It's not a calculator I have moved from Patreon to Floatplane! For just $1 you can follow me on Floatplane for a photo of every video game item I get, when I get it. www.floatplane...
I'm currently learning and know hiragana, halfway through learning katakana and the phrases from Duolingo. However I'm sticking with it because it's fun but man do I wish I could find some actual classes in person. I feel like the learning progress unless you pay is really slow on Duolingo.
The Casiopedia too, they did many RISC based machines, Tubers do them, for the CASIO branding only, or some other Mitsubishi brand they know. Japanese people are the best, but they have weird taste and habits, lol !
Honestly, the concept of printing stickers from scenes in your game seems neat. If Casio made it a third party device on a main console with specific games it works with, it mighta been more popular.
@@ToastyMozartthen it'd work for most games that can be plugged into a monitor or video capture device, yee. Imagine making stickers from BOTW or the ps5 spiderman game.
Yeah, a third party device for an existing console seems more viable. Also, since they wanted the young girl market, they should have done action adventure games in a style like Sailor Moon and Pretty Cure, which would have special compatibility with the printer add-on.
Regarding kanji in children's games, there are some basic kanji that Japanese children are expected to learn from a young age, and all the kanji shown in this video are among them. The games you showed were definitely very LIGHT on kanji, using hiragana for far more than you'd typically see in Japanese games for an older audience -- just not ALL hiragana. Pokemon electing not to use kanji at all in its early games (current Pokemon games do use some!) was indeed partially to make the games more accessible, but mostly due to technical limitations. For one thing, kanji takes up extra space on a cartridge that's already absurdly limited in space -- but more crucially, the Game Boy screen is extremely lo-res (and, initially, monochrome to boot!), and conveying complex kanji in a fuzzy, blurry square of 8x8 pixels (16x16 at most!) is a bit of a losing proposition. Believe me, I've seen games attempt it before, and trying to read those kanji can be infuriating, as you wind up with what practically looks like an all-white square that has random dots missing here and there, but otherwise just looks like an absolute mish-mash of pixels.
And I guess they couldn't just write in Japanese but with latin characters either because that would just suck for the japanese playerbase. Probably not difficult, but most definetely sucky
@@JamesTDG This is like a crappier version of Mario Paint + Gameboy Printer. That sticker also looked really nice (for what it's worth, of course). Too bad James didn't examine the printer tape closely before printing. Maybe there is a way to use a similar product and as a replacement by putting it into an empty cartridge (a DIY refill)
@@AB0BA_69 here's the thing, it could have been Mario paint+gb printer on crack. Give me the console and a way to homebrew media for it (plus some funding because I'm going to eat through a lot of tape while experimenting), and I'll make it happen.
"I can read all of this but I can't understand any of it" I've been studying japanese for three years and you've perfectly summed up my experience so far.
I have over 100 Japanese games and have tried to use that as an excuse to learn several times, and failed. I even tried to play through Final Fantasy 5 before the English patch was widely available. I understand fully.
I’ll translate some of the stuff but not everything. At 2:05 it was just asking “what will you pick?” In regards to starting the game or loading a save. “From the beginning” “Continue” “Copy” “Delete” At 3:47 the girl is saying “he (the dog) has such big ears. Hehe it’s like he’ll fly away” From 3:50 the dad is saying “let dad try. Look here” in regards to the dog At 4:20 the choices he needed to make were “Teach (the dog) to sit” “Stop teaching” so he put himself in a loop by choosing the second option constantly At 5:00 the girl is surprised that the doll they found comes alive. The alarm clock pops out and the girl says “wha- wha- why? The alarm clock is moving!” The doll then says “you’re so loud! Anyways aaaaland is in trouble” I think that’s in reference to James naming the character aaaa Skipping some stuff about the clock because a lot of skipping and can’t see all of the dialogue. But I did notice that a cucumber showed up. And it asked a riddle “It’s a black thing that at noon, is short, but in the evening it grows. What is it?” The choices being “Morning glory (asagao)” “Shadow” “Rainbow” James picked the first one so that was wrong Looking at the box again, it seems that even though the game part was marketed alongside the stickers , I can’t help but feel the sticker printing was the actual main selling point
I really like the style of sprite artwork in these games for some reason. That Japanese for-children cutesy style. Something about it that I can't put my finger on. Looks really good on CRT.
