Patching Touhou 6 (Embodiment of Scarlet Devil) to run on a 3dfx Voodoo 2

This is a guest post from spaztron64

One thing that’s been bugging me for years at this point is the ability to run Touhou 6 on my PC-9821 V166. For a good few years I’ve been stuck with nothing more than a Matrox Mystique graphics card in that thing, which can’t create a D3D6 HAL context for rendering the game’s 3D elements. In 2021 I snatched a 12MB 3dfx Voodoo 2, in hopes of being able to play more 3D games on that machine. There were two major problems….

1) The USBHID.SYS driver for PC-98 Windows 9x conflicts haaaard with Voodoo drivers. Moving the cursor around corrupts memory and makes the system unstable or kills the driver in mere seconds of use

2) None of the Touhou games support secondary Direct3D devices

For those not in the know in regards to the second issue, DirectX allows you to use multiple DDraw and D3D capable GPUs on one system. By default it’ll set the video card outputting a signal on the primary monitor as the primary DirectX device, the secondary output as secondary, and so on. Most people only used one monitor on their Win9x PC back in the day, hooked up to their 2D capable card. The Voodoo 1 and 2 aren’t meant to act as 2D video cards, yet they had to support D3D initialization somehow, so they presented themselves as non-primary DirectX devices, usually secondary, in hopes that game developers would allow the end user to select their 3D accelerator of choice.

This was standard practice at the tail end of the 1990s, but it was falling out of use at the turn of the millenium with the demise of 3dfx and the general lack of need for multiple graphics cards in one system for 3D gaming. This presented a problem, as games that technically could be played on a Voodoo 2… didn’t, as they could never be told to use it through normal means. Hacky solutions existed, like 3dfx’s unfinished, buggy attempt at a Voodoo 2 driver for Windows 2000 that allowed it to behave like a primary display adapter for general 2D and 3D use, but it’s notoriously unstable and isn’t possible to use on 9x. I’ve used this method before to play Touhou 6, Max Payne 1, GZDoom, GTA 3 and Vice City on the Voodoo 2 through Windows XP with mixed results.

Once I got an NEC bus mouse for use on my PC-98, I could finally use the Voodoo 2 on it without constant crashing. This got me interested in trying to get Touhou 6 to work on it, which lead me to a path of pure pain.

For starters, Touhou 6 is one of those games that only use primary DirectX devices, like the unsupported Mystique, so I had to somehow coax it into initializing the secondary device instead. My first approach to handling this was through direct binary patching. I didn’t know where to look for the init routines, so I asked 32th System for some heads up, and he pointed me to a rough location in process memory where the appropriate CreateDevice calls reside:

I then searched for the appropriate opcodes in the game binary, and patched all 6A 00 (push 0, A.K.A D3DADAPTER_DEFAULT) opcodes to be 6A 01 (push 1), forcing the game to init the secondary D3D device.

While this initially did in fact work, the approach ultimately sucked for two reasons.

1) Static binary patching only works for that specific binary, and doesn’t carry across different versions.

2) This requires manually patching every CreateDevice call, of which there are many in Touhou 6

It is at this point that I started sharing my progress with friends. jbit was quick to hop in and say “Why the fuck are you doing it this way? Just make a d3d8.dll wrapper DLL”. This was absolutely the smarter approach, I just didn’t know how to do it since I don’t know jack about DirectX programming. Fortunately, he handed me a little VS project he worked on called d3dcutter that, among other things, wrapped the CreateDevice function, which I promptly modified to always push 1 instead of 0 to the stack for the device selection parameter.

This solved the two patching problems, and I had something to show for starters:

Now, I’m sure you can tell that the performance is absolutely atrocious. This came as no surprise to me, as while the Voodoo can absolutely render the game at a full 60FPS most of the time, the dinky little Pentium MMX 166 struggles hard at doing triangle setup for the backgrounds every 16 milliseconds. Remember, 3dfx cards had no Hardware T&L, so the game has to fall back to Software T&L. I think the following wireframe screenshot will help illustrate the amount of work the CPU has to do every frame:

“Well, I’m in luck!”, one might think as they remember that older Touhou games support framerate division by 1/2 (30FPS) and 1/3 (20FPS) as options in custom.exe… There’s just one problem.

