Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlNIokKaJH8
It (Kind Of) Works! We Have Software! - Cefucom-21 Update
Introduction
2 weeks ago I released a video all about a rather strange English language teaching computer from Japan called the Cefucom-21. Well, a lot has happened in 14 short days! For example, I have 2 original software packs for it, someone started work on an emulator using my ROM dumps, I have feedback from hardware experts and actual users of this machine to share, and most importantly… it now works! Mostly…
Script
Hello and welcome back to ctrl-alt-rees and indeed to the Cefucom-21 English language teaching computer from Japan - and I think it’s fair to say that this has caused quite the stir on YouTube over the past couple of weeks. In fact, that video has gone on to be by far the most popular one on my channel and has gained me a few thousand new subscribers as well.
So thank you ever so much to everyone for all of your interest in this machine - and as you can probably imagine, I’m just as keen as you are to learn as much as I possibly can about it - so this is a bit of an update video covering everything that I’ve managed to achieve so far.
So in that first video I shared what little I’d managed to decipher about this machine, how it’s based on the Sanyo PHC-25, and how it uses these weird paper cartridges that progress along with the actual lessons and display images relating to those, tore it down to try to work out how it actually worked and discovered that weird dual Z80 CPU setup, and also managed to catch a leaking VARTA battery just in the nick of time.
Finally, I managed to put it all back together, but unfortunately it didn’t want to play ball and wouldn’t actually power up for a test, which I must admit was a bit of a disappointing end to the video.
But, as you can hopefully see, it is at least booting up, if not fully working, and I will be transparent with you about that just going in - there is another little job that I need to do to this just to get it fully functional, so I’m not quite sure if we’re going to be able to do a full demo in this video. But I have managed to track down the original software, and this is very exciting, because this is brand new in box, so we’ll certainly have a look at that, and of course there’s your feedback to go over as well from that first video - loads of really fascinating insights from people who’ve actually used these things, and indeed, an exciting emulation effort, which has started directly off the back of my work in that video - so quite a lot to cover in this one, let’s get on with it!
And if you are an electronics tinkerer like me, you’ll no doubt have dabbled in PCB design and fabrication, something that this video’s sponsor PCBWay has 10 years of experience in. But did you know that they’re now also offering CNC machining, 3D printing and injection moulding? All that and more is available on the link down in the description. Thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring this video.
First up, I thought we’d start with a good old fashioned unboxing - so these are the two original software packs for this machine, and I talked at length in that first video about how incredibly rare these were and how they never came up for sale, and how Tony, who was helping me out with some of the information on the machine, had also never seen them come up for sale - and when the video went out to my supporters on Early Access, I thought, You know what? I’ll have a very quick look on ZenMarket and just double check that there isn’t any more Cefucom stuff on there for sale - and these had literally just been listed on a very short auction and I actually bid on them and I ended up paying a lot more than I really wanted to.
But a very kind supporter of mine actually reached out and offered to cover the cost of these - so thank you ever so much for these. Of course, eventually this is all going to end up in a museum - and of course, we all get to enjoy them now - so, yeah, these are the two software packs and this is how they came, and I didn’t realize from the original listing that these were going to be brand new in box. So we’ll start with this first one - as you can probably see this one says EN2 on it, and this one very faintly says EN1 - I guess the EN probably stands for English - so we’ll start with this one, EN1, and I’ll just show you what these looked like and how they were actually packaged.
So these are the blue binders which I had some quite low quality images of that I showed off in that first video - and there’s also a book in these packs as well - so this is the book, this is Daily Life, the first module - and this has the various different learning scenarios in it - so we’ve got Giving Directions and Showing Visitors Around Tokyo.
We’ve got Introducing Each Other, A Surprise Party and all the rest of it - and of course these notes are all in Japanese, now, there was a comment on my first video from someone suggesting that we get this machine into the hands of someone who speaks fluent Japanese and I must confess, you know, I do have some Japanese language skills, but they are very rudimentary - I can read hiragana and katakana, and I know a few basic phrases and things and enough to get around, but certainly not enough to actually do this thing justice - so, yeah, if there’s anyone out there who wants to kind of work with me on this, and cover it all in detail and work out what actually, what all of this stuff is, I’d be very interested in that - someone did suggest Usagi Electric, I love the guy, I love his work, and I love his videos, and I think he would do a very good job at this.