The printing functionality reminds me of the absolutely legendary combo of the Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer. You should definitely cover Game Boy modding at some stage!
Let me just say that i hope you never change your channels name as I absolutely love the simplicity and humor behind it, as its such a fun concept of a channel name, keep up the amazing content, absolutely love it 👍
It isn't too hard to find print cartridges for the loopy, only issue is it's expensive because of international shipping, found one for $30 plus $25 for shipping.
@@eirationall7120 Man that just makes me regret not taking up Japanese when I had the chance in college. The little I know was forced through having to go through Japanese captcha in certain MMOs (and reading JP sites, along with general weebery). We used to have Spanish in our curriculum too besides it being baked in our language
I had a Gameboy Printer as a smol, and I expected this to print similar quality crap. When it went through multiple times and did color I was amazed. Apart from the whole thing just being a full screenshot with menus and stuff, that is a genuinely impressive sticker printer! I definitely would have loved something like this as a kid, my wardrobe was completely covered in stickers, especially Gameboy Printer ones. I had all 150 in Pokémon Blue, but I don't think I ever figured out how to print out the certificate to that, I mostly printed with the Gameboy Camera. Man, 90s junk was so cool.
Yeah deciding how to encode text, and which characters to include was a whole thing on the early days of gaming. On top of that, many Kanji are difficult to render (and read) is super low resolutions. There are examples of some games using Kanji for certain words while writing others in kana too. But also yes, children's media trends to use more kana, sometimes going as far as kana only too.
Yeah I think they developed a computer for office jobs, and the kanji capabilities made it the way to go to visual novels because of it, since it also made artworks specially beautiful and detailed... Can't remember that computer's name tho, my brain is not working atm
honestly I'm way more impressed with the graphics of this console than I was expecting from the jankity look of it. not sure what I was expecting tbh but i feel like they could have put out some decent side scrollers if they weren't being silly with their marketing demographics.
i hope you saved what was left of the paper because you can absolutely make more. you can get spools of labels for printing, and it looks like that paper just uses some black bars to help it align with the removeable part of the sticker. at the very least, you can get a spool of label and cut it to the right shape and wind it on that spindle.
Its actually somewhat more difficult to read japanese on older consoles as they usually use full hiragana and katakana as they couldn't render kanji as sprites due to the complexity of kanji, this makes it a pain to translate as almost every word in hiragana has multiple vastly different meanings TLDR; japanese is hard
Right, Japanese uses kanji/hiragana switching instead of spaces and generally doesn't use capital symbols, so hiragana only is sameaswritinglikethisinenglish.
This machine genuinely rocks. I want one. I'm sure there's new old stock printer cartridges somewhere in a bin in Japan if one were to dig around for a few years...
The point at the end about games marketed towards girls being shovelware reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend awhile back. We were comparing DS games we'd had as kids, and she expressed frustration at the fact that most of the games I'd had were "real" games (i.e. MarioKart and whatnot) while most of the games she'd had were dress-up shovelware games. It's a bit of a fascinating disparity, really.
5:28 Yep, that's some Kanji and compounds in there, such as 時間 (jikan; "time"). But not all words are written in Kanji. For example, the noun that comes next, とびら (tobira; "door"), would be 扉. There's also a Western word for door, ドア ("doa"), but 扉 is more akin of traditional ones. The Japanese still rather strongly distinguish between their own and imported concepts. Together, 時間のとびら means "door of time". It's generally true that many words are not written as Kanjis anymore in everyday usage; the rules on that aren't entirely clear to me, though. James is right that stories for children usually have very few to no Kanjis at all.
this entire console is just such an oddity it really makes me wonder how exactly this even came to be. just the idea of developing an entire new proprietary console instead of just making like an MSX computer in a purple shell is absolutely wild, especially since there obviously wasn't much of a market for it.
I just finished my thesis paper on video game music and various other nonsense. It took me AGES to finish and I needed to change a lot of things on the fly because of my job managing a music store. It is 5AM and I am exhausted. This video is the exact thing I needed right now.
The Loopy's great. If you want to show some other japanese "console" thing, I recommend the Pioneer LaserActive. It's a Laserdisc machine that also supports bonus module "thingies" that allow you to play PC Engine and Sega Mega Drive games on it. It's as cool as it is expensive and rare.
