The Portopia Remake Mistake

Post 00049 | February 27th 2024

Last year Square Enix released Square Enix released a remake of one of Enix' old classics: Portopia Serial Murder Case. The original holds a special place in gaming history. Not only was it Japan's first visual novel, it was also the first hit game designed by Yuji Horii who later gained fame as the creator of the Dragon Quest series. The game was released for the NEC PC-6001 all the way back in 1983 where it played as a text-based graphic adventure game. The game had graphics in the form of pictures, but you interacted with them using simple verb-noun commands (take key, open door, punch neighbour). The 1985 Famicom port ditched the text commands in favour of cursors, turning it into a point-and-click adventure. In the game you play as a police officer is trying to solve the mysterious death with his assistant. You go around to different locations, look for clues and ask people for information. It saw a few more releases in Japan on various home computers and mobile phones before finally being re-released last year as an AI tech demo to show off Square Enix's advances with natural language processing. It didn't go well. More…

Beating my first video game

Post 00048 | January 28th 2024

Last month while browsing a second hand shop, I stumbled across a few copies of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Hero Turtles comics. A steal at less than a euro a piece. When I got them home, I noticed two of them had Nintendo ads on the back; One for newly launched Game Boy while the other advertised the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles for the NES. That sent me on quite a nostalgia trip as that game was the first video game I owned which got me thinking: I never beat that game, did I?

It wasn't for lack trying though. Not only was it my first game, it was my only game for ages. Games definitely cost a pretty penny back then so when you got one, you tried to get your money's worth. I remember getting to the Technodrome once in what must've been my hundredth attempt.

I know the game was a killer app for Nintendo at the time - at least here in Europe. My local game rental had more copies of this game than any other and considering I found the aforementioned full-page ad in a October 1991 issue - a full year after the game was released - you'd think they would at least mention the just released Super Mario Bros. 3? However, I also know the game has a bad rap these days. For instance, it was featured in episode six of the Angry Video Game Nerd YouTube series where he called the game "as appealing as a fucking ooze-infested dirty sewer rat shit" and "inside-out asshole regurgitated purtid anal fecal matter". That's why I have been wondering if I blinded by rose-coloured nostalgia or does it hold up today? More…

One last hurrah for Windows 7

Post 00047 | December 30th 2023

It is with a bit of melancholy I post this today. Earlier in the year Valve announced that Steam would be dropping support for Windows 7 from the 1st of January 2024. This might very well be the final nail in the coffin for the now fourteen year old OS. Because of this, I decided to give the software one last go before curtain call. More…

New Mastodon account

Post 00046 | November 28th 2023

Just a heads-up for anyone who used to follow me on coop.lol: It seems like the instance is down for good. I haven't been able to get in the contact with the admin and whenever you try to visit the site, a laughing pig says the domain is for sale.

So, the bad news is that Twitter outlived the social network I replaced it with (although technically Twitter rebranded before the site went down), but the good news is that there are more fish in the sea. I've opened a new account at computerfairi.es (sadly I didn't get the chance to migrate the old account). People seem friendly there so lets hope the instance is more stable than the last one. Come say hi!

2023: The Year of the Linux Shoebox

Post 00045 | November 8th 2023

A couple of posts ago, I showed off the media centre PC that I built in an Ikea storage box. "The shoebox" as I affectionally call it was upgraded with an AMD RX6600 graphics card to add some oomph to game performance. One of the benefits of AMD cards is how drivers are available for operating systems other than Windows which reveals my ulterior motive for choosing an AMD card: I have for a while been wanting to try out Linux as a gaming OS.

Windows definitely has its strong points, but it is terrible for anything other than desktop computing. You are pretty much screwed if you don't have keyboard and mouse nearby. They change settings all the time to promote their newest fad, and restart for updates at the most critical hours. Linux on the other hand has the opposite problem; It can be used as a desktop OS, but it truly shines when it's tasked with few tasks, like serving files, media and such. It's more of an appliance OS rather than a desktop OS. The main benefit is that distro makers can make their releases as lean as possible on Linux - fewer parts means fewer points of failure. Furthermore, the user interface can be whatever you want it to be: Get a desktop environment if you want to control it with a mouse, a command line interface if you want something low spec, or something third if you want to control it with something entirely different like a game controller.

