This is a hint file for the adult anime Windows game "SAKUWIN" (or SAKURANOMORI) from "Active". It is usually distributed as 9 ARJ files which should be partially de-ARJed and renamed in a setup directory (just for neatness), and then you run SETUP before play. The partial deARJ is because they put SAJWIN.001 inside SAKUWIN.ARJ, so rather than trust an installer (INSTALL.BAT), I pulled it out manually. Also, to conform to the ARJ naming conventions, I renamed the other files as SAKUWIN.A01 through A08. Make sure your directory listing of the SAKUWIN.A?? files lists them in the order .ARJ, .A01, ..., .A08. Otherwise, when the files are deARJed, some may be scrambled. Use the MOVE command in DOS (move files between two directories) to get the order correct. When it's all deARJed, you should have 15.1 MB (15.8 million bytes) in 91 files across 9 subdirectories. See below under "Extra Files" if you need to reclaim space. The game requires Windows 95 ("About" says something about Win95(32)), and either Japanese NLS or an equivalent like NJWIN to see the Japanese text. Run WSAKURA.EXE to start the game. The game has minimum 640 by 480 256-color VGA graphics, and automatically detects SoundBlaster-like cards (no problem with my SB 32 PnP) to play music (.MID files) and sound (.WAV files). Run the SETUP.EXE program first, and to make things easier, give it the install directory name as the place to go, so you can find the WSAKURA.EXE file later. To work SETUP.EXE: left-click to select, right-click to cancel and "back up". 3 or 4 graphic menu options: (there are 4 once you've installed the game, #1 starts the game, the others are one later than when there were 3) #1 is apparently the WSAKURA.EXE installer. Press OK. Then give it the same directory as SETUP.EXE to make things easier. Make sure the top line shows the correct directory name (double click in lower windows to set this). The two buttons on the right side are (top) OK, (bottom) Cancel. Press OK twice. It then starts the game in full screen mode, and there will be 4 options in Setup until you erase all the files. #2 has 4 options: #1 "Software Lineup", opens WordPad for the LINEUP04.DOC file. I'd Save it so you can look at it later, because Word 6.0 won't work on it in the original form! A very nice illustrated catalog! press OK. #2 "Member's", opens WordPad for the MEMBER07.DOC file. Again, I'd Save it (as Word 6.0) so you can look at it later, because Word 6.0 won't work on it in the original form! Looks like 8 scanned pages of a "members" newsletter consisting mostly of postcards with artwork on them. press OK. #3 puts you in the Windows Help file for the game #4 back up a level #3 exits The game (WSAKURA.EXE) has 3 window menus: F is just to exit the game S has two sub-menus S for screen size (the last entry F is full screen at whatever your current size is) F for font (leave it at the default unless you really like another one better) H also has two sub-menus H the Help file, nearly all in Japanese A is About. Unless you want to watch a repeating show of a girl knifing herself, click the mouse, wait for a new screen, and click again. You are now at the main game menu, with 5 options on the screen. They are: load a saved game game 1 game 2 game 3 game 4 checkpoint (last valid location, maintained automatically) start a new game restart introduction photoshop and jukebox photoshop (nothing shown until enabled) jukebox (resets to song #1 when selected) next song of 22 (wraps around) previous song of 22 (wraps around) back up level back up to main menu Exit game Yes Cancel Again, left-click to select, right-click to back up or cancel. While playing the game, a blinking down triangle in the bottom left corner is your signal to keep advancing the text. Left-click advances, right-click will hide the text overlay and bring up a popup system menu (sub-menu options are just as in the main menu above): load a saved game save a game (one of 4 saved games) Exit game Aside from using or to replace a left-click, I found no way to quickly advance the text. Unfortunately, while you can save the game in the middle of sexy graphics, loading will put you back several (or many) screens before that. On some "full-screen" screens, right-clicking will not only temporarily remove the text overlay, it will also cause the graphics to scroll. Right or left click again to go back to "normal". In this game you are a pink-haired girl at, no surprise, a Japanese high school. Along with the usual horny students, there is