That was super interesting! Are there any details on how/where they found the sd and memory cards? It seems like you’d have to be incredibly lucky to find something like that.
Haha, I’m not though. I’m actually a professional game developer and have worked on the Wii and wiiu. But there’s no way I can express curiosity about this without sounding like a lawyer. Have an upvote though haha.
Left two in the first image and two at the bottom in the second image, possibly top right too, contain Chinese characters. The rest is Japanese. Chinese characters cannot be typed on Japanese systems in normal means and vice versa, so, Chinese factory dumpster leak?
I think you've mistook Kanji characters(Japanese) as Chinese characters, some chars are the same even in writing order, even though not shared in the same char codespace.
Unicode Hanzi/Kanji map is a huge political mess, but writings in CJK are divergent enough that anyone fluent in one can often just tell which one a character is from. Mutual intelligibility never existed and very little content is shared across the language spheres, which lead to each ones having its own self-emergent mannerisms with regularized shapes of characters and which ones to use.
In this instance, "稱" and "號" used on some of printed labels in place of "称" and "号" are outside of current Japanese common use(though "號" wasn't uncommon until very late in 20th century) and I can tell that the system used to print those labels must have been configured for Traditional Chinese(HK/TW). As for the handwriting, it just looks Chinese to me.
As I understand it, the author has an established reputation, to the point where, when someone finds one of these, they send it to someone like the author.
I just now went searching to see if there were any better quality GM drivers for Windows that let you upload a soundfonts and it looks really dire out there! The one that mainly shows up is VirtualMIDISynth (https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth). It seems like it supports Windows 11.
SoundFont® synths were never good. When Creative added this feature to their sound cards, they were trying to provide a cheaper alternative to dedicated hardware synths, but it did not match the quality (though it was still a step up from FM). And in the modern era, this obsolete format has somehow become more popular, now via software reimplementations, because of the catchy name or something?
I also want to point to Nuked SC-55, but that is also not based on SoundFont®.
I would say it's no more convoluted and confusing than git. I used Perforce professionally for quite a few years in gamedev, and found that a bit confusing at first. Then I was self-employed and used git, and coming to git from Perforce I found it very confusing at first. But then I grew to love it. Now I'm back to working for a big gamedev company and we use Perforce and I feel very proficient in both.
This reminds me a bit of Paul Theroux’s “The Old Patagonian Express” where he tries to make a trip from the northern US all the way to the southern tip of South America. It’s a great read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Patagonian_Express
Wow! I never knew of qmodem. I used Telix, maybe Procomm I’m not sure, and finally Terminate. I used Terminate the most. So interesting to see this though and like someone else said I also appreciate any reminiscence from that era.
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