The question is: Has Linux matured enough to work as a dedicated gaming OS where using it is less of a hassle than using Windows on a TV? More…

Saving the universe and looking cute while doing it

Post 00044 | October 1st 2023

I have a rather long list of games that I want to play but can't. Not because they're impossible to find, because a server has shut down, or because my hands have fallen off. Rather, it's a case of me not having taken the time to learn Japanese which is a problem with my taste in games. I could use my spare time learning the language, but instead I spend it more productively by looking at romhacking websites, seeing which games have received fan translations. Luckily for me, the localisation teams are more productive than I am; Within the last year or so, they have managed to translate an entire trilogy of games that has been on my list of ages.

"Ginga Ojousama Densetsu Yuna", known in the West as "Galaxy Fraulein Yuna" is a series of games, anime, and audio dramas released in the 90's. I have been playing the first game with the fan translation by Supper and Mafoo343. It follows Yuna Kagurazaka, a teenage girl whose life changes after she wins the Galaxy Fraulein beauty contest, becoming a famous idol singer. One night she is woken up by one of the other beauty contestants in an armoured battle suit who's destroying her neighbourhood. Elner, a small robot fairy also shows up to bring Yuna up to speed: Yuna is the Saviour of Light and has to go on a quest to defeat the darkness that is threatening to take over the universe.

The Liberation

Post 00043 | August 24th 2023

The post deals with Nazism, occupation and anti-German sentiment. If you don't like reading about these topics, you might want to skip this one.

I have recently reunited with an old friend and we have been enjoying to see films. I think I have been to the cinema more times this past month than I have the last decade. Tonight we went to the premiere of The Liberation, starring Pilou Asbæk. He plays a headmaster during the end of the war who is forced to receive 500 German refugees. Against their better judgment, they are compelled to aid the refugees who are becoming sick and dying, even though helping Germans is massively frowned upon. After the war he gets picked up by the freedom fighters to be interrogated and tortured. More…

The archive section is finally live!

Post 00042 | August 5th 2023

Sorry about the delay; I have been procrastinating. I've ended up doing a lot of spring cleaning on the site. Here's a list of news for chose who reads changelogs:

• The site now has an archive section. All posts are listed by date, but there are also different categories to pick from, almost like a real blog. I wasn't able to decide on an optimal way of listing the posts in each category, so I have experimented a little with different types. I guess that's one of the perks with writing your own html ;)
• Every post now has its own page. In the beginning, everything was just spewed onto the homepage. When that became too big, posts were organised on subpages, with five posts per page. I liked the idea of scrolling through pages, but in retrospect it only added confusion. Now post 00023 is located at 00023.html like it should be.
• The RSS feed has been cleaned up, and links have been updated. Sorry if this sends old posts to your feed reader. Let me know if you find any dead links or the like. It was a pretty big update and while I'm sure I have fixed most of it, I would be surprised if I didn't miss something
• Sometimes some pages were a bit misaligned which looked horrible if you were flicking though pages. It took me forever to figure out what was wrong. Turns out the vertical scrollbar disables in many browsers if the page can be viewed on one screen. Removing the scrollbar meant the got wider, so the center shifted. Thanks to a little CSS Magic, the scrollbar should now visible.

Mostly under-the-hood stuff, but it makes life easier for reader and author alike. With this over with, I can now go back to writing about more interesting things.

Happy Anniversary!
Tokimeki.memorial turns one!

Post 00041 | July 4th 2023

I just renewed my plan with the hosting provider. That should keep the website running for another year. An anniversary is a good occasion to look back at the year that has passed as well look towards the future. More…

My Most Favourite PC Case

Post 00040 | June 20th 2023

Nothing ages a computer as much as Windows Vista wallpaper.

There's a special place in my heart for evercase.co.uk. It's a website that sells 00's era PC components. If you're looking for a BTX case or a FireWire webcam with Windows 98 support, they've got you covered. Bear in mind that the site itself is pretty 00's. It doesn't automatically redirect you to an SSL connection, so if you were to place an order, you'd be sending your home address over an unencrypted connection. Payment is done via PayPal with is encrypted, however. Still, if you intend to place an order, you should add "https://" to the address bar. Alternatively, they also have an eBay site. Also, being a UK site, EU citizens may end up with a VAT surcharge due to Brexit.

Despite these downsides, I have still placed a couple of orders with them. It is on this website I found my most favourite PC case: The catchily named WT-01L. More…

Kirby's Dream Land 2 gets the deluxe treatment

Post 00039 | June 06th 2023

I have been playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land in between Tears of the Kingdom sessions. It's a true return to form for the series and it has reminded me how much I loved the classic games. It might have been because of this that I was very excited when I saw a romhack for Kirby's Dream Land 2 had recently been released; A romhack that brings full colorisation to one of my favourite entries in the series. More…

Upgrade time!