The game just… fails to initialize the D3D HAL on the Voodoo 2 in the frame divided modes. Why? Beats me, I still haven’t figured it out and likely never will. Just more ZUNcode bullshit I suppose.

I then figured out that framerate division is handled by a variable (that can be set even lower than 1/3, by the way) which could be set at runtime, even when the normal 60FPS mode is used. I suspected that the game uses a different initialization path for the two modes, so I once again tracked down opcodes that expect the variable to be set to 0 in process memory, this time with Cheat Engine, and patched them in the binary. Well guess fucking what, the game fails to initialize even when the regular init routines are modified to expect 30FPS or 20FPS frame division to be set.

This approach simply wasn’t going to work. so I went with trying to set the variable at runtime. Unfortunately, I had to go back to version specific patching once more for this, since there’s no way to wrap this functionality through DLL means. Additionally, while this wasn’t hard to do with the game running in windowed mode with Cheat Engine on the side on a modern system, it was basically impossible on a Voodoo 2 equipped machine, as the game ran in fullscreen and it wasn’t possible to restore the window after an Alt+Tab.

My final solution was to generate a trainer in Cheat Engine for version 1.02d of the game, as it’s the last one with a working logic speed limiter, that would forcibly set the frame divider variable at runtime with a hotkey:

This finally allowed me to play the game in 1/3 framerate mode on the Voodoo 2.
This allows the game to run at full logic speed most of the time, as the CPU now has 40 miliseconds per frame for triangle setup, however there’s something wrong with how the card handles buffer swaps in this mode of operation, leading to a very back-and-forth stuttery image that’s very unpleasant to look at.

Can we do better? Well yes! The game uses so-called STD scripts for certain stage-specific data setup, but also handling camera movement and geometry generation. Using Touhou Toolkit, I was able to unpack the appropriate DAT file, decompile all the STD scripts, remove all geometry commands, and recompile them for in-game use. As there are no more backgrounds to draw, there’s a trail effect left behind every frame, but thankfully custom.exe has an option to forcibly clear the back buffer every frame.

The end result? A nearly tripled framerate in 60FPS mode, recovered just by not drawing any 3D backgrounds. The game still lags when lots of bullets are on screen, but this doesn’t really come as a surprise.

Anglofying & running Japanese Lemmings for Windows

On one of my later trips I picked up this fun title, Lemmings!

And looking at the back of the box, what fun it contains!

Support PC-98, Epsons, IBM’s, IBM PC/AT.. Probably FM Towns as well

One interesting thing about 1995, is that with the rise of Windows 95, this marked the end of the specialized PC market in Japan. Just as WING/Direct X basically killed off the DIY driver/extender environment on MS-DOS, by being able to abstract the hardware it removed any meaningful difference between an EPSON PC vs a PC-98, FM Towns, or even the lowly IBM AT/386.

This being a Win32 includes both WING & Win32s. A perfect snapshot of an early Win32 commercial game circa 1995, as you needed to cater to that massive Windows 3.1 install base, although so many were rushing to Windows 95. Naturally this also means that the setup program is a Win16 app, once more again to preserve that bridge of the Windows 3.1 & Windows 95 world.

Well the obvious thing to do is just install it on a legacy 32bit OS, and what better than Windows XP?

Lemmings happily running under Windows XP via VMWare.

Now to run it on something like Windows 10, it’s just a matter of copying the WINLEMM.INI into %sysroot%, along with placing a copy of WING32.DLL into the %sysroot%\SysWOW64 directory and you are good to go!

Japanese Lemmings on English Windows 10

Sadly the character encoding in Windows is still really lacking and doesn’t render all that great. However that had me thinking as almost a decade ago I did find a demo of Lemmings for Windows. Could it be possible to just overlay the executables & DLL’s to produce an English commercial version?

