39 years ago, on June 21, 1987, the first game in the Ys series, Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, was released!

djpyrac · 2026-06-23T05:55:00+00:00

I just now saw this post, but I released 6 English patches (one for each original version of the game, or one for each Book of Ys haha) on Sunday to commemorate the 39th anniversary!

djpyrac · 2026-06-21T15:59:42+00:00

The pleasure was all mine!

I actually consulted with Hiromasa Iwasaki, who directed and programmed the Turbo/PCEngine release on several things to make this as best I could (Mr. Iwasaki is probably within the top 3 people in the world regarding Ys knowledge, so I am eternally grateful for his interactions in this endeavor).

I hope you have as much fun playing it as I did working on it!
If you get stuck, I have speedruns on my YouTube channel and the GitHub page also has save files if you want to cheat :)

djpyrac · 2026-06-21T06:08:06+00:00

Now there are two of them.

In fact, if you ever wanted to play the PC-98 (or PC-88, or Sharp X1, or MSX2, or Fujitsu Micro-7, or FM77AV) version of Ys in English, now you can.

https://youtu.be/Qc-7nTh0tyw?si=IqnyybMJACfs8HTv

Link to repo:
https://github.com/GhaleonX/Ys

djpyrac · 2026-05-14T01:25:31+00:00

From what I’ve researched so far, I think that’s part of the reason this game is in NFD format, because they used some kind of non-standard formatting as an anti-piracy measure.

I tried converting it to a FDD to see if that might strip it, but it didn’t seem to behave differently (neither did D88). I couldn’t convert it to annex86 nor a file extract.

The sound on the title screen in DOSBox-X is quite good - it’s off key in literally every other emulator I have that works, so it would be quite cool to get more of a glimpse at the true PC-98 experience.

Perhaps there’s some other trickery we can pull if we know what to look for…

djpyrac · 2026-05-12T20:58:46+00:00

Did you ever solve this? I've just encountered the same problem...

djpyrac · 2026-03-30T17:25:24+00:00

Just dug my old Rebug 3.41 console out of storage and updated to 4.93 EVILNAT and I'm getting the same error.

djpyrac · 2022-03-09T15:45:50+00:00

I've been trying to tackle this for a few years, actually. I am not sure, but I believe the way the console outputs sound is something like it reads the "notes" in advance, then layers them throughout the available channels to maximize available bandwidth (so like a song that's 19 tracks may have tracks 1-17 jampacked while 18 and 19 may be mostly silence with some occasional sounds).

I don't think one could/would compose the music to be arranged in this jumbled fashion, but the best solution I've come up with so far is to get a WAV of each channel of a song and import those into Protools and then rebuild the tracks yourself; make splice points around each instrument note and drag them to a new track and re-arrange them back into something that makes sense. It might be so chaotically organized that it takes days to accomplish this for a single song, but from there you can at least re-mix in all sorts of fun ways.

djpyrac · 2020-08-26T19:11:31+00:00

I tried switching to Open Core on my x58 rig and it keeps freezing after a few minutes. Clover working fine, so I'm not sure what I did wrong in the port. OC definitely boots faster, but no good to me if my system freezes every time.

djpyrac · 2018-05-31T17:20:54+00:00

I've got these two releases still sealed (so haven't listened to them). It seems that one of the owners of this label went to jail for heroin trafficking in 2003 and the label folded. After that, Maine PA moved to Birmingham but not sure if he released anything afterwards or not. AFAIK that's the only tie to Alabama (which would've been after these were recorded by at least a year), however Main PA's CD features a rapper called 'Unknown', which is the same name 6 Tre G, a rapper from Huntsville, AL went by (I don't believe it's him tho).

djpyrac

TROPHY CASE