The single controller was the death nail for this console. If it had two controllers, you could have designed your character, your friend their character, and then printed an image of you both. The printer was really good and high definition (for a toy). Also this came out a year after the PS1, so it doesn't make much sense to use cartridges. N64 was doing it, but that was also that console's failure.
this is a really interesting bit of kit, during this time in the 90s a genre of games called otome was getting really big, otome is games aimed at the female demographic and is usually used to refer to a lot of visual novels, dating sims, and light rpgs (not exclusively but usually), in a way a console designed specifically to play them kinda makes sense, especially one intended for young girls, however as james correctly surmised, all the game on it seem like *bad* otome games (although apparently one was made by kenji terada, writer of the first 3 final fantasy games), however the otome games as a genre had only really stared the previous year so this almost seems like casio were trying to get in early, however it would have been competing with many other consoles and even home computers, most of which had an existing library of childrens games and otome games, and that a lot of people already had. overall very interesting idea that casio in my eyes squandered by making it kinda crap (the printer is super cool tho)
You need to immediately order more printer sticker paper. Create funky animals and stick them all over Wades cars when he isn’t looking as a lil James Easter egg.
Despite being located next to the AV ports, the contrast knob is actually for the printer, not the video signal. It controls how much 'ink' is put on the label to make the image visible on a variety of different label colours.
One thing I thought about while thinking about this console is that you could theoretically use any book with blank pages, such as a notebook, to store the stickers in a safe place, making it effectively an early form of photo gallery.
what a cute and funky little console! loving all the funky devices and content. so many odd devices that didnt leave japan... love it! always interesting stuff
The best way to make use of this as homebrew is to make a horror game that prints stuff out as you play like the console is haunted. That or an adventure game that might print out stuff that might have a puzzle you physically need to solve
Actually this is brilliant. Is obviously the educative kind of computers from back then, but you can have fun with it. As a 90s kid, the other option you had is making your dresses with that toy that was a disk you could rotate, and had beveled clothes shapes, and you had to swipe a crayon over a piece of paper... Never played with one of those but the ads were everywhere, ugh, it was awful. You can also making music watching the notes you are composing is kinda cool, changing instruments... Have your pet even... The Tamagochi i think it was in 1997... geez... I think having a 32bit processor into this is kinda overkill, but considering how stuttery were confusers in the era, this looks very fluid in terms of graphics. Is like the Game boy Camera, which I loved it when I was a kid, and I always regret I've never got a printer. The only picture I have of my dog is in that cartridge. Nice one!
I absolutely love the idea of a small printer connected to the console, like the GameBoy printer. I probably would have been stoked about something like this as a kid even though I'm not a girl.
Thank you for being a voice in the darkness vindicating exactly the level of Japanese comprehension that I have. Well, that, and I learned some vocabulary from movie titles. This is the true path to learning language: figuring out how to pronounce a syllabary so that you can write monster names but then never really learning the language and confusing people who know less than you because they think being able to read loan words that aren't even from that language somehow makes you an expert. The struggle is real and it's empowering of you to show the world what it's really like.
And are one of the few companies to actually make watches that *aren't* on the Internet of Things. For "smart" watches being "smart", they aren't necessarily reliable.
The sticker paper looks like the same sticker paper that retail stores use. Wal-Mart had a ton of different labels in my time of working there, and Im sure one of those would actually fit, granted the sticker portion wouldn't be pre-cut. It might be worth looking at office and retail supply outlets for replacement rolls that you can make work.
Not necessarily. This is not a regular thermal printer, it uses thermal transfer or dye-sub technology. There's an ink ribbon (you can see a dried up bit of it stuck to the piece of paper he digs out of the console) sandwiched with the sticker paper that's (probably) 3x or 4x as long, and has a repeating pattern (either RGB or CMYK) the same size as each sticker. It prints each sticker multiple times with each successive part of the ribbon to get the full colour effect. These type of cartridges tend to be proprietary or close to it, so a drop in replacement may not exist. If you look at the paper in the cartridge there's a pattern of little black marks on it, the machine uses those to know where it is on the roll and where the ink ribbon is relative to the sticker paper. If it doesn't see those it'll probably either just refuse to work or mess up in weird ways. Depending exactly how this printer works you might be able to see what other people have printed if you open the cartridge and look at the spent ribbon.