Surprisingly the answer is yes. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it’s as simple as that!

The game is mostly playable, some parts are just coded to run as fast as possible, as no doubt nobody was imagining 1+ Ghz machines. So the intro, warp & suicide are almost instant.

It’s something to keep the kids entertained for a day in recent events. It’s been a LONG CNY.

Are you Japanese?

On my latest trip, I managed to find a copy of Zork 1 for the PC-98! And let me say, let the adventure begin!

I went to Beep and the place next door I always forget it’s name, and I found this burried in the back for a mere Â¥2,860! Not exactly what I thought would be a bargain, but flipping it over however…

Zork 1 for the PC-98!

Â¥7,800 YEN! From 1991!Honestly I don’t even know what is up with the price of software in Japan! Clutching this thing in my hands for the Â¥2,800 makes it feel like a steal so of course I buy it!

Contents of the box

Nice to see that opening of the box gives me a catalogue, a manual, minimal map, registration card and a diskette! And I’m hoping I can read it using a USB drive.

Now I have no pc98 gear in Japan, and I’m trying to not have a mountain of hardware here, the i7 desktop and 30″ cinema display are already feeling ‘too big’ for this place anyways. I go to hardoff and pick up 2 USB floppy drives hoping to read the 3 1/2″ diskette.

Now I bought an IBM & some weird iMac looking drive, I was hoping between the two drives, maybe one would work. And I was right for buying the two. The IBM drive didn’t read the disk AT ALL.

However this iMac looking Logitec LFD-31US did the trick!

Apparently you need what is known as a “3-mode USB floppy drive”. Whatever that means. Although I can read the disk fine from Windows 10, winimage was unable to make a disk image. Disk Explorer is another option, which also specializes in the PC-98’s weird 1.2MB on a 1.44MB disk, however it couldn’t read the disk either.

I write a simple C program to read 512, 1024, 2048 blocks from \\.\A: (the physical drive), however it was cut short after 138kb. Maybe a hidden bad sector? Xcopy ran without issues, so who knows.

Looking at what I could dump, it does look like a bootable image:

and the xcopy did pick up MSDOS.SYS & IO.SYS. I though Microsoft was so against people redistributing MS-DOS, but then again aren’t most PC98’s floppy only?

I was able to cobble together a DIY disk image, and it doesn’t work fully on Neko Project II sadly. However Annex86 works fine.

On boot there is a nice graphical logo, and animation as the door opens. Really cool I have to say. Searching through zork.exe there is some interesting strings

  • Are you Japanese?
  • MS Run-Time Library – Copyright (c) 1988, Microsoft Corp
  • Original copyright (c)1988 Infocom Inc.
  • Used under license from Activision. All rights reserved.
  • (c)1991 SystemSoft
  • Copyright VACS Corp./ASCII Corp.,1986-90.
  • @(#)sunedit.c 1.0 07/03/1989 by VACS Corp.

Well that’s interesting. I was wondering how to trigger the ‘Are you Japanese?’ and well it turns out it’s pretty simple:

I’d have to figure out how to type in things like eat/sleep take… Although it is a twist on the old Infocom style. Now could this have ‘saved’ Infocom before their sale to Activision? I guess there was a market for Infocom games in Japan, although probably far earlier than 1991.

Because I hate myself

Yes. It’s my last haul for the month.

I feel lucky to find a copy of Takeshi no Chousenjou in the box. I only know of it from Jon Tron. I actually do have a Famicom in the office, so I guess I can play it.. Although I’m not so much looking forward to holding up my phone with Google translate like a monkey daring to touch the monolith.

Yes it’s Takeshi no Chousenjou.

I’m pretty sure I won’t finish it, but this game immediately intrigued me. Then I forgot. This morning I awoke in a bit of a maker’s mark and contact c haze and remembered this game…. Then I remembered I’m in Japan.

I’m in Narita now. Having dinner, my flight back to Hong Kong is tomorrow. Can’t wait.

