Computer Historian

Title: Guardian Heroes / ガーディアンヒーローズ

Developer: Treasure / Youmex / Imagica / Kusanagi

Publisher: Sega

Release date: 26 January 1996

Catalogue No.: GS-9031

Genre: Fighting RPG

One of Treasure's first true master pieces in my opinion. Guardian Heroes is a story-based side-scrolling slash'em up that really uses the Saturn's 2D capabilities. The game features some of the biggest 2D enemies ever seen in a Saturn game, with some of them being the actual height of the screen !! As well as the standard story mode, where up to 4 players can simultaneously play, there is a versus mode where up to 6 players can simultaneously battle it out as long as you have a multitap.

It Came From The Desert / Wings

Title: Mr. Gimmick! / ギミック！

Developer/Publisher: Sunsoft

Release date: 31 January 1992

Genre: Platform Action

Gimmick (or Mr. Gimmick in function of the region of the game) is a platformer game released by Sunsoft only in Japan and Scandinavia in the early '90s. Despite the fact that more modern consoles were out, the game was developed for the NES and takes the system to its extreme limits, which is always a cool thing to see even nowadays for anyone who played lots of various NES games.

The story is pretty simple, yet quite original. A little girl receives a doll for her birthday, and as he immediately becomes her favourite, her other toys got jealous and captured the girl in another world.

You control the little doll which has apparently no other name than "Gimmick" in order to rescue the girl. It's very weird that the hero of a game is a doll, and that is a very cute doll! I really love him, he's all round and has enormous eyes, it looks like he's always trying to look serious but somewhat completely fails at it and this is very cute (exactly like animals). All enemies are various enemy toys and dolls as well; this makes the game have its own particular look and graphics style.

Unfortunately, the only weapon available to Gimmick seems to be one of the worst I ever seen in any platformer: He has (and only has) the ability to slowly create a star over his head and throw it in a totally unpractical and unpredictable trajectory. Once a star has been created it's impossible to re-create another before the first vanishes. This makes the game very hard because it's hard to hit enemies, and this method of attacking is slow and weak. You can ride a star as well to reach places you can't just reach by jumping, but this is very risky as it moves weirdly. You can also collect 3 types of items, bombs, fireballs and potions, and all of them have a one-time use, and you can't get more than 3 items altogether. Those additional types of attacks are also slow and unpredictable, and you can only use them once so it's really hard relying on those.

As previously mentioned, the graphics of Gimmick seems really good compared to other NES games, it's very cartoonish and childish and very cute. It's quite a lot detailed. The sky with clouds looks almost real, and you even see birds moving in the horizon, something you don't usually see on the NES. Graphics still lacks variation sometimes and they flicker a lot.

The music in Gimmick is really excellent for the most part and doesn't sound like most NES games does. It mirrors perfectly how the game is, a little childish and a little insane/vicious at the same time. The boss music is really noticeable (if you can survive long enough to hear it). Also, the Japanese version of the game has enhanced music as opposed to the PAL version, because the cartridge has special sound hardware (the Sunsoft 5B).

So why should we care?

You need to know where your own files are.

I've got a file on a flash drive that's been handed to me, or an archival data CD/DVD/Bluray, or maybe it's a big heavy USB external hard drive and I need to make a copy of it on my local machine.

Do I know how to navigate to that portable media device within a file browser?

Where will I put that data on my permanent media (e.i. my laptop's hard drive)?

How will I be able to reliably find it again?

We'll cover more of the Why and How, but this will take some time, and a few addendum posts because I'm actively hitting the character limit and I've rewritten this like 3 times.

Let's start with file structure

Files live on drives: big heavy spinning rust hard drives, solid state m.2 drives, USB flash drives, network drives, etc. Think of a drive like a filing cabinet in an office.

You open the drawer, it's full of folders. Maybe some folders have other folders inside of them. The folders have a little tab with a name on it showing what's supposed to be in them. You look inside the folders, there are files. Pieces of paper. Documents you wrote. Photographs. Copies of pages from a book. Maybe even the instruction booklet that came with your dishwasher.

We have all of that here, but virtualized! Here's a helpful tree structure that Windows provides to navigate through all of that. In the case of Windows, it's called Explorer. On OSX MacOS, the equivalent is called Finder.

I don't have to know where exactly everything is, but I have a good idea where thing *should* based on how I organize them. Even things that don't always expose the file structure to you have one (like my cellphone on the right). I regularly manually copy my files off of my cellphone by going to the Camera folder so I can sift through them on a much bigger screen and find the best ones to share. There are other reasons I prefer to do it that way, but we won't go into that here. Some people prefer to drag and drop, but that doesn't always work the same between operating systems. I prefer cut and paste.

We all have to get work done on a computer, be it for our dayjobs, school work, and of course general paperwork for surviving in today's modern existence. Paperless society or not, paperwork persists.

Not every document can be filled out in an online form, and even if they did, you probably want digital and physical copies of important documents that you will need later. Tax paperwork, your syllabus for each class, resumes, rental applications, car payments, loans, mortgages, insurance, etc.

You can't always rely on "show recent files" feature of an application to give you a clear indication of that file you just saved [gestures vaguely] somewhere.

You can't always trust that the file search feature is going to be helpful at finding the things you're after.