The trouble being that he’s in America, and I’m not quite sure about shipping this thing all that way again. But hey, it’s certainly a possibility, or if there are any UK- based YouTubers you can think of who are fluent in Japanese and who would be interested in this, I’m all ears.
But anyway, that’s the book - and the next thing, we’ll start on the cassettes, I think, just before the big reveal - and these are… So these are all individually packaged in this kind of cellophane kind of plastic wrap. I have actually opened this one because I have tested this, but yeah, this is how they were originally packaged, and as you can see, these are all just brand new in the box - so we have 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, and of course the B sides are labelled B, as you might expect - and these of course correspond to the various different chapters in the book.
…and in the second pack, of course, four more tapes.
But this, this is the interesting part, this is what makes this machine really special - and you can actually probably see, just in the corner of the shot here, the non-screen screen that was kind of the big selling point of my first video, because this is the cartridge that slots into the side of this machine - and I will show you how this works in a moment - but this is the paper, oh, it’s the wrong way around!
This is the the paper thing that kind of advances through the different slides, if you like, and actually shows images - so it’s a continuous roll of paper and it’s got various images printed along its length which correspond with the different lessons. Some of them have pictures, some of them have bits of text that correspond to the lesson, and it’s kind of in addition to what’s displayed on the screen, on the computer screen - and I must point to a comment that I had on that first video from someone called cruftist, who compared this to something called a kamishibai. Now, I must admit that kamishibai isn’t something that I was familiar with, but it’s a traditional form of Japanese street entertainment for children where it’s kind of like a story that’s told with the aid of these interchangeable slides with different images on them - and I can definitely see the comparison there.
So yeah, that’s a very good call there, cruftist - and thank you ever so much for your comment. But if we take this out of the box very carefully, as you can see, it is wrapped as original and again, this was taped shut, I have already opened this because I wanted to try it in the machine just before I started on this video, but essentially this is as brand new as it gets - so this is the cartridge that we talked about in part one!
And as predicted, it has these two sprockets or gears on the end which are driven by that mechanism inside the Cefucom-21, and we’ve got that clear panel on the front that obviously allows us to see what’s going on inside. Now, a couple of interesting observations about this, I guess - of course we’ve got the sticker on the top with the name of the module, and the arrow showing which direction it goes into the computer - and on the end here where we’ve got this drive mechanism, something that I hadn’t noticed before are these metal contacts here - so I’m not quite sure, this does have a motor inside the actual computer itself which drives this, so it’s not self-driven, these aren’t to power it, maybe it’s backlit, maybe there’s some kind of light inside it, I’m not sure, I haven’t opened it up, or maybe it’s some kind of system to detect which actual slide it’s currently displaying, but that is really interesting to see.
And of course there is EN2, the second module - I won’t go in-depth with this one because the format is exactly the same as it was with that first Daily Life module - but this one is Visiting Overseas, and I haven’t actually opened this one at all yet, so both of these books are in absolute mint condition, these are both brand new, as I said. So this has some modules with titles like At A Bus Depot and… what’s that? An American Host Family, On The Campus, A Japanese Cooking Lesson - and again we’ve got an introduction to what the actual module is about and we’ve got the dialogue between the two different characters which I guess corresponds with what’s actually displayed on the screen - and again, we have the two boxes with the eight cassettes in total. These are green this time, so I guess they’re colour coded depending on the actual module, and again they are still in their original wrapping.
And finally, just that lovely cartridge once more - and I’m going to open this the wrong way round. Oh no I’m not. Oh there we go, look at that - so this one’s actually been wound on slightly. That’s interesting. That’s very interesting - look at that!
Is this still sealed? Or has this one actually been used?
