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 … | Continue reading
At the end of 2023 I bought a one-in-a-million find from Japan: it’s a postcard from Barbara Nessim’s residency at The Ginza Art Space, September 26 thru October 19 1986. This residency came on the back of her breakthrough early computer art that was done on a Telidon system, a t … | Continue reading
Kenta Cho is a Japanese indie game developer, who has been active since the 1980s. He became well-known in the West in the early 2000s with a series of bullet hell shoot-em-ups. In 2021 he created a total 139 games, which is one hell of a lockdown project. In early 2024 his game … | Continue reading
It’s 2024 and for some years now Apple have stopped supporting non-retina displays. From their perspective it makes sense given that all of their devices run retina displays, but from the user’s perspective it’s annoying given that so many of us are still using non-retina display … | Continue reading
You can [subscribe to the blog's feed](/feed.xml) to be notified of new posts. Most feed readers should auto-discover it if you use [a link to this blog](https://blog.gingerbeardman.com). | Continue reading
Here is an alphabetical list of all tags used on the blog—the larger the tag the more it has been used. Click on a tag to see a list of all posts associated with it. | Continue reading
At my core I’m a software guy. I don’t really get attached to hardware: in my mind it exists only as a conduit to software. I use emulation whenever I can to benefit from the increased convenience and reliability. But when I can’t… I buy old devices, and with old devices come old … | Continue reading
In April 2023, after I’d been listening to a bit of Japanese music during the last stretch of making the game Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate, Apple Music started recommending me Japanese music in the weekly #NewMusicMix playlists. Every week I post my favourite track to social me … | Continue reading
2023 was a year where I feel my blogging really hit its stride. I’ve spent most of the year trying to comprehend 2022’s traumatic events, the lingering impact of which continues to affect me daily. Positive outcomes are that it gave me a little more time to write, and I developed … | Continue reading
Recently I’ve been following a trend in macro-pads, specialised/bespoke keyboards that provide an easy way to trigger keyboard shortcuts. A host of small companies have flooded the market with modified Bluetooth numeric pads that target Procreate, and Figma have teamed up with Wo … | Continue reading
Thoru Yamamoto (Japanese: 山本徹 or とーるやまもと), born 1955, is a Japanese multimedia artist. Over the years he has released work in many formats including, but not limited to: magazine illustrations, HyperCard decks, interactive CD-ROMs, printed books, websites, digital stickers, and v … | Continue reading
The only aspect of game development I’ve not attempted myself is the music. I mostly use royalty free music of Japanese origin (just because I dig their vibe, man) as in the case of Sparrow Solitaire or Fore! Track or in rare cases I pay friends (like the amazing Jamie Hamshere) … | Continue reading
I’m fascinated with Moai so I always try to squeeze an appearance into my games. Moai in video games is a meme, or easter egg, going all the way back to 1983. But my game YOYOZO (out now for the Playdate handheld) is about capturing stars in space using a yoyo, so how could I get … | Continue reading
2023-12-27 — Ars Technica: YOYOZO wins GOTY accolade! almost unbelievable to be listed alongside such games as: Chants of Sennaar, Cocoon, Dave the Diver, Humanity, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Pikmin 4, Puzzmo, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Venba and Viewfinder. A gam … | Continue reading
Whilst searching for something else entirely I stumbled across these images and was struck by just how beautiful they are. The artwork is by Barbara Nessim and was featured as the cover and section pages in the September 1984 (Vol 9, No 10) issue of BYTE magazine. Larger versions … | Continue reading
Collecting Japanese Macintosh Magazine Media was not without its challenges. After buying those discs, and figuring out a way to index the content, I wanted to run some of that software! So I needed a way to work with Japanese files and display them correctly in a real Classic Ma … | Continue reading
For a while now I’ve been collecting references to old Japanese pixel/dot art software. My main sources of information are the treasure trove of scanned magazines on Internet Archive, Twitter archives, YouTube videos, Yahoo! Japan Auctions listings, and Google search. I’ve been k … | Continue reading
From LOGiN Magazine (1987, No 5) comes the story of 篠原賢一 (Kenichi Shinohara), a “cheerful uncle” from Hyogo Prefecture, who at the age of 60 years old began using an NEC PC-98 to draw pixel art reproductions of Ukiyo-e. He also printed them and made folding screens and kites! Jus … | Continue reading
I just released the “OpenSCAD to Spritesheet” workflow I created for Daily Driver: https://github.com/gingerbeardman/openscad-spritesheet It’s a Frankenstein mish-mash of a Makefile and several shell scripts that evolved over many months/years. Initial rendering is done using Ope … | Continue reading
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, … | Continue reading
This interview is reproduced from the January 1976 “Disco” issue of Black Music magazine. TOM MOULTON is the behind-the-scenes figure of disco music. His name has appeared on the credits of discs by Gloria Gaynor, B.T. Express, Bobby Moore, Al Downing, Peoples Choice, South Shor … | Continue reading
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 a … | Continue reading