@@irtbmtind89 Interesting... Might have to get my hand on one and see if an alternative can be figured out, surely the demand of sticker printing consoles must be going up.
I'm really glad that this channel is essentially cool shit mixed in with nugget game consoles. Feels familiar but is unique, love it. I'd love to see you just do some dumb shit similar to the portable SNES. Loved it lmao.
Now I really want someone to reverse-engineer this console and dump the ROM in these cartridges so we could have a feasible emulator! Data Preservation and all that.
I believe MAME support Casio Loopy (I don't know what state the emulation is in). Though only 6/11 of the games have been dumped and neither "Bow-wow Puppy Love Story" or "PC Collection" have yet been dumped.
I really like your content, even putting the Wade connection aside (who i absolutely adore and is the reason I checked your content out to begin with). I look forward to more content going forward. Keep up the great work, James!
james big man. it takes a lot of skill to make content this good especially when you get convinced by your friend to make a channel and then get many fans. harnessing that may be harder than building you own channel. love you jame s
I sent this video to a friend of mine who owns lots of funky Japanese electronics and learned he owns six of them. He also took the photo on wikipedia for the Magical Shop accessory. My friends are nerds.
I was not expecting to hear a voice I recognized by clicking on this video, looked down, said James' Channel and thought oh yeah this is great. Brilliant video btw
Ok well I would say I came here from Dankpods, but I didn't RU-vid recommended this to me and I didn't realize who I was watching halfway through. Good to know I would have discovered James either way, because this channel is exactly the kind of stuff I like watching. Weird retro console I never knew about, disassembly and specs, with funny dialogue the whole time. Keep it up man :)
A fun game should be fun for kids regardless of who they are. I feel a lot of girls end up settling for less with games growing up because they're marketed a very narrow section of the available games, or at least thats how it was when I was growing up. But likewise boys miss out on some awesome stuff too. I think it's finally become more gender neutral but polly pocket was really awesome and a great scale for play on the go. Likewise some of those pet/animal related games were really awesome but very heavily marketed towards girls. I remember having one called Catz and Dogz for the PC growing up and had such a great time.
Contrarily, the "boy's stuff" during this time (in the western hemisphere, anyway) was either complex or nasty-looking and small. I'm not sure neutrality between the sexes was a debate in this medium, but moreso women saw nothing here (tomboys aside) for them and left. It's like how girls' anime never took off in the west (every attempt to export a "girlish" anime for television was shot down or heavily mackered) and nowadays has a large following of mostly adult men.
Speaking anecdotally, my little girl is really into Animal Crossing (where harmony and building a nice place to live is important) Minecraft (for building nice places, but with a little bit of risk from the creppers, etc) and Kirby (where there is action, but its unapologetically cute). I did nothing to encourage this, it was all her own path - and responding to what her friends were playing at home. She knows and sees I play violent games, but they do not appeal to her in any significant way. Different brain wiring is my conclusion. That said, of course, the games she enjoys can be enjoyed by boys or vice versa, but I would venture girls would be more into the nurturing, upkeep, or cute games (and a strong market exists for those, as Nintendo well knows and built much of their business on).
This is just reminding me of the Pico I managed to find in a thrift store in Indiana. In its box! That console was very popular in Japan, they kept making games for it there up until about 2003 if I'm correct, and that thing had the same processor as a Sega Master System. The Pico with its SMS CPU outlived the Dreamcast! :(
@@jajadingo I know, but I also heard that the PICO hardware still got support until about 2007, just like the NES. I can't be too certain though, it's been a while since I looked into it.
I can’t believe that a company who created just watches, and even digital keyboards, can also have a first attempt in creating a game console, and failing because of it
8:10"Wow there's some scissors in there, if i put a random piece of garbage in there, i can cut it and then have trouble getting the piece out later" ! 😂😂 !
This just came on my recommended and watched it cuz it looked interesting. I had no idea this was James channel until the very end. I've been subscribed since the Garbage Time video. Great stuff man!
"...what the hell is that?" - Me, every time I see this in the games room and I forget that you explained it to me last time haha. Pretty sure that PC game has to place somewhere high up on the "best intro themes pretty much nobody will ever hear" list too.
These games look decent to me, but I think that’s just because I love the art style. As a kid, I would probably have loved this thing for about a month then never touched it again.