Has it been used and re-wrapped? Or did it come like that from the factory? I must admit, I only opened the first one, I didn’t open this one so this is a bit of a surprise to me. Now that’s still- oh it has been opened. Interesting! Very interesting - so yeah, we can actually, thanks to that - actually have a look at what these cartridges look like, and what the actual scenes displayed on them look like, and how they correspond with those lessons so that is very interesting indeed.
“How are you?” “Not very good. I locked myself out of the house and I got caught in the rain.” “Today has not been your day.”
Now that has got me pondering how an emulator for this machine might actually work, because of course to effectively emulate the Cefucom-21 you’d need to take these cartridges apart, scan the paper rolls inside, and then distribute those alongside the software, and somehow come up with a way of displaying that on screen alongside the actual computer output - which all sounds very complicated - but in part one of course I took the ROMs out of this, and I dumped them and I made them available online, just in case anyone fancied that challenge - and it turns out that someone pretty much immediately did!
Someone going by the name of Pernod, who straight off the back of my first video, dropped into my Discord server to let me know that they were the person responsible for implementing the Seiko MAP-1010 in MAME, which apparently is another Sanyo PHC-25 clone - and now, thanks to having the ROMs available for the Cefucom, they were going to be tackling that one next. Now Pernod is also in touch with Tony AKA HereBeDragons, who helped me out with the first video to get his ROMs dumped as well because it would appear from the RAM configuration in his machine that his is actually a slightly later revision, so all very exciting stuff.
But as mentioned at the beginning of this video, they weren’t the only bits of feedback that I had off the back of part one - so let’s have a look at those now just before we move on to the demo.
First up, there’s a comment from MyLifeIn8BitsAndPieces over on BlueSky, who lets me know that his cousin was an English teacher in Japan in the late 80s and early 90s, and actually used these machines. Now, apparently in her school they pronounced the name Key-fu-com, although she’s not 100 percent sure that that is the correct pronunciation, and also that the mechanism was very unreliable, and that there were educational games available for this system as well, so thank you for that - and just on the topic of the name, I thought this comment from ChristopherPardell4418 on the original video was quite interesting as well - so Christopher doesn’t know Japanese, but apparently in Chinese, Sifu means teacher - so SifuCom, teacher computer. That certainly would make a lot of sense.
Now this one is very interesting - so in part one, we pondered the meaning of the text across the top of the keyboard: “CCI Multipurpose SLAP Computer” - and yes, as you might imagine, I did get quite a lot of jokes about that as well. But this comment from Witness1013 seems to clear it up and it says it much better than I ever could - so I’m just gonna read the comment to you: “Say, Look, Ask, Put: SLAP. The SLAP strategy is designed to assist students with deciphering the meanings of words found throughout informational text by utilising context clues.”
“SLAP is an acronym for Steps of the Strategy which equips the students to determine a word’s meaning by looking at the clues within the text itself. After being taught each step explicitly, it is the goal for each student to independently use SLAP while reading to increase understanding of both the text and individual vocabulary words.”
Thank you Witness1013, that actually makes perfect sense.
Finally, of course, there was also quite a bit of discussion about the specific specs of this machine - the teardown was completely unscripted, and I was basically just saying what I saw as I went along, and found a very weird combination of different types and amounts of RAM in different places on the different boards - so thank you to everyone for all of the information on that. It is all very, very useful, particularly the size and the usage of some of those RAM chips.
…and one final piece of feedback on the actual hardware itself: that 1000bit website that I was using for the specs specified that this had a Centronics printer port, and isettech has pointed out that it’s the same connector as the Hewlett Packard General Input Output Bus, HPGIB.
And of course, I totally agree that this thing’s far too small to be a Centronics connector, I was just reading from the spec sheet and assuming that they knew something that I didn’t.
So a big thank you once more to everyone who provided feedback and information off the back of that first video - that was my intention in putting that out there, and it seems we’ve actually achieved what we set out to do, which is fantastic. But of course, I promised you at least a partial demo earlier in this video, I did mention that this wasn’t fully working, and if we listen closely…
Yeah, there’s like a buzzing noise coming from the tape deck and I’m not quite sure what that is, but I think it might be related to the remains of that drive belt that I found in part one, so I still need to get that replaced and the tape deck isn’t working, so unfortunately we’re not going to be able to load any software in this video - and of course I will try to get that fixed for part three. But for now there are certainly some interesting menus and things that I can show you around: I can show you how the cartridges slot into the machine and everything else - so let’s check that out now!
