). A short leap from SameGame to Shark Turtle.

Perhaps the most well known version of the concept, MaciGame まきがめ also riffed on this. I’m not sure of the exact meaning, but I like to think it’s a clever double meaning of something cool in Japanese and it also being a game for Macintosh.

Recovering tile sets

I’d previously recovered a range of tile sets for a download pack I uploaded to Macintosh Garden, but that was done in the Classic Macintosh environment so I needed to redo it on modern macOS to be able to extract the images easily.

MaciGame supported custom tile sets in three formats:

SameGameFormat (160×64, from the PC-98 version of the game)
SameGameFormat2 (192×64, includes additional background tiles)
MaruSameFormat (256×65, includes connected variations and alternate palettes)

These tile sets were popular user created content for 1990s Macintosh fans, given how easy it was to load up a paint app or ResEdit. They were made available for free download at online repositories like NIFTY-Serve, Info-Mac, and on magazine cover mounted media around the world. I found several unique tile sets in my Macintosh Magazine Media archive of vintage CD-ROMs.

The main online source of these is at: vector.co.jp/vpack/filearea/osx/game/puzzle/makigame/ and I automated the clicking of the download buttons using a temporary user script (gist) to redirect to the download page and then click the button. I use PageExtender for such things. I could have gone one level deeper by automating the clicking of all the items on the list page, but I quite like clicking through long lists.

user script at gist.github.com

We can expand these esoteric archives with The Unarchiver. I needed to confirm MacOS Japanese encoding for the filenames that it was unable to heuristically determine. Read more about the madness of classic Macintosh text encodings in the pre-Unicode age.

Next we can convert the PICT resources we’re after with deark. Deark doesn’t have a recursive mode, so we need to wrap it in a one-liner:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} deark {} -k -od /destination/

I verified those and found some others using DiscMaster. A few stranglers found on the web brought the grand total to 320 tile sets.

De-duplicating

It was obvious that there were some duplicates, so what to do? My first thought was to optimise all images equally, I used ect command line tool for this purpose. After that, still on the command line, we can do a quick de-dupe using the fdupes tool. This helped me get rid of a bunch, but there were still some hanging around.

I wanted to compare files at a pixel level, so wrapped imagemagick in a shell script (gist). We compare each image with every other image. I tried adding pre-checks to the script but they slowed it down and removed the ability for it to run in parallel. Keep it simple wins again.

shell script at gist.github.com

Organising

For organisation sake I wanted to verify and categorise the dimensions of each image. I created a shell script to tag images of specific sizes with Finder colours (gist). I noticed that some converted images were one pixel wider than expected, it turns out that this is a quirk in how those specific image were composed. So I coloured them red and edited them by hand after the fact.

shell script at gist.github.com

All tile sets

Here’s a video of my 5 tile sets plus the 320 classic user created tile sets. Gotta catch ‘em all!

Playdate

I originally wrote a version of Shark Turtle for Playdate back in 2023 and released it earlier this month. The desktop version of the game is expanded and enhanced in the way that desktop apps can be. Those features took a bunch more work and I’ve undoubtedly been working on the platform specific stuff far more than I did on the core of the game.

Buyers of the Shark Turtle for Playdate get the desktop version for free! Head to this bundle.

Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons (1994)

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

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

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

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

Play it in your browser

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

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

Introduction

In Japanese, it says:

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

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

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

Translated into English:

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

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

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

Macintosh Magazine Media: 1 million files

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

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

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

Many thanks to my Patreon subscribers for their support!

Status report

The archive as it stands (updated March 2025):

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

New discs

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

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

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

The process

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

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

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

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

Searching the collection

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

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

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

Interesting finds

Digging up the past with DiscMaster

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

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

Automated Searching

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

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

Class of ’93

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

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

Chaos Calc 2

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

Wire Hang Redux

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

FAQs

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

Some new old posts you might find interesting

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

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

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

Macintosh Magazine Media: search engine update

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

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

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

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

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

Try the search here: gingerbeardman.com/mmm/

PSA: Internet Archive “glitch” deletes years of user data & accounts

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:16:00 +0000

Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman since 2015.

