King Mahjong

When I was young, I noticed my grandmother would play this interesting Taiwanese Mahjong game. This was amazing to me, and I had not seen anything like it.

The thing that really makes something transcend... into a work of art, is it's ability to give a sense of how it was like to live in the time period that bore it.

This game was more than just a typical Mahjong game. It was an immersion in the multilingual culture of the Taiwanese people. There were 4 distinct characters who competed against each other, and spoke in different accents and languages to reflect their background. Even if it was just snippets of responses (Pong! Fa Chai! Fang Chiang!), it really gave me the feeling that I was at the table.

And the music is amazing, the kind you hear in a nice jazz cabaret. I've searched far and wide for the sources of these midis, but they must be some kind of special Taiwanese improvisation.

Thankfully, the one time I managed to get the game running, I extracted the all the music files by directly recording the direct sound output from the PC Speakers, and separating the waveforms. I've posted it to YouTube for your listening pleasure.

Pamirs Description

至尊麻將

全國第一套完全模擬真實麻將規則的遊戲。

一個站在玩家角度思考所製作的麻將遊戲。

• Pamirs King Mahjong

Running on Windows

Unfortunately, running this game on modern Windows is a pain. For one, it's a Windows 9x game, which causes all sorts of issues and It doesn't function on Windows XP SP3 due to some kind of changes.

Also, it has some kind of curious

Conversion

In order to make this game work for the rest of time, I'm trying to convert the assets into a Python game engine. It's simple enough, since all the sound files are just wavs, and the graphics are all in one nice bitmap. It's more about whether I have the patience to do it.

Someday, I will. It will at least be a great present to my grandparents.

Extracting the Music

The only hurdle I had to face was to extract the music. I could not find the music files anywhere on the ISO, though I saw tons of .wav files. The music must have been generated MIDIs, hidden somewhere deep in a .exe file.

Instead, I resorted to the brute-force method: I ran the game and recorded the music straight off of the PC speakers, using Audacity. It wasn't pretty, and since each piece of music played in a random order, it took a while to grab them all.

But eventually, I managed to match duplicate waveforms, eliminate the ones with bad audio pops, and narrow it down to 7 files. Here it is: (need to post to YouTube)

Sources

• Pamirs Product Page
  • Pamirs King Mahjong