Oh I also picked up a GTX 980! So expect more exciting Chinesium updates tomorrow. I think on Tuesday I’ll get more water pumps and change my dual Xeon huananzhi board to water cooled..

There is other stuff afoot, some more painful returning to Return to Zork, and if my FM Towns actually works, some pharlap fun. Although I’ll probably do that even if I need to rely on emulation.

Did you know that although the FM TOWNS may have shipped with the pharlap 386 do’s extender with its MS-DOS, but it never had a DooM port!?

Oh and disks to the Coherent port to the Commodore 900 turned up. Binary only. But I guess this is exciting for Z8000 fans.

I did look quickly at lemmings, and yes it has WING and Win32s. Awesome!

What is with the price of retro Japanese software?

So I was lucky enough to get to Beep before it closed, and I picked out a couple of FM Towns titles (and a junker!), and I thought ‘Return to Zork’ would be a good title, something to compare the MacOS & MS-DOS versions against.

Although slightly faded, it does come in this nice box, which reminds me of the NEOGEO… which is probably an apt comparison.

The artwork has faded, although the CD-ROM inside was still sealed, never before opened. I picked this up for an eye watering Â¥3,480 but flipping the box over revealed the launch price of an astonishing Â¥12,800! I’m not sure what the exchange rate from 1994 was, but even at a generous 100:1 JPY to USD that’s half the price of the old multimedia kits which included the drive, sound card and so many came bundled with Return to Zork.

Another random title I grabbed was even more insane!

¥ 14,800 for Silent Möbius: Case: Titanic!

I need to get a RGB monitor & keyboard to see if this thing even works, meanwhile I fought with UNZ to get it running, and the mouse tracking is totally broken unless you change the DPI scaling, credit to this post in the UNZ ‘BBS’.

One thing is sure, the voice acting in the Japanese version is so terrible.

As people complain about ‘AAA’ games, and paying $60, just look at this! $134 USD for some cartoon boat game thing.. Although I’ve never heard of Silent Möbius or played it, I just saw it was available for the x68000 and PC-98. So I guess it’s one of those Lowest Common Denominator games.

One interesting thing about the FM TOWNS is that they have that ROM DOS with CD-ROM drivers, and their apparently blanket licensing for PharLap 386. Although while I was wasting time looking at cartoon rabbits, someone else scooped but the 386 BASIC kit. Darn.

But in the Return to Zork world, the ‘made.exe’ is in fact a Pharlap 386 EXP, meaning that it runs in 386 protected mode, so you don’t have to struggle with emm386, himem.sys and trying to get a ludercus 580-600kb of conventional memory. Seriously it was such a chore to get this running the manual has a big section on setting up a boot disk. It’s a shame they didn’t license a DOS extender for the US PC platform, although I can see why they chose that route on the FM Towns (and I believe PC98), as there is a RTZ9821 directory there which includes an EXP. Shame it was never relased state side as a patch, as it would have been a GREAT user change. Well that or a Win32 executable.

Japan get’s all the neat looking SONY PC’s AKA the trouble with early SSDs

Is it a Rumba? or a PC?  It’s a SONY!

SONY VGX-TP3G

So while cruising the junk market in Hong Kong I found this little ‘roomba’ looking machine.  Looks pretty neat, and because it has video & crashing issues I was able to get this thing for $500 HKD or about $75.  I mostly felt bad for the guy as the disk had died in the thing, and he had spent the money to get a SSD into this thing, and had been nice enough to upgrade the Windows 7 to Windows 8, and onward to Windows 10 for me, all legit.

But to start the adventure what the heck is this thing?  Naturally SONY has several things that look like model numbers.  Normally I’d just flip it on it’s back and reveal..

SONY VGX-TP3G underside

A model of PCG-2G2P.  However looking at it’s side I find…

SONY VGX-TP3G side view

That this thing is also a VGX-TP3G.  Way to complicate things SONY!

So searching SONY seems kind of funny as it bounces me to America first for some reason, then tells me to go to the APAC site.

