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The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus

https://www.journaldulapin.com/2025/05/17/the-lost-japanese-rom-of-the-macintosh-plus-which-isnt-lost-anymore/
111•ecliptik•4h ago

Comments

hoherd•4h ago
Coincidentally I had never heard of KanjiTalk until earlier this week when I stumbled across it on infinite mac.

https://infinitemac.org/1996/KanjiTalk%207.5.3

msephton•2h ago
I'm the nerd that requested this be added to Infinite Mac, as there's a lot of great Japanese software. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43607153
JKCalhoun•1h ago
Wild. There was a Japanese port of Glider 4.0 to Japanese. (Sadly I have only the box and manual, no floppy. I am not sure I ever had it — be nice to find that rare binary out there.)
npunt•1h ago
If you ever find it, folks at https://68kmla.org should be able to help
msephton•26m ago
I have a demo of 4.06 that's probably Japanese. I'll check soon https://www.gingerbeardman.com/mmm/#Glider%204
ChilledTonic•4h ago
The fact that this was machine translated was surprising as it was remarkably readable! Interesting how far that tech has come while I wasn’t looking.
userbinator•3h ago
I read your comment after the article and didn't believe it. JP>EN is one of the trickiest pairs for MT and there are usually interesting phrases, understandable but distinctive, that would appear even if an actual human did it.
Pfiffer•3h ago
It was originally written in french
userbinator•3h ago
That makes sense, FR>EN is far easier and even Google Translate has been doing a decent job of that for a long time.
dwood_dev•3h ago
LLMs are quite good at translation. You can even instruct them to use different linguistic styles and regional idioms.

They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.

AnotherGoodName•3h ago
To be clear, it's the original purpose of LLMs.

The whole LLM scene today came about because context was really important to translations. The "attention is all you need" paper was by the Google Translation team as they came up with ideas to improve how to map context of words and carry them across in translations.

At some point people started asking the translation to "translate from English to English as if you're an AI assistant".

Anyway it shouldn't surprise anyone that LLMs are good at translation. The real surprise to everyone is how powerful translation engines that understood context could be!

pests•38m ago
One distinction is the original transformer was an encoder/decoder while (most?) LLMs today are encoder only.

The translation transformer also was able to peek ahead in the context window while (most?) LLM's now only consider previous tokens.

jimbokun•1h ago
It also makes sense that they would be good at translating from English to programming languages, for the same reasons.
TMWNN•36m ago
>They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.

You see this with recent automated translation on YouTube. If the creator of (say) an English-language video doesn't upload subtitles, YouTube automatically creates them based on the audio, but they lack punctuation and have nonsense phrases. The AI-driven translation of those subtitles to other languages cleans up the text along the way, so the end result is that non-English speakers get better subtitles than English speakers.

nxobject•56m ago
For what it’s worth, this wasn’t the first Japanese-localized Mac with Kanji fonts - Canon modified a 512k Mac by adding an extra ROM board and called ugh the Dynamac.

http://g00nejp.fc2web.com/Macintosh_CM/index.html

zdw•51m ago
There's also a 1MB EEPROM mod you can do on a Mac Plus that gives you a built-in ramdisk: https://www.bigmessowires.com/mac-rom-inator/

I wonder if one could put this larger ROM, and the other files into a custom built image so no swaps are required.

phire•34m ago
Apple actually shipped the Mac Classic with a built-in romdisk, accessed by holding command+option+x+o

They had enough room left in the 512KB ROM to fit a 357KB boot disk a stripped down System 6.0.3 and a few useful tools (MacsBug and AppleShare Prep)

zahlman•5m ago
IIRC it also included some (low-res, B&W, dithered) photos of the developers.

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84•PaulineGar•4h ago•20 comments

The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus

https://www.journaldulapin.com/2025/05/17/the-lost-japanese-rom-of-the-macintosh-plus-which-isnt-lost-anymore/
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