lolisamurai.neocities.org
Projects
things I build to keep old software alive
A full English patch for SYGNAS's 2007 Lucky★Star × THE iDOLM@STER desktop-accessory disc. Desktop mascots, a calendar companion, themed calculators, wallpapers and screensavers, all in English on real Windows XP, with the dead Google Calendar revived locally and no Google account needed. Ships only a tool + a delta that you apply to your own copy of the disc.
More preservation projects are in the pipeline. If you want to nudge a specific game or piece of software up the queue, that is what the Ko-fi is for.
Writeups
notes from inside the disc- 2026-06-23Reviving a dead 2007 calendar with no Google account
A native fake-Google server that speaks XP's own 2007 TLS stack. - 2026-06-23Three LZSS codecs hiding in one doujin disc
MINK, ACZ and PACKDATA: the SYGNAS container formats, cracked. - 2026-06-23The one-line bug, layered windows, and other field notes
The smaller discoveries that made the translation actually work. - 2026-06-23Why the installer ships its own font
Inno Setup only lays the wizard out correctly with MS PGothic, so the build bundles it. - 2026-06-24The screensavers that never ran, and the apology that already fixed them
The disc's four screensavers were gutted stubs; SYGNAS's own apology re-release brings them back.
About me
I lived through being a weeb on the early-2000s internet: the dial-up forums, the fansub IRC packs, the doujin discs you traded for, the desktop full of mascots and skinned calculators. A lot of that software was made by tiny circles for a tiny audience on hardware that no longer boots, and most of it is quietly rotting away on dead servers and out-of-print discs.
So I cherish it, and I try to keep it alive. I reverse-engineer the formats, translate the text, revive the parts that depended on services that have since died, and write down what I learn so the next person does not start from zero. When I am not doing that I dabble in a bit of game dev, and I grind MapleStory on stream.
The reverse-engineering work here is AI-assisted: I direct it, an agent does the format cracking and binary patching, and I verify every step on a real Windows XP box.