Pasofami emulator author Nobuaki ANDOU has passed away

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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koitsu
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Re: Pasofami emulator author Nobuaki ANDOU has passed away

Post by koitsu »

Sour wrote:Personally (going from the Japanese text), I'm mostly assuming this to be about "registering" the software to get the full version. It says the .exe file is about generating a "user ID" based on a "machine ID", and taking a look at the pasofami website, there's a section explaining how to get your machine ID from Pasofami (and that you need to enter this in the registration form when you buy a copy of it). The part with the code appears to be a "machine ID", the machine ID I get on my computer in pasofami is formatted the same (6x hex digits). I'm assuming the machine ID that is given in the post might be a special value that allows the program to work on any computer, even if the machine ID doesn't match? Can't really say for sure, though.
Completely possible, but I simply don't know because I haven't ever run PasoFami, so I can't give a completely accurate description of the behaviour. That's what I tried to cover (apparently very badly!) in the last paragraph of my post: "I apologise for any inaccuracies, especially with regards to GETUSRID.EXE. I personally have never used Pasofami so I'm not familiar with what's being described; maybe it's a verification key, for example. I simply don't know."
Sour wrote:Also, the part about "something will be done with the site content", the original text says that he "has been told to remove everything but the bare minimum from the website", and that this will be done after confirming the current state of the hosting contract, etc. (and later on he says he will update the contact e-mail with the new one at the same time). It doesn't actually say who told him to do this to the website, though (I'm assuming it's something that someone in the family has decided).
Thanks for clarifying this! Greatly appreciated. The translator told me something along these lines as well, but stated that there was some ambiguity in regards to both the circumstances behind the site/hosting being taken down, as well as whomever had requested it. My gut feeling is that the family feels it would be expensive or too painful (re: grieving process, etc.), or maybe even pointless to continue to keep up. I can respect all of those, but it's speculative. Some parts of the translation were hard to translate in English; both the translator and I tried to come up with something that sounded reasonable.

I felt it important to convey that the site would no longer exist past and undisclosed time, because it's a piece of NES history and should probably be archived (respectfully of course, i.e. someone who speaks Japanese should contact Kouji ANDOU and ask in Japanese for permission to archive it for sake of history. It's very possible they would say no, which would be sad, but in which case their request should be respected).
NewRisingSun
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Re: Pasofami emulator author Nobuaki ANDOU has passed away

Post by NewRisingSun »

Is it safe to use the last released version on Western operating systems now, or should I still expect to have C:\WINDOWS wiped?
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zeroone
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Re: Pasofami emulator author Nobuaki ANDOU has passed away

Post by zeroone »

Did Nobuaki Andou openly share his code and hardware discoveries back in the day? Did he help start up communities like this one?
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koitsu
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Re: Pasofami emulator author Nobuaki ANDOU has passed away

Post by koitsu »

zeroone wrote:Did Nobuaki Andou openly share his code and hardware discoveries back in the day? Did he help start up communities like this one?
I don't have answers to those questions, but I could explain why that is, as it's a kind of important part of emulation history (helps explains why things took "so long" to develop). It's not about me, but more about nesdev emulation and technical information history and evolution, so I feel it'd be worthy of a separate thread (or maybe this one from 6 years ago?). I did a write-up and saved it into a .txt file locally in case people are curious or it comes to fruition.

The answers, though, don't change the fact Mr. ANDOU was still a NES/FC emulation pioneer. He was one of the first on the emulation scene to start doing a NES emulator at the time (it's guessed to be early 1996), and IIRC (going off of memory here), Pasofami was renowned at the time for being quite fast given how it did its graphical updates on Windows. Think about the year (early 1996), and think about what commodity hardware was available at that time: most people had high-end 486s, maybe a Pentium 100 or 120 if they had the cash); the former was a system that could barely play a 128kbps MP3 file (most wanted 112kbps because it left enough CPU time to do general other things without audio hiccups.

There are different kinds of pioneering efforts -- not all of them have to involve public disclosure of information. I don't know who in Japan helped make Famicom-focused communities.
Sour
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Re: Pasofami emulator author Nobuaki ANDOU has passed away

Post by Sour »

koitsu wrote:I felt it important to convey that the site would no longer exist past and undisclosed time, because it's a piece of NES history and should probably be archived (respectfully of course, i.e. someone who speaks Japanese should contact Kouji ANDOU and ask in Japanese for permission to archive it for sake of history. It's very possible they would say no, which would be sad, but in which case their request should be respected).
I understand wanting to archive it, but I kind of feel like asking would be perceived as rude, no matter how it's worded. Coming up with proper condolences/etc in Japanese is somewhat outside of my skill set, too. I could have whatever I come up with proofread by a friend, but even then, I still feel like it may be best not to ask at all.

At the very least, the website appears to be pretty well archived on archive.org and should technically remain there unless the family asks for it to be removed (and if they do ask to remove it, then we also get the answer to our question, without ever having to ask it :p)
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