PROJECTS AND ARTICLES Retrieving Japanese Apple II programs

Living in Japan I've been searching for some time for Japanese programs for the Apple II or II j-plus. Recently I saw a small collection of original Apple II cassettes on Yahoo Auction (Japan) and I decided to bid on the off chance that some maybe Japanese specific...Anyway, I won, and as a bonus the seller included another 10 non-original (copied) cassettes. Thanks Nakano Eiji San.

I proceeded to backup everything by making digital .aif files of each cassette. To my delight many are indeed Japanese specific, although they do not need the Japanese character set which were present in the Apple II j-plus to display the Japanese KANA characters. After some audio manipulation using Audacity, the images below were captured using Virtual ][ and Open Emulator software.

Some of the programs are indeed just rebranded versions of foreign (US) programs, such as the Programma International titles which were rebranded under the ESD name. I have included these rebranded programs on my FTP site as some of them seem to have subtle differences from the originals.

Finally, I have salvaged some programs that are not shown in the images below, such as a cassette based copies of Floating Point Basic (Applesoft Basic?), and two different versions of Integer Basic with slightly different load addresses (200.3FFFR vs 200.3800R) from a company called Micom Center RAM (RAMsoft).

N.B. All the programs on my FTP site have the load addresses and launch address in the file name, and in general if the program needs Integer Basic or Floating-Point Basic this will also be included in the file name.

*After loading Renju, do a soft reset and then a ‘RUN’ command to run the game.
*Ack Ack, Speedway and Retreat, although Machine Code programs, specifically need Integer basic loaded. After entering Integer Basic do a ‘CALL 151’ to enter the monitor, and finally ‘200.2000R’ to load and run the games.
*Beneath Apple Manor seems to be the 3.3 DOS version saved to cassette. I have not been able to load this game direct from the cassette image as per the instructions on the tape. If anyone can prove me wrong, I’d love to hear from you.