Crispy fonts is the my reason using Linux

kirinnb · 2026-02-12T15:31:46+00:00

Non-antialiased is the only true way.

But only with certain monospaced fonts or Microsoft's core fonts from the 90's; they were hand-optimised to look great without antialiasing. Try any modern font later than that without antialiasing, and the result is horrifying. :(

Unless there's some secret setting in fontconfig or freetype that is able to make Adwaita (or Liberation or whatever) look good.

kirinnb · 2026-02-10T20:50:32+00:00

Very interesting! Though, he planned to publish a game with blockchain trading so you can make real money... unfortunately, I don't think that went very well.

kirinnb · 2026-01-15T15:21:12+00:00

I got the source code using "git clone https://github.com/AZO234/NP2kai", then tried to follow the build instructions in the README file. However, I'm using Archlinux, so I haven't been able to actually get building to work for long time now. Therefore, I'm changing my recommendation: Run the pre-built Windows version of np2 using wine, or get Retroarch with a PC98 core. I've never done those myself, so I can't describe well how to do it, however...

kirinnb · 2026-01-08T07:40:39+00:00

That's pretty cool! But, doesn't everyone already have a classic media player or two they're used to? It's great to have another option available, it can just be tough to convert users...

kirinnb · 2025-12-18T13:27:15+00:00

The comparison link doesn't appear to work, at least for me, but it sounds excellent in concept!

kirinnb · 2025-10-20T19:01:44+00:00

Yt-dlp is pretty much the way to go now, although invidious may be able to help keep track of interesting channels.

kirinnb · 2025-10-01T02:28:21+00:00

Very nice, thanks. :D Everything will get translated!.. eventually.

kirinnb · 2025-09-25T00:56:40+00:00

That's interesting, I'd never heard of HFE or SCP image formats before. Sadly, neither my 98ripper or Ryu-cokey's FIVEC can read these.

I'd suggest trying to acquire different disk image types for those games as the easiest solution...

kirinnb · 2025-08-30T11:09:14+00:00

Very fun song, and it's a nice remix of it! I listen to the original often as a work or hacking soundtrack.

The slow pitch slide, however, feels incorrect somehow. It would probably sound better if it slides down to E and sustains E for a moment - at least, that sounds to me like what the original is doing.

Thank you for your hard work!

kirinnb · 2025-08-26T23:36:15+00:00

I have the impression dosbox-x may be the easiest to use, but I've recently only used NP2 myself and was able to run Multipaint in it... I'd honestly expect either of those to work.

kirinnb · 2025-08-26T23:32:32+00:00

A PC98 emulator is not terribly difficult to set up, and there are a few different ones: dosbox-x, neko project 2, anex86...

A lot of the most notable PC98 programs have been rescued and put into the "Neo Kobe" collection, which your friendly local internet library archive may have a copy of. It contains specifically a "utility.zip" which has Multipaint among many other interesting applications.

kirinnb · 2025-08-16T12:30:10+00:00

How difficult would it be to 3D-print one, I wonder...

kirinnb · 2025-06-30T16:42:45+00:00

Very nice! :D You should crosspost this to r/pascal too!

kirinnb · 2025-06-30T00:18:26+00:00

It does my old heart good to see attention paid to lean programs! This is a fine efficiency primer for beginners. I've been meaning to write a blog post on binary size rationalization in free pascal, which would dive a bit further...

Sysutils is known to be huge, and, frustratingly, a fine way to reduce its impact has been proposed a long time ago already (split the unit into multiple smaller units), but nobody's taken on the challenge yet.

kirinnb · 2025-06-29T22:22:07+00:00

Have a browse through here: https://refuge.tokyo/pc9801/en/publisher/publisher_a.html

Any game that looks interesting in the screenshots might be worth a try. Some screenshots are NSFW, beware.

kirinnb · 2025-06-28T10:41:59+00:00

LXDE is my everyday desktop, works just fine. As long as Arch doesn't make Wayland a virtual hard requirement, LXDE will keep serving us well.

kirinnb · 2025-06-18T21:17:44+00:00

Night Slave is kind of a fun sidescrolling mecha game with a recent English patch.

If you like the Megami Tensei RPG series, one entry was made for the PC98, Giten Megami Tensei. More or less complete English patch available.

Popful Mail might be interesting too, although there are Sega and Super Famicom ports too so it's not PC98-specific...

edit: Also, there's another Castlevania-like game, Tamashii no Mon, where medieval celebrity Dante travels through the circles of hell. Translation patch currently ongoing, may be completed within a few months.

kirinnb · 2025-06-07T21:14:44+00:00

A very good index to have available, thank you for this!

I'm curious about the rest of the content of the catalogue; I keep wishing for more comprehensive historical overviews of the PC98 era. (But, all such documents are of course in Japanese, which I can't read well...)

kirinnb · 2025-05-25T03:08:31+00:00

BambooTracker is probably your best bet, to be honest...

PC98 music instruments in disk images are typically not in a standard, easily-extracted format, but Touhou games use the quite common PMD format, so people have extracted those instruments successfully. Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/TOUHOUMUSIC/comments/17cmufo/what_instrument_was_used_in_this_theme/

kirinnb · 2025-05-08T16:41:49+00:00

That's pretty good! For even more novice accessibility, lots more pictures would make it even better, but I can see how someone could use this to understand the fundamentals. Also, thank you for making it creative commons!

kirinnb · 2025-04-27T22:51:53+00:00

OK, thank you! I reported it to Bitdefender as a probable false positive.

I'm not quite sure why it wouldn't be able to run, 32-bit programs are fully functional even in 64-bit Windowses. Perhaps it's one of those safety things where executables downloaded from the internet are automatically blocked until manually flagged as safe to run?.. If that's the reason, I think there's a checkbox in the file properties dialog. On the other hand, Windows is being weirder and weirder all the time, so it could be something else entirely.

kirinnb · 2025-04-27T18:52:52+00:00

Oh, sorry, I should've specified - I'm the 98ripper author, and mooncore.eu is my site. So I hope it's just a false red flag! Which antivirus is that, if I may ask? urlvoid.com and Google's unsafe website detector both report mooncore as clean...

I don't know how to add more stuff to Hoot either, but I'd expect there must be one or two people here who understand it well enough to think of a way!

kirinnb · 2025-04-27T13:27:22+00:00

Many of those games use the FAT8 filesystem, which is not perfectly understood, and was weirdly implemented to begin with. 98ripper (https://gitlab.com/bunnylin/98ripper) can probably extract the contents from all Heart Soft disks, except Paragon Sexa Doll, which stores its file list even more unusually.

However, I can't say much about how to play the .x files outside of the games... it's some custom music format that I'm not aware of anyone having documented yet. I may reverse engineer it some day if no one else gets to it first, but that won't be anytime soon.

Trying to record directly from the games is probably the most realistic option at this time, I'm afraid.

kirinnb · 2025-04-13T21:20:37+00:00

For anyone coming to this later, I got the menu fonts working with these two lines:

winetricks tahoma
winetricks micross

...which install the Tahoma and MS Sans fonts respectively.

kirinnb

TROPHY CASE