Random photos of stations I have visited

January 8

January 8

On 1/6/2024 at 9:32 PM, mojo said:

First time I've seen an Atari ST. This shop could have done some serious damage to my wallet.

I still have mine. Atari 1040STf. It was still working a couple of years ago, the last time I tested it. I bought it for the included MIDI interface and used it along with Cubase for music production...

marc

January 8

Some nice stuff there. Might have to see if I can make it out to Yamanashi. I had a Mickey and Donald Gane & Watch that’s disappeared but have been resisting getting another.

January 8

9 hours ago, mojo said:

wash their cats

That’s a recipe for getting your jugular slashed! Or at least getting you a scar to make you look like a Bond villain…

jeff

January 9

Cat washing - I just cannot grasp the concept!

Tony

January 9

@mojo wrote: "one thing I love about Japanese houses is how they are mostly all different, unique designs." I like that as well. In my area, it is quite typical to see the same design elements over and over - similar commercial and housing designs repeated from location to location. Never really discussed this with the architects I have worked with but I a wondering if it is easier to get the required constructions permits by using designs that are already in use. Or maybe the developers insist on "proven" designs.

Cheers,

Tony

January 10

On 1/9/2024 at 10:27 PM, Tony Galiani said:

@mojo wrote: "one thing I love about Japanese houses is how they are mostly all different, unique designs." I like that as well. In my area, it is quite typical to see the same design elements over and over - similar commercial and housing designs repeated from location to location. Never really discussed this with the architects I have worked with but I a wondering if it is easier to get the required constructions permits by using designs that are already in use. Or maybe the developers insist on "proven" designs.

Cheers,

Tony

In the UK they don't employ architects to design houses, they just use technicians to lay out some standard designs in what they deem the most profitable layout. You see the same house replicated tens of thousands of times, up and down the country. It's rare for them to be stand alone too, most houses are joined to at least one other, and the quality of the sound insulation tends to be quite poor.

January 10

Heh, on our little street of a dozen houses from the same builder, even though they're all the same size, each house is subtly different in design and internal layout, and they are even slightly offset to each other within their plots so the street frontage is not uniformly positioned. Decently insulated too (though that's not always a given in Japan).

January 11

I guess this is am inductive loop for detecting when the train is there...

January 11

Fuji-san from the Nozomi.

Since Niigata is still suffering quite badly from the recent earthquake, I decided to go to Nagoya instead. There is a guy who is some kind of Hard Off king, the company has given him awards for being so dedicated to junk, and he said that Nagoya had some good Hard Offs. Well, he wasn't kidding, the quality of the rubbish there seems to be consistently high. Every store had something exceptional.

Apple's failed game console, made by Bandai. It ran a cut down MacOS and was pretty much a Mac with a CD-ROM.

This is the first ever PV-1000 game I've ever seen in the flesh. My policy is generally only to own a few games for each system, ideally special ones. Otherwise the collecting would get out of hand. The PV-1000 doesn't have a flash cart yet, but I have created one that works in the emulator and I now have the real hardware, so this year hopefully I'll have it built up and working. The software for the PV-1000 is 95% done, the main issue is just trying to stop the hardware getting out of hand. I kind of want it to be a development system too, with a RAM chip I can load code into over a serial link to a computer, but that complicates it a lot...

That obscure Tomy 16 bit computer? Here are some games for it...

Here's another machine for which there is no flash cart, but which I am working on one. Only at the planning stage really, but the hardware isn't complex. The main issue is that is is very low resolution, so it's hard to make a decent menu...

January 11

A super rare PV-2000. This was a computer that used the same NEC chip at the heart of the PV-1000 games console, and the same CPU, but was otherwise incompatible due to having a different memory layout. The reason it has no keys is that the keyboard was a low cost sheet of plastic, and whatever it was made of proved to not be very durable. Basically all of them today have at best a badly rotted keyboard. Apparently people have been able to create new ones.

This isn't cheap, but it's a rare machine and it comes with a few games and BASIC. There was no BASIC in ROM. I think it just had a very basic tape loader.

Kitayama.

January 11

Among the cat community in the UK, it is well known that I am a reliable friend, always ready to make time for some fuss. Unfortunately the message doesn't seem to have translated well, as I've found Japanese cats to be somewhat timid.

According to NHK, cats have regional accents, so it could be a communication issue.

Here's a book about Freecad, an app that is currently at version 0.2x. They love books in Japan, and there are books on everything, even obscure open source software that is at the beta stage.

January 11

January 11

Sorry this is out of focus. I got these because there is no way currently to make a flash cart for the Cassette Vision. The console only has a video chip, the CPU, RAM, and ROM are all in the cartridge. What's more, they are all in one chip, which was designed for the previous generation of single game systems, by NEC I believe. Anyway, since the ROM is inside the chip and there is no need to ever read it out as the CPU is in there too, the ROMs have not been extracted. In theory, by dissolving the chip case with acid, it might be possible to read the data out.

Sango Station.

January 11

Setoshi Station.

January 11

January 11

Night Sight is kind of incredible. It looked more like the normal version in real life though.

Can you believe that nobody got Nagoya Station on the Railway Station Photos app? Well it's mine now!

View from the hotel window. I booked it via Yahoo on the train on the way back to Nagoya Station. Very easy. It was quite nice too. Not a fan of combined bath and toilet bathrooms, but on the 13th floor it was quiet. The pillow was super hard though.

Edited January 11 by mojo

January 11

Some interesting detail here. One thing I love about Japan is that there is evidence of someone caring everywhere. In the UK you don't get these little details at all.

January 11

So... Can someone tell me what this little hole under the platform is for? Lots of stations seem to have them on some lines.

500A is more than I expected, and apparently a lot less than it is capable of.

January 11

Some signage.

Unumajuku Station, unmanned.

January 11

A non-Sega Saturn. AFAIK there were two, this one from Victor and the Hi-Saturn from Hitachi. The latter I think had the MPEG decoder module built in. The reason the FMV on the Saturn and Playstation was poor was that neither had dedicated video decoding hardware, the CPUs had to do it. The MPEG card for the Saturn let you play Video CDs, which were mostly soft porn and bootlegs. Real movies came on Laserdisc and later DVD.

They had a really good library of PC-FX software. Thing is, all but 2 or 3 games on the PC-FX are dating sims, and the majority of them are at least a bit ecchi. Of the remaining 3, one has a rather young protagonist.