If you come to rely on these tools, and one day they break after a migration to a new computer or operating system, suddenly you can't find that one PDF talking about your health benefits from when you got that new job 5 years ago.

I know some folks prefer metadata tags on things rather than hunting for the files in question, but that isn't always going to be possible on some systems. Corporate/school environments won't necessarily give you this option. If they want you to go find a file that's kept in shared drive X:, you will need to understand how to traverse their folder structure to go find it. File searches in these situations tend to fail spectacularly, or they go slower than molasses because they aren't all pre-indexed. Up until recently, we had a networked Google drive at my job that Windows file search could not find anything in sooner than 10 minutes.

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I should define the concept of the desktop (I don't mean like desktop vs. laptop). Much like my file cabinet/folder analogy from before, we'll use a desk concept. Pretend I'm at a school desk and it's the 1960s. I've got a few things in front of me, maybe some colored pencils for drawing. Maybe a nice pen for writing. A calculator slide rule for doing math. Maybe a notebook, a tiny calendar, and a book from the library.

Each of those items are arranged on the top of my desk for easy access. Each one serves a specific purpose, and with my desktop, I can have a few of them out at once if I'm doing work that needs more than one at a time. Maybe I want to read a section in the book to write down notes on paper. Maybe I want to draw a graph with the colored pencils. The idea is that all of these tools are at the ready, easily visible and arrangeable for the task at hand.

So too goes for a computer desktop. I've got icons that are shortcuts to let me start a web browser, a media player, a video game, a text editor, a drawing program. I've got a taskbar at the bottom to keep track of all the things I'm actively doing. I can manage not only my workload, but the computer's workload. All from my desktop! I can even make shortcuts (we'll get to those) to places that I frequently want to visit that have files relevant to what I'm doing.

But more importantly, I can store things on the desktop. It's a just a fancy folder like before. However, I highly recommend against getting into that habit. You could pile every song, picture, and pdf you had on the desktop. And that'd be fine for 10, maybe 50 files at most but if you've got 1000 files? That ain't gonna work.

You especially do not want to store most of your files on the desktop (even in folders you made on the desktop) if you're using a networked domain Windows account (like what you would be issued at work or school). Because it's slow. Every file you save there has to be loaded again on login, which has to come from a central server across a building, or maybe even miles away to get to you. If you aren't always using the same computer each time like I did in college, each time you log in, all of those files may have to be locally cached on that computer before you can start to do anything. I've seen this first hand at my old job, some employees waited like 5 minutes from logging in before they could start doing any work. They had a bad time, until I showed them a better place to keep those files.

Lets talk about Shortcuts with some visual assistance from @ms-dos5 who's providing screenshots for me to use (thanks for the help!)

See that little arrow on the bottom left corner of these icons? These are shortcuts to files that exist somewhere else. The good news is that we can see where that is with a little effort.

All of these shortcuts take up very little drive space, a proverbial spec of dust compared to the actual file they're a shortcut to. If I copy them to some other location, I'm not actually copying the file, just a link to that file somewhere else. If I wanted to send that readme to a friend over discord, or put it in a network share, they'd get a tiny little useless shortcut file, rather than the actual readme text file.

I want to see where those files actually exist, because maybe there's some config file I want to check or modify. Let's go to properties and follow the breadcrumbs.

Ah, okay. The real file is located elsewhere, so let's copy that path (a name for the folder structure on display here) and see what else is stored there.

Here we go. This is the file I was after. Now I can copy or move this with the certainty that this is the real deal. Note how under "Type" it says "Text Document" or "Application" or something specific rather than just "Shortcut".

So, final takeways:

Play around with your computer. Your cellphone interface obfuscates how alot of these things work, but a laptop or desktop computer will provide a far better playground for you to try traversing your file structure a bit to see where things are

Arrange your files in ways that make sense to you

Don't be afraid to poke around in folders and see what's stored where, just try not to delete anything that you don't understand

Ask someone proficient to show you in person how they organize their files, because demonstrations tend to work a bit better

Own your computer, own your files, and take control

A computer, phone, tablet, whatever, is a tool. You are supposed to be in charge of the tool. By knowing where things are stored and how to get to them, this puts you in charge of the computer. It's harder on modern smartphones, because they want to simplify things so much that it takes away any chance of control, but the concepts are still in places like app folders and photo albums. Don't be afraid to poke around in Windows Explorer/File Explorer/Finder/Nautilus/Thunar/ls in a *nix command prompt/whatever cloud service you use (the cloud is just folders on someone else's computer!). You don't necessarily need to understand why things work, just how. Exploration and curiosity are your friend, no matter how old you are.

You can download it and its expansion as omnipedia.toast_.sit and omnipedia_2.cdr_.sit here or here (the manual, omnipedia.pdf, can be found here or here), and run it on modern systems by following the instructions below the images.

Open this in-browser emulator.

Drag one of the two files you downloaded onto the emulated desktop.

Open The Outside World, then Downloads, and open the file you'll find there. Wait patiently while its contents are extracted. (If nothing new appears afterwards, close and re-open Downloads.)

Drag the new file (the .sit or .cdr file) into Uploads in The Outside World. Wait patiently for your browser to suddenly download it in a .zip file.

Repeat the previous three steps with the other file.

Close the emulator's tab or window and open this other in-browser emulator.