Just making a short post to mention that I massively overhauled the formatting of the opening post to improve the verbiage and organization. I also found a good tool for running the games on Windows 10/11, since they’re pretty obnoxious about crashing when attempting to switch to fullscreen mode. Far better to just use an integer scaler in windowed mode (though that has its own funky quirks).
I believe that the use of an int scaler makes the game a lot easier to work with, particularly with regards to capturing gameplay footage with OBS on a multi-monitor setup.
I also found a blog of some sort, so that’s linked now. I also linked an archive.org copy of the old website on the argonian.jp or ninja.jp domain (can’t remember which). This would be useful for anyone who wants to download a copy of Hack9 Solid, since it’s now technically vaporware for those who are not Japanese literate (i.e. me).
Later I’ll try to get direct links to a Hack9 Solid download so nobody will have to do any Internet archaeology to get to it. I just don’t feel like it right now. I’m kinda tired.
However, I am somewhat excited. The frustrations of trying to run these games in fullscreen had prevented me from streaming them, but the Magpie scaler solves this issue beautifully.
Another to do for down the line is that I need to create a hacked save file for Hacker9, unless some enterprising soul wants to do the work for me. I described my method that I used to create the file for Hack9 earlier in this thread and I have full faith that the same technique will work for Hacker9.
No clue if it’ll work for Hack9 Solid though. That game is an odd fish, and it’s not yet translated. I hope somebody undertakes to translate it someday though. Failing that maybe folks in the Twitch Retro community will come up with a decent way to pipe the gameplay feed into Google Lens for real-time machine translation without a text hooker. I’ve had zero luck running any of these wahiko94 games through a text hooker. The memory management is pretty opaque and hard to understand.
Also, I noticed that wahiko94 recently posted a video for something that they called “hack9 (Trial Version 4)” (at least according to Google Translate). It looks different from everything I’ve seen thus far. I think it might be an entirely new game or possibly a new build of Hack9 Solid. I can’t really tell. It’s 3D like Hack9 Solid so maybe it’s a sequel to or new build of that.
Check out the video here: twitter.com/wahiko94 → “Hack9 Trial Version 4”
There’s also an older video concerning the same game “Hack9 Trial Version,” with some pretty awesome key art here:
twitter.com/wahiko94 → “Hack9 Trial Version”
These videos indicate that they seem to be implementing some Minecraft-y elements to whatever this Hack9 Trial Version game is.
I found many videos (links to Twitter):
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This is the art. You can really tell that wahiko has come into their own as a 2D artist. Probably from drawing reams of Uma Musume fan art, I’d wager.
