Isn't she just Misunderstood? The Casio Loopy | Hacker News Reader

Isn't she just Misunderstood? The Casio Loopy

nicole.express

132 pointszdw41 comments

90s and 00s Japan was truly another world. This represents well the diversity of ideas for an electronic device.

Nowadays everything is just a smartphone or tablet from 2 or 3 relevant manufacturers. Boring.

Sony is a shadow of it’s former self even though PlayStation is a success, and Casio is tiny and only focuses on niches (watches, instruments).

Isn't it a natural course for most industries ? it starts like a wild and creative jungle, then settles on a small set of solutions.

Japan in nineties also seen the most absurd property bubble, which has only met its peer now in Chinese property bubble.

Japan in nineties also seen the peak of the most absurd corporate culture in the world, which was a strange broken phone image of the Western one.

Japan in nineties was been a capital of vice on size unseen since Sodom and Gomorrah.

Japan in nineties was more ambitious, and more crazy, but in a bad way.

What Japanese buddies of mine tell of it — "Nineties were a time when foreigners wanted to get into Japan, and Japanese wanted to get out"

Can you elaborate on the vice part? My mental image of Japan in that period is pretty conformist. Which kind of vice was rampant?

Probably sexual - the 'tentacle porn' stereotype must come from somewhere.

Well, it's at least 200 years old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...

Not that in particular, it's Japan turning from an easy going, and simple society into a polar opposite, obsessed with profit, and stimulation like some worst gambling addicts

That is surprising, given Japan's reputation pre-1945. I guess their equivalent of the baby boom generation was an outlier in terms of drive?

It was. The post-war conditions, with the cooperation of American occupying forces, made Japan scramble to reinvent itself from a militaristic industrial power(from the Meiji period until 1945) into a consumer corporate economy with strong export businesses, and it did so in a top-down collective fashion - which has made external observers remark things to the effect of "it seems like Japan is stuck in the 1950's", since the model remained in place, everything in lock-step, for decades. This can be studied through the history of the major companies that emerged from that period like the auto manufacturers(Toyota, Honda) and electronics companies(Casio, Philips, Sony, Roland and more). This culture is also reflected in more detail through prominent figures in the boom generation that came of age in the 70s, e.g. Hayao Miyazaki(animation) and Shigeru Miyamoto(games) - both extremely driven, fastidious types.

The model worked and created the "economic miracle", but it also set the stage for an enormous property bubble in the 80s. I recommend reading "Japan, inc." to get a sense of the bubble period in the form of a manga focused on finance and economics. Ever since the bubble burst, Japan could be described as "unmotivated" - a combination of being chained to the structure of existing institutions and seeing demographic declines set in earlier than other nations. While the country is still known for a fastidious corporate culture, the demographics are catching up with it now and suggest what things will look like in countries facing population decline going forward.

Japanese property bubble was the late Eighties. Stock market tanked in 1990, real estate followed in 1991. Most of the Eighties I heard "The Japanese are taking over America. They're winning an economic war."

Doc (1955): "No wonder this circuit failed; it says 'Made in Japan'."

Marty (1985): "What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."

Casio did make at least one smart phone around 2014. It was ruggedized and waterproof. Not very powerful and the operating system was out of date the day it came out, but I remember it fondly. It was great for fieldwork, since I didn't have to worry if it got wet slogging through streams or busted against riprap on the way up the bank.

I've never seen this before, and it's fantastic! A games console with a printer??

It printed stickers. The idea that you could play a game and end up with something tangible, that you could then exhibit or share with friends, is just groundbreaking. Even as a niche product, it should have been a huge success!

What went wrong? It was marketed at girls, and maybe girls weren't enough into gaming at the time...? Or maybe the games didn't take full advantage of the hardware? Or maybe the marketing wasn't good enough? What a pity...

Here's another article: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-15-in-the-loopy-t...

This is fascinating. I was one of the biggest collectors of video games in the late 90s and early 2000s. I would have shit like the 64DD shipped overnight on day of release.

But I never even heard of the Casio Loopy until today.

Now I want one.

> A games console with a printer??

How about that game boy printer?

Yeah but it was always just an add on, and it's hard to design games for an accessory that maybe 10% of players will have - it's just not worth the effort. If you know that 100% of your userbase will own something, then it can become the core of your experience and design.

