Pasofami emulator author Nobuaki ANDOU has passed away

https://twitter.com/gdri/status/995503617258946561
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA005758/


The message was written by one of Nobuaki's sons. It says his father had been struggling with stomach cancer for some time, and unexpectedly passed away on May 6th. It also states that his father, best to his knowledge, was still actively developing and supporting Pasofami. Google Translate does an OK job for this, but I'll have something more accurate/eloquent provided later tonight when I see my neighbour who can translate it accurately. Edits/exclusions above are my own.

This emulator and story may not mean much to folks who weren't around during the emulation heyday in the late 90s (Pasofami was originally released sometime between February and August 1996) but for those who were, it should hold some weight. Pasofami was a commercial emulator for Windows and was known for being quite fast/efficient for its time. It (or possibly Super Pasofami (SNES/SFC emulator) done by the same author) gained some notoriety outside of Japan, since it was known to contain copy protection that when triggered (and apparently sometimes erroneously) would recursively delete C:\WINDOWS. Regardless, Mr. ANDOU will always be considered one of the original NES/Famicom emulation pioneers.

Wow. What a blast from the past. Yeah; I remember Pasofami pretty well. Back in the day when ROMs were rare and you had to juggle among iNES, Pasofami, Nesticle, and fwNES.

Pour one out for a homey.

Sorry this took me a bit of time, work has been swamped and I hadn't a chance to see my neighbour until this evening. As promised:

Original Japanese:


English translation:


^[1]: The term 製品版製作 (seihinbang seisaku) is used here, which can refer to several different things.
^[2]: The description given here in Japanese is intentionally vague, so it's hard to discern what exactly is meant by this.
^[3]: The term 連絡先 (renrakusaki) is used here, which is somewhat vague in this context; may mean "contact information" as well.

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. Superscripted items are from my own notes during discussion with the translator.

Weird... Was this software you had to pay for? I don't really see the point when there are so many viable NES emulators for free.

Because when this came out, the free emulators did not even exist yet.

But, why didn't he change his business model long long ago?

Also, what does "paso" mean?

I think emulators have just about been declared completely legal, but asking money for one still feels... I don't know... grimey maybe? I'm sure it was a whole other landscape back then though, so I shouldn't really be commenting...

Really sucks for this person's son. It sounds like they don't quite know what to do, but at least they're trying to fix everything up rather than taking the money and running.


"Paso" on this because there are tons of other emulators for free.

Personal Computer -> パーソナルコンピュータ → パソコン -> パソ -> Paso
Famicom -> ファミコン -> ファミ -> Fami

For example, in USA, Sony's loss to Connectix in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sealed that. I don't know about any analogous case law in Japan, but Atlus, Jaleco, and Konami did use an NES emulator originating from the GBA homebrew scene for rereleases of their NES games.


I remember Pasofami ROMs coming as three files: PRG ROM, CHR ROM (optional) and a board description. Was the format of the last of these ever documented?

Marat Fayzullin's NESLIST is named by ucon64's source code as the documentation of PasoFami's .PRM file. It seems that most of the bytes signal emulator hacks and do not describe the cartridge hardware. At some point, Pasofami started supporting the iNES format, so I assume that most mappers cannot be represented in .PRM at all.

At this rate, I'm going to have to start keeping a list of all of Espozo's posts that demonstrate failures in the generational gap. *chuckle* ;-) I knew this type of thing would happen (speaking generally, not about Espozo), because for whatever reason, the younger gens really don't seem to care about learning about the history of how things got to where they are now (this is especially the fields of retro console dev, emulation, and romhacking).

It's pretty simple really: when talking about (or asking questions about) something that relates to "a thing that began {in the past, before I was born, before I was old enough to get interested in it}", the thought at the forefront of your mind every single time should be: "how things are today are probably not how things were then". This in turn should make you ask questions to learn, not make ignorant statements like "you had to pay for it?! but there are so many free NES emulators!" The state of emulation and emulators today is absolutely nothing like what it was in 1996.

And as I said, Mr. ANDOU was certainly a NES/FC emulation pioneer -- one of the first. If you weren't around during that time, or if you were but weren't part of nesdev or emulation communities, then yes, a lot of this is going to be eye-opening. It's actually quite sad how so many of the original pioneers have been ignored; the giants upon whose shoulders today's emulator authors stand have been forgotten. When I met with JoeGtake2 for his The New 8-Bit Heroes documentary (the footage of which was not used), most of what I talked about with him was exactly that. I was sure to mention many names of the original nesdev/RE/homebrew and emulation participants, names which now only seem to exist in what might as well be considered the Dead Sea Scrolls -- because all of those folks deserve mention.

Anyway... Two other things I wanted to mention (one relates to Espozo's comment sort of, while the other doesn't):

1. What isn't exactly made clear in the Japanese text written by Mr. ANDOU's son: there are certain words and phrasing used (mainly in Item 1) that imply Mr. ANDOU may have been hired or doing some sort of general emulation work for clients. This is completely speculative, but it may indicate that people were hiring him or buying parts of PasoFami's core to use in other products (likely commercial). I do not want this paragraph to cause a bunch of grassy-knoll-shooter type theories. But this is a good example of what happens when someone (esp. with children) passes away without the details of things being passed (to family, a family attorney who handles such matters, etc.): those unaware are left confused about the nature of what the deceased was doing, and there is an uncomfortable nebulous feeling to it all, often occurring alongside the grieving process. It's difficult to explain, and even more difficult to go through (hopefully none of you do). As such, I think some of the vague wording is understandable.

2. I'm aware of Japanese cultural aspects (both personal and social) regarding death and the passing of someone, and did my best to have a decent translation done while respecting those. Sometimes depending on the nature of the situation, it can be a walk-on-eggshells type of thing, so I always approach it with respect.

Thanks.

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.

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).

Sad to hear about that.

I agree that younger people can be more educated on recent history, but regardless of age, very few people care about retro console dev, emulation, and romhacking, and that's coming from someone who is. I get the notion that you find this to be a failure somewhere in society, but you can't expect people to care about something as niche as this. I hear classic car fans complain about the same thing, and that's far less obscure. Maybe I'm misinterpreting your criticism.

Fair points, but in actuality, it's not society I'm necessarily expecting it from -- it's you, as someone who is part of the niche. :-) Society and I have never seen eye-to-eye.

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."


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).

Is it safe to use the last released version on Western operating systems now, or should I still expect to have C:\WINDOWS wiped?

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.

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)