GOTO APAC!

I don’t know why these kinds of ‘main corp, but not really main corp’ companies drive me crazy.  And wouldn’t you know it, no manuals, and the downloads are only for the SONY applications built in for BlueRay playback that aren’t on the SD.

And then I find this fun support article, 00188888.

Dear Valued Customers,

Please be informed that Sony’s support has ended for VAIO computers which were shipped with the following Microsoft Windows operating systems preinstalled:

•        Windows 95
•        Windows 98
•        Windows 98 SE
•        Windows ME
•        Windows 2000
•        Windows XP
•        Windows Vista

As of March 1, 2018, we will no longer provide drivers and software for download for these computers.

That’s right!  Even though they already offer no drivers, BIOS updates or anything they will kill all downloads for all the older machines in less than 2 weeks.  Great.  So avoid any old SONY salvage guys.

So I decide I’m going to wipe the machine, and re-install Windows with the x64 variant, and I also wanted it in English.  The OS installs just fine, and everything looks good.  Even though this is a 10 year old machine, I thought I’d try something simple, like compiling a Linux kernel, and that is when I saw the weirdest thing. While unzipping the archive, the disk usage hit 100%, but there was no blinking on the disk LED (this machine is so old, it has one of those things!), and in the task manager, no program was using the disk at all.

So a quick search led me to this article, 3083595.

Task Manager might show 100% disk utilization on Windows 10 devices with Message Signaled Interrupt (MSI) mode enabled

Symptoms
Task Manager shows the disk to be at 100% utilization despite a light or no workload, and the system may experience lag or become unresponsive. In addition, the system event log contains numerous events with Event ID 129, which represent resets of the disk controller.

While device resets can be caused by a varying number of factors, we are aware of issues with some Advanced Host Controller Interface PCI-Express(AHCI PCIe) models that causes these symptoms in Windows 10 when running with the inbox StorAHCI.sys driver. Due to a firmware bug, the Solid-state drive (SSD) does not properly complete input/output when Message Signaled Interrupt (MSI) mode is enabled. As a result, the Windows storage stack attempts to reset the device after waiting on unresponsive reads or writes for a period of time.

Well isn’t that interesting!  So it turns out that a firmware update could solve this, and I didn’t figure it out until actually much later.

I loaded up Kerbal Space Program, but it’s ancient Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T8300 & NVIDIA® GeForce® 8400M GT GPU really show their age.  But it does run, so that is nice.  It runs Edge & YouTube just fine, and handles all the general media stuff I wanted so that’s a win for me.

DooM 1.2j1.0 on NekoProject II

So the first thing you’ll need is Neko Project II.  It can be a little hard to track down downloads, but there is a whole slew of them here:

http://ux.getuploader.com/emu/index/1/date/desc the site has since moved to here:

http://nenecchi.html.xdomain.jp/

https://simk98.github.io/np21w/download.html (it moved again)

So for now this link, is the latest build, which was last updated on

Extract that, and rn np21nt.exe

You’ll want to configure the sound.

MIDI options

MIDI options

If you choose to use the MIDI you’ll have to map them to a MIDI-OUT port, and I used the default Microsoft GS Wavetable.  Of course you could use MUNT, or any other MIDI mapper or port.  Also you may want to setup the serial port MIDI as a backup plan.

Serial MIDI

Serial MIDI

The sound effect settings work best for the PC-9801-86 audio board.

xx

Select the correct board!

I’ll save installing MS-DOS, and installing DooM for another fun episode, but to configure DooM.

Run setup.exe to setup DooM!

Setup menu

Setup menu

The menu is simply:

  • 1 graphics
  • 2 Background Music
  • 3 sound effects
  • 4 not sure
  • 5 controller

Graphics

Graphics

The PC9821A driver works best from what I’ve done in my limited testing.  I guess if you had a different emulator, or a real PC-98 you’ll get more out of this.

Next is the BGM or music

BGM

BGM

You really have 2 options here, #3 for the PC9801 driver which uses the YM2608 chip.  Or the General MIDI either option 4 or 6. I didn’t notice any difference between the two of them, they both sound kinda slow, but workable.