In similar vein, Microsoft killed Kinect when they announced that it will no longer be bundled with the Xbox One - suddenly it went from a "must" in terms of integration, to an optional feature that was nearly always cut from any project, since you couldn't guarantee the player would even have it.

Truly an NFT before that became a thing 20'ish years later...

* NFT in this context a Non fungible THING.

I love the writing flourish of having an introductory paragraph that follows the common stylistic form of making some kind of broad point that the following paragraphs will flesh out, only to pull the rug out and cheerfully admit it was just a bunch of rambling with no connection to the rest of the text.

I thought it was a direct bit or foreshadowing for the later paragraph:

>Which leaves us in a bit of a pickle. I am not a preteen Japanese girl. As a child, I wasn’t really into stickers as their impermanence bothered me. So I’m not sure I can judge this console fairly…

>But hey, since when has that stopped me?

>I think had Nintendo somehow ended up in a Philips-like deal with Casio, a port of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe to the Loopy may have been a success. Someone get on that.

1995 was just after Nintendo got burned twice by the Sony and Philips CD-drive deals. The likelihood of them doing another partnership like that with Casio would have been in "when hell freezes over" territory.

Hadn’t been nintendo to break up with sony, causing the first psx?

I consider Casio one of the few under-exposed brands in the world. You could credibly taken them into several other adjacent product areas than the ones they currently occupy.

They have some of the most brilliant low-cost electronic musical instruments around.

Casio fx991 is the best scientific calculator there is, and it is cheap.

The FX-115ESPLS2 is really good as well, I think it's pretty much the same as the one you mentioned but more available in the United States.

I wish Casio made earbuds. I doubt they'd have the best sound and they probably wouldn't be very comfortable (no different from the competition) and they surely would be no sartorial revelation.

But they would last forever and they would actually work reliably. I'd buy a pair, happily.

Rachel Weil, who started the FEMICOM Museum to highlight "girls games", has done extensive research on the Loopy. There's a good overview of her work on this recent episode of the Video Game History Hour podcast: https://gamehistory.org/ep-58-femicom-museum/. She has done a lot of work placing these games in context and defending their importance. Some of these sold in huge numbers but have basically no coverage in the traditional retro gaming spaces.

Unfortunately, the FEMICOM Museum website seems to be down right now (http://femicom.org/).

It prints in full colour? For the 90s that’s pretty amazing to have that feature in a game console.

How does the printer work? Is it laser or inkjet or something else? Did you need to buy toner or ink?

Seems it's multicolor thermal tape to me.

Thanks friend! I did not know such a thing existed.

The Okimate series of printers (C64, Atari, etc.) printed in colour with this method as well.

> Even the high score concept is foreign to a man who doesn’t know about the modern arabic numerals

I used to work for an Arab guy back in the day. He wasn't very familiar with Roman numerals but what we call Arabic numerals, he calls Indian numerals.

On topic: thanks, I didn't know about this console. I do remember (fondly) their tiny handhelds, though

Yeah, I found that fascinating too when I first found out about it: the Arabs invented the concept of decimal numbers, but the characters they use are mostly completely different: 0 is just a dot, 1 is a more or less vertical line, the only number instantly recognizable is the 9 (https://www.lexisrex.com/Arabic-Numbers/1-100)

> the Arabs invented the concept of decimal numbers

No, it was invented by Indian mathematicians.

No, the Arabs didn't invent it. al-Khwarzimi, a Persian scholar, introduced it into the Arab world with his book: "On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals" around 820 CE.

The Hindu Bakhshali manuscript carbon-dated to between 200-400 CE, uses the "shunya" or zero symbol both as a placeholder in the decimal place-value system, and as a numeral involved in computations.

Turn 2 and 3 on their side and they become our version.

I can definitely see how 4 could become our version, especially if it needed to be written in a way that distinguishes it from epsilon as it spread into Europe.

TIL Europeans called them "Arabic" numerals because they were in use in parts of the Arab world and popularized by a Persian mathematician (who called them "Hindu numerals")

I also wasn't aware that they are a relatively recent invention from somewhere between 1st-4th century.

The Hitachi (now Renesas) SuperH family was pretty good for its time. A project I worked on the mid to late 90s used one and it was great to develop for. Even the assembler code was understandable for someone like me coming from a Motorola 68000 background.

It also came with an add-on video capture "word processor": https://youtu.be/OpZ2AKfOw2k

Hilarious. Make a whole console instead of an accessory...

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