Somewhat surprisingly, they are not reaching out to affected users but rather waiting for them to create new accounts and silently relinking their old uploads only if the new account has same email as the old account. Otherwise, all profile metadata, favourites, lists, reviews, posts, collections, web archives, and the original username are not being relinked. For me that’s a decade of data…gone.

The main impact of this massive data loss, that happened around mid-July, is that there are now dead links to old profiles and various old pages all across the internet, plus the additional impact of lost data that is not being recovered. It’s a real blow to the broader preservation effort to know that the one place where data is supposed to be safe forever has had a massive data loss and the organisation responsible are not taking proactive steps to address the issue fully. I can appreciate addressing it will require a certain amount of time, energy, staff and that’s likely the reason why it’s not being.

The extent of the data loss and how many accounts were affected is currently unknown. And because they’re not really talking about it, it’s quite difficult to find any concrete information as to the extent or cause of the data loss. You can find more info at the Internet Archive forums, the /r/internetarchive subreddit, or your choice of social media where Internet Archive have a presence (Twitter: ref1, ref2).

This story is still developing, and the press have been notified.

Status

Here’s a summary of the current status of the pages related to my deleted account:

Relinked

archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman/uploads

Restored (see update below)

Lost

archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman/loans
archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman/lists
archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman/posts
archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman/reviews
archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman/collections
archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman/web-archive

Support, up to a point

My support experience with Internet Archive was frustrating and ultimately futile. They did not adequately address my queries and requests. Instead they made changes to my account that I did not request, and in the end were pretty clear that they were not going to help me any further. This is such a disappointing stance to take with users who are simply trying to recover their data as a result of loss caused by Internet Archive itself.

Update, about turn

After the second submission of this post by somebody else hit the Hacker News homepage I received an email say that they had “figured a workaround” (their choice of word) and restored my username, which in turn relinked my old favorites. This miracle contradicts the message shown above there they are pretty clear that it was not possible.

So this means there’s still a bunch of data missing, as detailed above. I suspect this was a one off workaround and that they’re not doing it for everybody affected. YMMV. It wasn’t my intention to try and force action by publicising this event, but it does seem to have had that effect.

Elsewhere

Hacker News
Hacker News submitted by somebody else (“flagged” for some reason)
~~Lobste.rs~~ (deleted by moderator at the request of Internet Archive)
Tildes
Two Stop Bits

The Blue Nile “A Walk Across The Rooftops” (5.1)

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

1984

In early 1984 Scottish band The Blue Nile released their debut album “A Walk Across The Rooftops” including the single Tinseltown in the Rain. After 40 years the album is still regarded as a classic, and in all that time the band have released only three other albums.

2010

A user called XTC343 uploaded some files to a USENET newsgroup: a fan-made multi-channel version of The Blue Nile’s “A Walk Across The Rooftops” album. The .nfo file said only:

This is an upmix from stereo to 5.1
Done in Plogue.

I was so excited to listen to one of my favourite albums in a new way. I burned the DTS format 5.1 .wav and .cue pair to a CD and played it in a Sony Blu-Ray player. It was awesome! The album sounded more like a live session, with instruments and noises positioned all around.

2023

Anyway, lots of time passed, and one day in September 2023 I rediscovered these files in my archives. A quick Google showed that they had been forgotten about and did not exist anywhere else, so I thought I’d upload them to Internet Archive. I didn’t give it any further thought.

2024

It’s now February 2024 and I realise that I have a whole bunch of devices capable of playing multi-channel audio: my iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and AirPods Pro headphones! Time to revisit those files.

Wrangling

Immediately it was easy to confirm playback using the original DTS format .wav and VLC app on macOS. But how to get the audio into the Music app so I can listen on my device of choice?

XLD and the .cue sheet to split the single DTS format .wav into multiple files
FFMPEG to convert the DTS format .wav files into AC3 format .m4a files

Using a video container for audio content is a trick normally reserved for podcasts, so they can have chapter markers, but here it enables us to get multi-channel content into Music app (aka iTunes).

Playback

You’ll need some multi-channel capable listening equipment.

For the DTS .wav you can either burn it to a CD and play it in a suitable CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/etc player, or play the file directly using software (VLC).

For the Apple .m4a files you can drop them onto the Music app or copy across your devices.

I’m sorry but I cannot help you with any of this.

Have fun listening!

Download

archive.org/details/the-blue-nile-a-walk-across-the-rooftops-dts-5.1

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.

“The Famous F40” vector illustration by David Rumfelt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time travel

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

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

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

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

Scrollable 20-megapixel version

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

Notes

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

Downloads

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

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.

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:

Working with classic Macintosh text encodings in the age of Unicode

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

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

The Relentless March of Progress

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

Before Unicode

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

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

Opening Pandora’s Box

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

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

DIY

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

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

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

HFSExplorer

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

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

Aside: out-of-range characters

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

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

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

hfsutils

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

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

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

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

ScummVM

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

Tickle

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

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

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

…so much effort to arrive at this simple solution!

convert2unicode

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

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

Let there be search

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

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

Future

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

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

I’m preserving vintage Macintosh magazine media

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

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

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

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

Archive status report

The archive as it stands (updated March 2025):

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

Notable finds so far

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

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

Thanks for being on this journey with me!

Playing Old Llamasoft iPhone & iPad games

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

Back in 2017 a large number of games and apps were rendered obsolete when iOS 11 removed 32-bit compatibility: the appocalypse. At that time I was still downloading apps into iTunes as backups, and seem to have put aside some of these great Llamasoft games—Gridrunner and Minotron: 2112. What foresight!

Since then, with the help of others, I’ve tracked down the rest, and we now have all nine games of the Minotaur Project — Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin’s run of iOS games — preserved and available.

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

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

#	Game Archive	Genre	Release date	Web
1	Minotaur Rescue	Twin-stick shooter	2011-01-05	website
2	Minotron: 2112	Twin-stick shooter	2011-02-23	website
3	Deflex	Action puzzle	2011-07-08	website
4	Goat Up	Platformer	2011-09-06	website
5	Caverns of Minos	Cave shooter	2012-01-19	website
6	Gridrunner	Shoot ‘em up	2012-02-17	website
7	Five a Day	Multidirectional shooter	2012-04-02	website
8	Super Ox Wars	Vertical shoot ‘em up	2012-06-24	website
9	Goat Up 2	Platformer	2013-03-06	website

Most games work on iPhone, iPod touch & iPad. Some game pages also include beta PC versions.

Edit, 2021-09-13: I’ve added a decrypted version of Minotron: 2112 that should be easier to install on a jailbroken device.

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

Edit, 2026-07-03: updated the blog post to reference all the games in the Minotaur Project, and added their release dates.

Samurai Mech

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

I’ve been digging up old Macintosh games, and this search has resulted in the website for the classic Japanese game Samurai Mech coming back online after over a decade! Thanks Ritsuko! See: patreon.com/posts/48174477

Samurai Mech サムライ・メック is a Japanese sci-fi RPGs set in a future-medieval-space Japan. You assume the role of the eponymous Samurai Mech over the course of 40h of exploration/battle/puzzle gameplay.

You can practice your swordsmanship at the dojo, and upgrade your Samurai Mech suit with parts obtained through winning battles. The first game has a whole city to explore whilst you solve a mystery involving a group of ninjas.

Here is Samurai Mech running on my 1992 Macintosh Classic, using System 7.1.0 with Japanese Language Kit installed.

In the sequel Samurai Mech II: Heaven サムライ・メックII・天 you are a bounty hunter in an archipelago colony at the edge of the universe. The setting includes an ancient castle, an amusement park, an adult ballroom, and a giant corporation. An all new scenario, more freedom, improved mech system, improved combat, and a choice of colour or mono graphics!

Staff

Samurai Mech

Yukito Morikawa (森川幸人)
Shūji Nomaguchi (野間口修二)

Star Odyssey
Jumping Flash series
Astronōka

Akihiko Miura (三浦明彦)

Otocky
Bombliss
Pokémon series

Minoru Mukaiya (向谷実)

Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2/3
Samurai Warriors 2

Samurai Mech II adds the following notable Staff:

Hitomi Amakawa (天川ひとみ)
Shigenori Miyamoto (宮本茂則)

Jumping Flash series
Astronōka

1992: Samurai Mech (HuLINKS)
1994: Samurai Mech II: Heaven (HuLINKS)
1994: Geograph Seal (EXACT)
1995: Jumping Flash! (EXACT)
1996: Jumping Flash! 2 (EXACT, MuuMuu Co Ltd)
1997: Ghost in the Shell (EXACT, Production I.G.)
1999: Pocket MuuMuu (Sugar & Rockets)
1999: Robbit Mon Dieu (Sugar & Rockets)

SkateBoarder Magazine

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

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

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

EPOCH Instruction Manuals

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A recent friendly nudge from Jason Scott at the Internet Archive let me know that somebody had lost their manual for their 1981 Epoch Cassette Vision and tweeted EPOCH to see if they could help. But EPOCH did more than that, spending time to scan and upload manuals for all of their vintage consoles!

Mirroring these at Internet Archive was a nice bite-sized task to help burn off some of the Christmas fat and get things moving again over here. I went about it as follows (high level information only, comment or @ me on twitter if you’d like to know more):

Download all PDFs locally using jDownloader (total=240)
Copy titles from Japanese listing, store in a file
DeepL translate Japanese titles to English, store in a second file
Write shell script to loop through filenames and collate titles etc into CSV ready for batch upload
Check CSV for errors and fix (there were mistakes in the original Japanese titles and/or DeepL translation)
Test batch upload using a single file, tweak script
Do the full batch upload using ia CLI tool
Confirm any failures, fix and reprocess those in a second pass

My script ended up like this:

After the first pass there were only a few errors: 2 corrupt PDFs that needed to be uploaded manually, 2 duplicate identifiers that I had failed to spot looking through the translations, and 1 identifier that had trailing spaces that I had missed during my finessing of the titles. Pretty good going, though!

They’re now accessible at: archive.org/search.php?query=identifier%3Aepoch-manual%2A

Have fun & stay safe!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

Atari ST: Music Software Manuals

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

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

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

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

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

Cubeat 2.0 Disk (720kb)

The BeOS Bible

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

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

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

Searching for: The Claque Beignet

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

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

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

1. Searching with Limited Knowledge

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

2. Obtaining the Game

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

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

3. Decompiling the SWF

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

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

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

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

4. Searching with Learned Knowledge

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

“The Claque Beignet” 2000

Halfway down the first page of results:

Bingo!

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

And there we have it. C’est ça!

Music: T&E SOFT “New 3D Golf Simulation” games

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge fan of the music in T&E SOFT’s “New 3D Golf Simulation” series, so I have spent some time to digitise the music from those games in the series I did not have in my music library. That makes 13 new soundtracks!

Devil’s Course (PC-98, 3DO)
Eight Lakes G.C. (PC-98, X68000)
Harukanaru Augusta (PC-98, X68000)
Harukanaru Augusta HD (PC-98)
Masters: Harukanaru Augusta 2 (PC-98)
Masters: Harukanaru Augusta 3 (3DO)
Pebble Beach no Hatou (3DO)
T&E Selection (PC-98)
Waialae no Kiseki (PC-98 + 3DO)

For PC-98 and X68000 I used a Windows app called HOOT to play back the “chip” music and export it as WAV, then I trimmed any loops and added fades, then finally converted to FLAC and MP3.

For 3DO I extracted the filesystem from CD-ROM ISOs, then converted files containing audio into WAV and then FLAC. For AIFF/AIFC files I converted using command line ffmpeg, and for Stream files I used ZStream CHUNKS Reader (version 0.96).

www.mediafire.com/folder/tcm6u1rhz1xsy/vgm

They should make it on to the Video Game Music website soon, but they are available first here. Enjoy!

Iwata Asks Downloader

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

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

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

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

Redumping Discs

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Redump is a Disc Preservation Project that requires multiple verified dumps of the same game disc before it is marked as good. It’s a worthy endeavour that secures the future for disc-based games. Their data is public and downloadable, and I’ve heard that the game data is available at archive.org.

To get involved with such dumping and verification, you’ll need:

a compatible disc drive/reader (mine is a Plextor PX-716UF)
some free/open-source software (and a Windows install)
time (most discs take a quite a few minutes)

I started out dumping my rarest discs, some titles for the ill-fated NUON system. More recently I’ve been dumping my collection of obscure Japanese PS1 games, amongst others.

You can check out my dumps so far at redump.org/discs/dumper/gingerbeardman/

Recovered: Forgotten SEGA Exclusives on Palm OS

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my ongoing efforts to uncover lost gems from Japan, I recovered two exclusive games made by SEGA in their brief flirtation with Palm OS back in 2002. These games were presented by their Smilebit division at PalmSource Japan Forum 2002. This was around the time SEGA were abandoning consoles and Palm OS seems to have been part of an effort to figure out “what next?”.

My journey to these games started with the my purchase of a GC10 game controller adapter and playing its bundled games, one of which featured an old website URL. I then fell deep down the archive.org rabbit hole and managed to find mention of the two games—one had screenshots but neither had downloads—on an old SEGA website. From here I managed to find the PRC files in a set of just over 100 on chip.de, a German computer magazine and software download website, the only place they still resided and where they had been long forgotten for decades. Finally, I used the Mu Palm emulator and my Sony CLIÉ SJ22 to try them out and take some screen grabs!

Triangle Magic トライアングルマジック

Use the stylus to position triangles on a grid, the aim is to deflect a ball to the goal and collect coins on the way.

This one feels quite familiar today, I can remember several games with a similar concept. Edit: Sega’s 1990 arcade game Borench features a very similar concept.

Borkov ボルコフ

Use the hardware buttons, or stylus, to make an overweight red-haired man eat chunks of chocolate to match the goal shape.

It’s reminiscent of COMPILE’s 2001 GBA game Guru Logi Champ, in that you rotate the play field and shoot/suck blocks from the middle. Pretty cool.

Columns for CLIÉ

The only commercial result from this particular period at SEGA was a version of Columns bundled only with a game controller accessory for Sony’s CLIÉ range of Palm OS “personal entertainment organisers”.

Download

You can grab Borkov and Triangle Magic at palmdb.net/?s=sega

Columns for CLIÉ can be found in the All Games or GC10 downloads at sonyclie.org/drivers.html

Get Info: #preservation

Shark Turtle: a modern version of SameGame/MaciGame

About the icon

What’s in a name?

Recovering tile sets

De-duplicating

Organising

All tile sets

Playdate

Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons (1994)

Play it in your browser

Introduction

Macintosh Magazine Media: 1 million files

Status report

New discs

The process

Searching the collection

Interesting finds

Further reading

Digging up the past with DiscMaster

Automated Searching

Class of ’93

Chaos Calc 2

Wire Hang Redux

FAQs

Some new old posts you might find interesting

Macintosh Magazine Media: search engine update

PSA: Internet Archive “glitch” deletes years of user data & accounts

Status

Support, up to a point

Update, about turn

Elsewhere

The Blue Nile “A Walk Across The Rooftops” (5.1)

1984

2010

2023

2024

Wrangling

Playback

Download

Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator (1997)

Down the rabbit hole

Research first

CALEID GET!

Installation

Syncing

Add-ins

Game on!

CASIO Catalog ‘97-12

Extras

Fake Steve Jobs & Letters from BILL G

Letters from BILL G

The Media King

End Users

Legacy

SameGame

Illustrator

“The Famous F40” vector illustration by David Rumfelt

Time travel

Scrollable 20-megapixel version

Notes

Further reading

Downloads

Preserving the Marguerite Hanafuda browser game

Gone but not forgotten

It’s alive!

Mobile & Mahjong?

Usajong gaiden ore ga kirifuda! (Game Soundtrack Rip)

Soundtrack download

How to play the game

Notes

Five interesting facts about the design of the original PlayStation

Photo reference

Ordering photocopies from Japan’s National Library

Remote duplication?

Step-by-step

Costs

Paying

Conclusion

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

Triangle Magic トライアングルマジック