Archives for July
1998
July 16, 1998
Shipping update! All shipments are traceable
through the US Postal Web site. See FAQ page for details. There
will be no shipments from July 20 - July 30. July 20 is a national
holiday for Japan so there will be no postal service and after that I am
going overseas for my day job. Any mail sent to me which arrives
during that time will be recived as normal but will not be processed until
I am back in Tokyo. In other news, "Zet" of Akihabara has changed
their name to "Media Land". Seems that the corporate higher-ups thought
this would be a good idea. Akihabara has had little to offer lately,
even the suburbs have dried up some. I'm hoping things will get a
little better later in the summer when kids are on vacation. My prediction
for the next hot collectable system is the Bandai Playdia. It fits
many "collectability" criteria, short lifespan, few titles ever released
and almost totally unknown. I've had lots of requests for Playdia
systems and games lately and to keep everyone happy and satisfied, I'll
probably start an "other" page for things like Playdia, PSX or any thing
else I come by which does not fit into the pages above. Next update
will be in August after I return.
July
5, 1998
It's been a while since my last update.
Work has kept me too busy. I've also started on a project to learn
how to program the SFC/SNES. There is not much documentation available
in English. I don't have access to any official documentation, but
I have to give props to the old school of SNES demo/trainer groups who
made their source codes available for people who want to learn. Anyone
interested in the subject should search out the docs written by Yoshi as
well as studying the PAN/TWK source code available from the Anthrox
site. Some of the old trainer people will even answer email from
a newbie like myself, some of them just ignore me.
To be quite honest though, even though
Pan did a great job of documenting his source code and Yoshi produced
a great explanation of the SNES/SFC memory map and sprite encoding, I still
feel like I am missing alot in my current level of understanding.
I have found some books on SFC coding in Japanese. They are of course
totally un-approved by Nintendo, and alot of the information is related
to cheat code devices or console copiers.
On the subject of console copiers, most
of you know by now that I am against game piracy. The cool thing
about console copiers is that you can code your own SNES/SFC programs and
then test them out on a real console as opposed to running them on an emulator.
As I get more information on the subject
of coding and the inner technical details of this system, I will create
some pages dedicated to the subject. I will try to make the information
as accurate as possible. Since most of this info comes from un-approved
sources I will not swear by any of it. If I reveal any trade secrets,
it is un-intentional.
Gaijin
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