Re: Apple II tapes backed up to wav...now what?

[sicklittlemonkey <nick.westgate@gmail.com>]

> On 14 Jan., 04:50, Nama <forums6...@mac.com> wrote:
> > Living in Japan I've been searching for some time for Japanese
> > specific programs that were written to work on an Apple IIj plus
> > (which I own),

@Phil: Great work!

On Jan 15, 5:32 am, spacealbum <dbackenkoeh...@t-online.de> wrote:
> Phil, regarding Japanese programms: I was always wondering if
> something is known about the Japanese programmer M. Hata who ported
> Invaders to the Apple II?
> Or the Star Craft of Tokyo of team that programmed the great Apple
> Galaxian version for Broderbund?
> Do you know if they sold their games also in Japan, maybe with their
> own Artwork?

@Dirk: I can contribute a bit of info ...
(I used to live in Japan too, where I met Phil.)

Firstly, I don't what those guys are doing now, but the Star Craft
guys had a long history of writing - and later porting - games in
Japan. I've got a casette of Star Blazer (yes Antoine - I'll get
around to it someday! ;-) that has a Japanese instruction sheet, so
they were definitely selling these games in Japan.

They had offices in 2 places that I know of. One in Ikebukuro in Tokyo
that I went to investigate, as I happened to work in that city, which
was torn down and replaced by a new building in probably the mid to
late 90's.

Another office was in Ginza (Chuo-ku) in Tokyo, which I unfortunately
never got around to looking for, even though I lived fairly close by.

Anyway, they went on to port many Apple II (etc) games to the
computers which became popular only in Japan during the 80's & 90's. I
can't recall the specfics of which ones they did for which platform,
but for example there was a port of The Dark Crystal to those
platforms (e.g FM-7) which simply had all of the English text
transliterated into the Japanese katakana phonetic syllabary. Very
painful to read, but cheaper than translating it, and those early
computers didn't have the resolution for kanji (Chinese characters).

Cheers,
Nick.