…and here we are - so, for the purposes of this video, I will be using the manual that I scanned and translated as part of the last video, because as mentioned, I’m not fluent in Japanese, unfortunately, my reading skills are very rudimentary - and you may have also noticed that I have a flat panel display hooked up to this, and this is going through my RetroTINK 5X upscaler - and to be honest, that’s the best solution I could come up with, because the video output from this is abysmal. It’s really, really terrible.
I appreciate it’s NTSC-J, but I own other Japanese NTSC-J machines and I have various solutions that work fine with those, and this just looks universally bad no matter what I hook it up to - so I don’t know if there’s an issue with the video output circuitry or maybe a recap required or something like that, but that’s yet another thing to look at.
And of course, for the purposes of this demo, I also have my laptop capturing the video output from the RetroTINK as well, so we can do some actual proper video capture, even if it looks terrible. So without further ado, let’s get this powered up!
…and the first thing that we’re presented with is this time and date screen, which should be fairly self explanatory. You can see here what I mean by that video output not being very good at all, and for some reason, it’s constantly scrolling through times and dates here. I’m not quite sure what’s going on - whether this is some kind of fault or what? But the manual says to just- to set the time and the date, which I’m not going to bother doing- and then just press return. Of course, the reason it’s asking for that, there we go - and the reason it’s asking for that is because I took that battery out in the previous video and I haven’t actually replaced that yet so that’s yet another job to do - and I must admit, I do have a bit of a confession to make about that first video as well while we’re here, and I think we’re deep enough into this one that I can admit to this now, but remember when I went to demo it and it just wouldn’t power up at all?
Yeah, it turns out when I took it apart and put it back together again, there was a ribbon cable on the bottom board that I didn’t actually plug back in, and that was why it didn’t work - and it wasn’t until after I’d finished recording that I spotted my mistake and fixed it, which took all of about two seconds…
Yeah, so sorry about that, but we’re here now, let’s continue - so as you can see we have five options here on the main menu and the way that we navigate to these is by pressing these big shiny buttons on the top and the very first one is called “Cefucom-21 Watch” and it’s actually a timer function so you can set a schedule here and if you want to get home from work and do your English lesson at say 7pm every night, you can go through here and you can say, “OK, I want to set an alarm for 7pm every night,” and of course, with the help of that internal battery, which helps it to remember the time when it’s switched off, it will actually automatically come on and sound an alarm at that time - now, of course, this doesn’t have the clock battery in it at the moment, so I can’t set the time and demo that to you, but I thought that was actually a really interesting function.
Now, I am just going to briefly skip option two for now. That is the main language learning mode that uses these cartridges and things, and as mentioned, that’s not fully working, just to manage expectations. But we’ll just run through the remaining three options, and then we’ll revisit that one, and I will explain the concept of how it’s supposed to work. But for now, option three is hopefully fairly self explanatory - this is Cefucom BASIC, so that’s- this is on this keyboard this time, press option number one- and it just takes us into a BASIC prompt, and indeed you can do your programming on this, and you can save your programs to the cassette and load them again when the cassette deck is working, and it’s a fully featured BASIC computer.
Our fourth option here allows us to use this as a cassette deck, oddly enough - so this actually enables these controls across the front here: we’ve got “Cassette Recorder Manual Control” here - usually the cassette deck is controlled by the actual program that’s running, but this actually puts it in manual mode so you can use this to play your music cassettes. There’s actually a headphone output on the side, so you can sit and listen to music on it if you want, but I think predominantly, of course, it’s designed for language learning - so there’s a built-in microphone and a built-in speaker. You can also plug in external speakers, headphones, microphones, it’s got all of the connectors on the side for that - and you can record yourself speaking English and listen to it back, or even potentially send those tapes to a teacher - and I believe this can actually be used in conjunction with the alarm function as well so you can set it to actually come on at a specific time and start playing a cassette - I think, from what I’ve managed to decipher from the manual.