Post 00038 | May 29th 2023

I think it's time to put a graphics card in my media centre PC. Don't get me wrong, I still love my 5600G - It's the little engine that could. It still impresses me how much performance you get from a chip this affordable. It is by far one of my most favourite CPUs ever released. That said, the times are a changing. It's still playing most games I want to play and for it and for the few games it can't run, I have been using streaming the game from my gaming PC. And therein lies the problem: Nvidia being Nvidia More…

I went to fly in a Zeppelin

Post 00037 | May 20th 2023

This is just a quick life update post as I have just returned from holiday. Last month I noticed I had raked together quite a few days off on my holiday account and because business is a bit slow I decided to take three weeks off. Besides, May seems like the ideal time to go vacation; Days are getting long but it isn't dreadfully warm yet, so you still have energy to do stuff. While I did spend a lot of time just unwinding, I did manage to go on a couple of trips; I had a day trip to Copenhagen to see the musical Miss Saigon and a four day stay in Friedrichshafen in Southern Germany to live out a childhood dream of mine: I have always wanted to fly in an airship. More…

Ending the "Super Famicom Redhead Trilogy" with Slayers

Post 00036 | April 18th 2023

What do an exorcist, an 15th century Spanish pirate and powerful sorceress have in common? Well, if they have ever featured in a Super Famicom game, chances are they are redheads. After realising the last two games I have written about on here were Super Famicom games starring ginger women, I thought I would make this a trilogy with Slayers released exclusively in Japan in 1994. More…

I made a thing! Wifi controlled PC Power Button

Post 00035 | April 8th 2023

As regular readers may know by now, I have been fetishising reducing my power consumption. One of greatest power hogs was my home server. Most of the time it barely did anything, but I didn't want to turn it off in case i needed it to do something. Of course, I could use Wake on LAN to be able to power it on remotely. I've never really had much luck with it to be honest. Sure, it works most of the time, but most of the time isn't the same as all of the time and you can sure that it would always be most inconvenient time where it wouldn't work. So instead I'd just leave it on.

Well, now I have found a solution to the problem in the shape of a little home-made IoT device. Using a D1 Mini, a wifi-enabled microcontroller, and a relay, I am able to simulate a press on the power button. The D1 Mini runs Tasmota which is an open source IoT firmware that works wonderfully with Home Assistant, so I am able to not only switch on my PC remotely, but also automate its power state. As an added bonus, the D1 Mini also reads the voltage of the PCs power LED, so Home Assistant is able to see if the PC is on or not. It is also remarkably cheap, roughly costing €10 in components. More…

New Horizons

Post 00034 | March 23rd 2023

Growing up, I was positively mesmerised by games such Sid Meier's Pirates! or Tai Pan for the C64. There was something incredibly exciting about going back in time, getting on a boat and explore the world. Open world games are a dime a dozen these days, but back then, having a big world to navigate while having some vague objective to follow was very unique. I have always wondered why this kind of game concept wasn't more widespread back then, so you can imagine my surprise when about ten years ago, I found Uncharted Waters: New Horizons on the Wii U's Virtual Console. More…

Sweeping Ghosts on the Super Famicom

Post 00033 | March 15th 2023

As I wrote about in my previous post, I have been gradually been getting more and more into emulation. As a result of this, I find myself playing a lot a greater variety of games than I usually would. One of these games is "GS Mikami - Joreishi wa Nice Body" which was released for the Super Famicom in 1993. More…

Emulation

Post 00032 | March 1st 2023

I would like to propose a toast to one of the most boring pieces of technology from the last century: The humble CD player. For three decades, it was the defacto standard for audio. If a sound was being sold, it was being sold on a CD. Not only that, your CD would play on whatever CD player you had; Your 2006 Arctic Monkeys CD would play equally well in your 1986 hi-fi or the radio in your 1996 Nissan Sunny. And of course, if "I Bet That You Look Good on the Dance Floor" wasn't your jam, by this record companies had put out most of their back catalogues, making most of the soundtrack of the 20th century available for your listeining pleasure. More…

One man's trash is another man treasure: Broken laptops are the new SBCs

Post 00031 | February 27th 2023

For the longest time, Raspberry Pi has been the household name when it came to small project computers that was able to run small, dedicated tasks. However, if there is something that has become obvious during the chip shortage, it's how vulnerable you get when you have to rely on the single supplier. The promise of a $35 computer seems like a distant memory when you look at the current going rate for a used board on eBay. To add insult to injury, it appears business customers get priority access to new batches that are getting produced. While it makes sense from a business perspective, where does that leave hobbyists? More…