Here’s how you can downgrade to an older version of Twitter (pre-X changes) and install it in a way that means it will not be automatically updated. Twitter 9.66 (858339189) running on an iPhone Xs just now Downloading the old version This is the trickiest part of the proce … | Continue reading
Following on from yesterday’s extraction of old sound effects, I quickly realised I needed an easier way to search them as they came out of Director as unlabelled, numbered files. I can use QuickLook or a media player to quickly audition them, but how could I easily find the samp … | Continue reading
For my latest “quick” Playdate project—a remaster of a ~1997 web game by Thoru Yamamoto—I decided to add sound effects. In order to keep it as authentic as possible I decided to use only sound effects created by Thoru Yamamoto that were used in his other productions. The largest … | Continue reading
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 acro … | Continue reading
This blog post assumes some familiarity with Playdate (a handheld game console with a cool crank control scheme), Playdate SDK and the Lua programming language. During the development of my forthcoming Playdate game Ball und Panzer Golf (tentative title), I wanted to be able to … | Continue reading
I’ve had a pair of Beyerdynamic Blue Byrd 1st generation bluetooth earbud headphones since June 2020. They are great Bluetooth headphones but were recalled just after I bought them. Somebody got too sweaty and managed to somehow burn themselves on the headphone wire. Given that n … | Continue reading
I’ve been following the X68000 Z mini computer since it’s announcement in the hope that it will bring new activity to the X68000 scene and it seems to be having that effect. In one video from the recent 「68の日」(“68 Day”, named after the date written in Japanese order, 6-8, that’s … | Continue reading
Marguerite is a defunct Japanese website, previously at https://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 f … | Continue reading
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 https://archive.org/de … | Continue reading
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 V … | Continue reading
The ultimate hot hatch. Most people are familiar with the first game in the GTi Club series due to its prevalence in arcades throughout the later half of the 1990s. The second game in the series is very hard to find in the wild, whilst the third is perhaps least known but a littl … | Continue reading
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 wait … | Continue reading
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 referre … | Continue reading
For the past month or so Apple Music has been suggesting new music from Japan in my weekly “New Music” playlist. I’m not quite sure what flipped the bit in their recommendation engine, but I’m happy it did. If I had to guess I’d say it was the music I was listening to whilst fini … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
I just pushed some changes to my Playdate-centric fork of Piskel: https://github.com/gingerbeardman/piskel-playdate/tree/dev-1047 This fork: can be used to build desktop apps of v15.2 on latest OS should build just fine for Windows/Linux/Mac (Intel) can also be used to b … | Continue reading
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 a … | Continue reading
A little known feature of Sparrow Solitaire is its ability to load user-generated content from files copied onto the Playdate. One day I thought it would be cool to combine two tile sets, so I built a web app to do it! A wild tile set builder appears! https://sparrowsolitaire.com … | Continue reading
A while ago I bought a 2.5” Crucial SSD and a UGREEN USB 3.1 Gen 2 Hard Drive Enclosure (SKU: 70499) on which to keep some working files whilst connected to a Mac mini. I used that on macOS 10.13 High Sierra, 10.14 Mojave, and 11 Big Sur (I skipped 10.15 Catalina). Over the years … | Continue reading
I’ve previously written about the Playdate game Sparrow Solitaire, when we released the Early Access version of the game. That was almost 9 months ago and a lot has changed! This week the hugely expanded full version of the game released on itch.io, where it’s been for sale for a … | Continue reading
I’ve been obsessed with The Great Wave (or its more literal title: Under the Wave, Off Kanagawa) since the mid-1990s. This Japanese woodblock print designed by Katsushika Hokusai is one of the world’s most iconic works of art. You’ve probably seen it crop up in a whole host of sc … | Continue reading
Safari 16.4 has some breaking changes (fixes?) to CSS, which means Polyglot the Safari Extension by Yasuaki Uechi that I use every day no longer displays its popup. Oh no! It turns out that some 6-year-old CSS and recent changes in WebKit mean the translation popup disappears imm … | Continue reading
Universal If you’re using the Dolphin emulator, by far the easiest method of syncing a Wii remote with it is to use a cheap Bluetooth adapter and Dolphin’s “Passthrough a Bluetooth adapter” controller option. If you want to use the Wii remote outside of Dolphin, the easiest way i … | Continue reading
Yes, the iPhone Xs came out in 2018. I thought it would be interesting to review it in 2023. Plus, I only just bought one! I hung on to the old home-button form factor for as long as I could, using a 6s for the longest time, but two things made me move to an edge-to-edge phone: … | Continue reading
I’ve been falling behind watching Masahiro Sakurai’s game development videos, so decided to subscribe to his YouTube channel using RSS. This is as simple as plugging the channel URL https://youtube.com/@sora_sakurai_en into your RSS feed reader. BUT only the most recent 15 videos … | Continue reading