The fifth and final option here is a bit of a mystery, it’s quite an interesting one - so this is listed in the manual as “Information” and then it says “Future Implementation” in brackets - but it doesn’t actually have its own chapter in the manual, so there’s no explanation as to how it’s supposed to work. But if we go into this, I think there is a bit of a clue - so we have two options here, “200 b/s” and “300 b/s”, which I think are baud rates which are related to the modem. We did find out in part one, and there are pictures of this in the manual, that there was an acoustic coupler available for this, so you could actually hook it up to your home phone, put the actual handset on it, and then it would potentially connect to some kind of online service, and I think that that’s what this option is for, but it looks like that was never implemented, or maybe they eventually implemented it in future revisions of this machine - and of course, not only will that service be long dead now if it ever actually launched in the first place, but of course, it’s it’s also based in Japan, I don’t have a phone line here in the studio, there unfortunately are multiple reasons why I can’t demo this to you today.
And last but definitely not least, we have Mode 2 of course, which, as mentioned earlier, is our main language learning function - so if we go into this…
…we have a screen that’s a bit garbled, a bit messed up, and this isn’t actually how this is displayed in the manual, but these are actually different user profiles. I assume this uses the SRAM in conjunction with the battery that I’ve taken out to actually save these profiles, and if we just go into one of them - not that it will make things any clearer - but we have a tape number and a capsule number here - so what this does is it keeps track of your progress, so when you go into this option you can select your profile, you can load up the actual program that you’re running, and then it will keep track of your learning through that actual language learning program, which is absolutely fascinating.
So just press 1 and then press return…
Very briefly, it flashes up “TAPE LOADING”, and then it comes to this screen - so we’ve got Tape Number: 1A, Capsule Number: 1…
…and here we go!
Right…
…so if we insert…
…this is tape number 1A.
It goes in that way around - and we have capsule number 1, which is this one: Daily Life.
I’ll just slot this in - and as you can see, there is some kind of film over this, I’m not sure if this is supposed to retract or something before the course starts, or as I mentioned before, maybe they’re illuminated from the inside once the- somehow - and maybe that actually shines through there, I’m not quite sure, I haven’t worked that out yet because as I say, it’s not fully working. But if we just have a look at our little accompanying book here…
Lesson one should be “Giving Directions” - and yeah, let’s see if we can load this - so I think if we press 7, yeah, “Tape Loading Now”, and there’s a click - quite a loud click - and then there’s a second click which seems to come from further back. So I think the first click is this mechanism trying to do something - it’s potentially jammed, I’m not quite sure what’s going on with this, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to get this one to work, and indeed the tape doesn’t actually start playing either so that cassette deck isn’t working, but of course we knew about that, I think that’s to do with that perished drive belt.
And eventually this will reset and actually go back around to that loading screen once it gives up - so that’s all I can demo to you today, but hopefully that gives you some impression as to how this thing’s supposed to work.
Now, I must admit, I wasn’t going to have this thing powered on for this outro sequence because - well - because of that constant annoying noise from the tape deck, but then it crashed, and I wanted to show this to you, because this is something that it does every so often, particularly when it’s been on for a while, and to be honest with you, it looks RAM-related, which is quite daunting given the RAM configuration in this machine - and it’s something else that I’m going to have to get fixed before I can put part 3 out there and do a full-blown demo of the whole thing in action so do bear with me while I get that fixed, but hopefully in the meantime that’s been a lot more information - I certainly feel like we’ve uncovered quite a lot about this mysterious machine - and we’re very, very nearly there.
So, thank you ever so much to my channel supporters on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and indeed my YouTube channel members who all get to see these videos a little bit early and ad free, and finally, a big thank you to you for watching - and hopefully, I’ll see you in part three!
Original Video Links
Support The Channel:
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Episode Links:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11sqTJXXSQo
Usagi Electric: https://www.youtube.com/@UsagiElectric
Kamishibai Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6URceEr_zc
ROM Dumps / Manual Scans: https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/hino-electronics-cefucom-21-information-and-downloads-manual-scans-eprom-dumps-and-more.html
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