Now for the audio board, select the PC-98

Doom sound drivers

Doom sound drivers

The PC-9801-86 is what you want here.  Now with either a 100% PC-9801-86 config, or a 50/50 of the MIDI/PC-9801-86 we are ready to run DooM!  Selection option 6 and away we go!

Save settings and run DooM

Save settings and run DooM

And all being well you’ll get the start of DooM!

DooM starting up

DooM starting up

Otherwise you’ll get this fun error:

DX386 error

DX386 error

In this case I had emm386.sys in my config.sys which conflicts with the dos extender DX386.

Personally I find it easier to boot off the #1 install diskette which will automatically start DooM!

If you are feeling brave, listen!

Retro Freak, first thoughts

So I apparently have more time to spare, so lets get this one out of the way, the Retro Freak!

The Retro Freak in the wild!

The Retro Freak in the wild!

I saw these originally for demo during an Electronic and game show in Hong Kong.  A vendor in Taiwan who claimed to be the manufacturer was willing to sell the units to me (in bulk mind you!) these units for $160 USD in qty 15-100.  So it was a LOT more than I was willing to spend as this is no doubt an expensive retro console to device.  And much to my surprise I’ve seen them out in retail world for sale with prices ranging from Â¥18,000 to Â¥24,480.  And that was a major surprise.

So I bought one retail for the price I had been quoted back in the autumn.

The exciting box!

The exciting box!

As you can see this is the box.  And yes that is the bed in the house I’m currently renting.  Such a festive background.

And for those who love this kind of thing, here is the back of the box:

Back

Back

Once I purchased it, and they counted the cash it was opened up, and they put their store chop on it.  Unfortuantly they used crap ink, and I have to dig out the receipt.  But it was the cheapest price, which put it at $150 USD (before the 8% tax).

Opening the box

Opening the box

Opening the box, and we get that made in China feel.  The box is cheap, but hell I didn’t pay for a box, I paid for…

the dull console

the dull console

The most utterly dull and uninspiring console ever.  The plastic feels VERY cheap too.  Holding something like a Mega Drive (Genesis), or a Super Famicom feels so solid.  And the SONY gear is top notch.  This is just featureless dull soft gray plastic.  And not even a logo, or any real surface features save a power LED.  It just feels cheap.

Now one interesting thing, is that the majority of the body is actually the cartridge reader.  You have the ability to flip it over, and slide out the actual console, which is much smaller, and cast in the same dull and cheap plastic.

The actual console

The actual console

The console has 2 USB ports for 2 controllers.  I haven’t seen any USB SEGA controllers (what the hell are they doing?  Is there that much money in Gundam VR, and Pinchino?)  But there is lots of knock off Nintendo USB controllers.  I have some to test later that I scored for 700 YEN.

Console underside

Console underside

Flipping it over, reveals that it is made in China, and it is made by Cyber Gadget, out of Japan.

Turning the unit on, doesn’t reveal any fancy startup screen or logo, just a language selection.  There is online help, but of course its in Japanese.

HELP!

HELP!

I am still not sure if you can just plug and play cartridges at will.  It also doesn’t like it if you just power it off abruptly.

Because it was getting late, I slapped in the only Mega Drive game I bought so far on this trip, Air Diver

Air Diver

Air Diver

It detected just fine, and I was able to play without issues.

Playing the game was much like the real thing, and you can add all kinds of screen filters, and other things to make your LCD TV behave like a CRT including overscan, and some saturation if you go further into the video settings.

The bundled controller is more SNES+WiiU feel to it.  Again I am just bummed out there is no SEGA knockoff stuff.

The good part is that it supports a crazy amount of formats!

  • Mega Drive
  • Famicom
  • Super Famicom
  • Game Boy
  • Game Boy Colour
  • Game Boy Advanced
  • PC-Engine

Which is pretty cool.  I always wonder why nobody has approached SEGA on licensing the BIOS for the MEGA-CD, or the 32x.  Naturally SONY wasn’t too thrilled about emulation of the Play Station 1 from a long time ago.

