Hunting the Elusive

Well, I got an Amazon shipment yesterday containing some books and magazines. I'll be going through them bit by bit in the near future. One of the magazines I got was CHARA*MEL volume 5 (August 2008 issue). As some of you might already know, CHARA*MEL is the magazine which has Cage in Lunatic Runagate, but it has some other interesting visual material within as well, which I *might* have a look at some time, including the latest Itou Noizi illustrated game "Flyable Heart". But volume 5 of the magazine also came with a bonus CD. [Download: ISO (255MB)] [Download: Wallpaper archive (26MB)]

So why should you get this release? Well, here's why:

For the illustrator-centric fan people, there is the Itou Noizi illustration (for afore-mentioned Flyable Heart game), a Tokiame Touhou one, and a Kantoku illustration (last picture). If that's not win, I'm not sure what you CAN call win.

(Warning: the Kantoku one is not very safe for work)

Before you download the ISO (...you've already downloaded it, haven't you...), I should just say that the CD contains 9 wallpapers and one Touhou Subterranean Animism demo (the next Touhou curtain shooter, already on torrents from Reitaisai). Yeah, so if you have actually got the demo for Subterranean Animism (TH11), you might have wasted a bit of bandwidth if you downloaded the ISO.

On the other hand, if you were looking for a direct download of Subterranean Animism, you know what to do.

The wallpapers are encoded in a file format .noa. I can't actually hack it, so I accessed the wallpapers through their application "charamel.exe". I'm not sure how your user experience will be, but in my English Windows, the executable starts then closes by itself if I open it normally. If you open it through Applocale using Japanese settings, then it will run.

Once you have got it running, it's a fairly simple matter. Clicking on the wallpapers will give your a prompt asking you if you want to set that particular picture as your Desktop wallpaper. Click the affirmative and it's done.

Resolutions available are:

1024 x 768

1280 x 960

1600 x 1200

1920 x 1200

As you can see, there are provisions for widescreen aspect ratios, but for those awkward ones in between (like my 1680 x 1050), you'll need to get a bigger resolution one (like the 1920 x 1200) and scale it down as needed.

Since the wallpapers are fully digital (one would assume the images came straight from the illustrators' PSD files or whatever) there is absolutely no quality loss associated with analogue (paper to scanner) transfers. Also, the files are in BMP, so no compression loss.

Anyway, the wallpapers, after you click on them to set to desktop, can be found in a directory in Windows. For me (Windows Server 2008, but probably similar for Vista users), it's <installeddrive>:\Users\<username>\Pictures\Wallpapers\, where you will find the BMP files. I've just taken all the 1920 resolution ones out and put them into the wallpaper archive (BMPs compress nicely). If you want the other resolutions, you can either work from the 1920 ones, or use the application in the ISO to get the other resolutions out.

PS: