Remember how fun it was to pointlessly interact with your computer programs, back when access to the internet was not something unheard of, but still quite limited? It was a time when many PCs were presented as with multimedia capabilities, a term that never seemed able to retain a concise meaning. It was also a time when having floppy disks or CD-ROMs with promotional goodies was simply fun, from exploring the directories and files to actually using the files for their intended purpose.

My first experience with a computer was around 1995, and it started right away with programs like Microsoft Encarta, the McZee ones, screenmates like sheep.exe, and many other things. Back then, my relationship with Japanese media was nearly non-existent. I had watched some anime, but my access to it was too limited. I had no idea that so much software related to it had been developed, and only recently I learned that sheep.exe was based on the character of an animated series owned by Fuji TV.

This year, I started exploring the Internet Archive in search of CD-ROM images with content that could be biasedly regarded as otaku at first sight, to try out on a Windows VM. A Japanese version of Windows 98 to be precise, because as I found out pretty quickly by hex dumping, much of the text found in old Japanese computer files seem to be encoded in JIS X 0201 and Shift JIS. That includes the file names. I wanted to run this old software as smoothly as possible and display the text without much hassle while “actually” using an old version of Windows: with both old software and encoding systems it’s usually best to rely on what’s been made specifically to support them out of the box to avoid wasting time.

And now for your viewing pleasure, a short video with some of the stuff I found, installed, and recorded:

Sorry for uploading it to YouTube, but I wanted to use a song from that era without it getting taken down by a DMCA request. Record companies are too protective of their music. Also, this was originally meant for a now cancelled project, hence why the word “yokai” can be seen so often in the video.

The footage I included is from:

• Pita-Ten Desktop Accessory
• serial experiments lain BOOTLEG
• Neon Genesis Evangelion Collector’s Disc
• Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou Desktop Accessory
• Slayers Hyper
• Chobits Accessories
• Taiho Shichauzo Story Screen Saver
• Digimon Adventure 02 Mailer & Accessory Collection
• Love Hina Digital Toybox
• Kino No Tabi: The Beautiful World Desktop Accessory
• FLCL Collector’s Disc
• Let’s Play With Sakura!

I also found software related to Martian Successor Nadesico, Tsukihime, and a few other works.

These CDs often bundled random image and video files, character dialogue recorded by voice actors, virtual pets for your desktop, minigames, screensavers, figure catalogs, mouse cursors, icons, calculators, notepads, clocks, Windows themes, and much more. The most fascinating ones included mini-encyclopedias packed with all sorts of information presented in a way that Fandom sites could only dream of: the Slayers Hyper ones even have lists of the spells used in the series, notes of the author, a map of the continent the series take place in, etc.

An interesting case is Di Gi Charat Mail Software, probably the most “useful” of all the stuff I checked out, in a productivity sense. It seems it’s an email client that supports SMTP and POP3, with a gamified design that let’s you unlock stuff for your tiny character. Sadly, the software is so old it has no knowledge of modern cryptographic protocols (and you shouldn’t use software this ancient to access the internet, honestly.) You could technically use it unencrypted with a locally hosted mail server, though, just to test.

I hope you enjoyed watching these ancient things as much as I did. Now if you excuse me, I need to install Magic School Bus Explores The Human Body to ease my nostalgia.