So the plus is that this does a LOT of emulation for the buck, if you want to read your own cartridges.  The practical side says that they have all been downloaded and converted ages ago and are trivial to find online.  It isn’t as cool as the actual hardware, but considering it is new it is much cheaper than buying and recapping a bunch of machines.

And honestly, you would probably prefer the retrode 2, which is a USB peripheral to read Mega Drive, and Super Famicom (Gensis and Super Nintendo).

While the Retro Freak does read many more formats it is better suited to someone who “just wants the damned thing to work!”  And it succeeds in being a magical box you can slap the cartridge into, and start playing.

And regarding what is under the hood, regarding the software license:

RetroFreak uses source code from the following open source projects:

  • VBA-M (both primary SVN and VBA-Next fork)
  • Genesis Plus GX
  • FCEU (FCEU-Next fork)
  • SNES9x (SNES9x-Next fork)
  • Mednafen

And of course a fork of the Linux kernel.

Merry Christmas from Japan!

So yeah, I’ve been crazy busy this holiday season, between work and vacation so updates have . well not been forth coming.

I wanted to touch on old StarWars games for the new movie, and even got to play Star Wars on a x68000!  If it were the 80’s I would super recommend one.  But in this day/age it’s plagued by poor draw distances, poor wire frame 3d, and just poor game play.  It is probably more of a fault with the arcade version that was revolutionary for it’s time, then it rotted and was ported out.  Something like Frontier puts Star Wars to shame on low grade 68000 based hardware.

But the sound, sure was awesome!

I also want to do some passable review of the retro freak!  I picked up one for about $150 USD. It is expensive, there is no doubt about that, and it is emulation.  I also picked up a NES on a chip console clone for about $13 USD.  At the same time I can score a MegaDrive for about 30-40 USD, and 25-30 for a SNES.  Which brings me to an interesting observation:

There is next to NO Mega Drive stuff.  There is far more Saturn, and very few Dreamcast, but I’s seen maybe 15 Mega Drive carts.  Meanwhile I’ve found Famicom/Super Famicom stuff almost everywhere I look.  My favorite is the local chain “Book Off” that almost always has a nice retro section, along with used PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 stuff.

Otherwise, I have horrible to non existent internet in the house I rented (it is like the yacht in Hong Kong from a few years back), so I’ve been forced to spend my time in internet cafes for 12+ hours a day.

Oh yeah, Tokyo is just like London.  After 6pm, everyone goes home, the stores close, and there is nothing open.  After 10 the trains stop and that is that.

While I’m on the subject of living in the future, and working physically wherever, the Microsoft Surface is a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE thing.  Granted I didn’t pay for this one, but it’s wifi chip is utter crap, it is prone to locking hard, and the kickstand and detachable keyboard is a JOKE.  I know Balmer wanted in on the iPad action, and then the Surface RT, eventually became just another PC, but damn a laptop this is not.  The only nice thing I can say is that it boots fast.  Which is something you’ll be doing lots of.  The fan is noisy and distracting, the display is OK, but nothing fancy in this modern age.

I currently had to go out and buy 2 USB Ethernet adapters and bridge the cafe’s internet so I could connect this POS.  I give the Microsoft Surface Pro v3 a 1/5*.  AVOID DO NOT BUY.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

In the “neato” section, I did find an eval copy of Citrix.  And a NIB quality box of Postal 2!  I didn’t know there was any updates so that was a surprise.  But now I see it is on sale over on Steam, for $7.50 Hong Kong Dollars.  I would do some give away but I also found out that my account got converted. YAY.

steam is now in HKD

Steam is now priced in Hong Kong Dollars!

Which means I cannot give anything away as apparently I now live in a poorer area and get subsidized games. I guess that is to make up for censored and restricted catalogs.

So yeah, I am alive.

And MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!

Crazy to think that 2016 is literally around the corner!