a girl with long brown hair and a semi-transparent red piece of clothing. She might be the ghost of the same girl who killed herself in the introduction. The game has a few menu choices in it, but they are mostly limited to "must do all the options several times before moving on", or "choose where you go next". I don't know if there are multiple endings, because it took several hours to go through once. Going by the structure of the saved game files, there are 24 stages in the game, and whenever you load a saved game it puts you at the beginning of a stage. So you may have a lot of clicking to get back to where you actually saved the game. I played part of it with kanji, part without, and didn't miss much either way. When you play through the game completely once, after a picture of a girl doing something to the young guy, you have to sit through a "Staff" listing. The photoshop is enabled when you get back to the main menu. The file that controls the photoshop is SAKUCON.SAV, and its only 14 bytes long, so you can easily create one in a binary file editor. Contents (in hex) are: $29EF 4E82 CC93 6D00 0100 0000 0000 I've tried with zero length files and other contents, and they don't work. Just use these values. The photoshop appears to be all the sexy images in the game, including a few I didn't want to see again (two of dead girls, ick!). While you view the photoshop, it asks you after every picture if you want to continue or exit. Top option is continue, bottom is exit photoshop. The full-screen scrolling pictures want you to click once to scroll back when they stop. The game uses ACTIVEJP.INI in your \Windows directory to tell itself where the data files are for the game, and some window settings. Just so you can delete it if you ever want to expunge all trace of this game from your computer. EXTRA FILES ----------- You can delete the SAKUWIN.001 file in the SAKUWIN directory - it isn't needed once you've installed the other SAKUWIN.A?? files. It's read-only though. There were a LOT of extra files included with this one which have nothing to do directly with playing the game. They're in the "Info" and "_Omake" directories. Over half the 9 disks worth of stuff is in there. The SAKUWIN\_omake\Picture\Tato1?.jpg files (?=5 and 6) are slightly wrong. They include a Macintosh header which prevents them from being displayed by most JPG display programs. Use a binary file editor to delete the first 128 ($80) bytes, and these two pictures should work fine. Well, 15 has really strange colors... File SAKUWIN\_omake\if.lzh contains an IF.JPG file that's better than the existing IF080H.JPG file. However, IF.JPG needs to have the first 128 bytes deleted, just like TATO15.JPG above. Delete IF.LZH if you don't want to read the IF.DOC file. File SAKUWIN\_omake\magen2.lzh contains a MAGEN2.JPG file which may display as if it is damaged on some viewers, while others show it correctly. Delete MAGEN2.LZH if you don't want to read the MAGEN2.DOC file. The SAKUWIN\_omake graphics files are in several different formats - TIF, BMP, and JPG. The TIF ones (BOMBER?.TIF) happen to already be smaller than a GIF version! However, the BMP ones do end up much smaller when converted to GIF. BOMBER4.TIF didn't want to display properly in one of my utilities, but it was fine in others. The SAKUWIN\_omake\_omakeif\_omake_1.lzh file apparently contains the photoshop files for IF3. Without the game, I guess you could try file renaming with IF1 to get to see these pictures. Then again, file renaming might make the "missing" photoshop in IF1 available too. Just a thought - need to follow up on this! File SAKUWIN\_omake\ACTLIST.DOC apparently is a list of "Active" products and their release dates and formats. Looks like the SAKUWIN game is #15, and there is only one other Windows 95 product in the list, #16. The two LARGE .DOC files in the INFO directory don't work with Word 6.0, at first. You have to use SETUP.EXE to open and view them. Decide if you want to save them while viewing. "Save" or "Save As" will work. If you have the Susie graphics viewer, the TS1.EDO and EDOFILE.PAK files contain images for this game, although there is only 1 in TS1.EDO. You need the Active plug-in for Susie to see the images. There are also images in the _OMAKE\PC98 files MG3_98D.LZH and SAKURA98.LZH files, although the SAKURA98 ones you've seen already... If you have anything to add to this file, let me know. Pete Karsanow - bishoujo.helper[AT}sbcglobal{DOT)net http://www.geocities.com/hentaihelper/