~sweep~ ~sweep~ ~sweep~

After one week with HoiHoi-san around, it’s time for more pics, don’t you think too?

The main purpose of HoiHoi-san isn’t cleaning though as you might know from an earlier post.

(As someone will ask for the wallpapers anyway. You can get them from mikumix.com, the right one is the most epic Miku picture ever!)

Yah, that’s more like her. What’s better than girls with guns? Robot girls with swords and guns!

A funny feature are her changeable faces, which make her look…

right…

…left (or straight ahead of course).

Every time I look at the photo above it’s like I hear her saying: “Bugs, don’t mess with me!”

HoiHoi’s weapons aren’t her only useful accessories though. The broom comes in quite handy sometimes too xD

If you are a H2 owner too take care if you have some Nendos around. Looks like a bug in her firmware let’s her recognize them as bugs… Kagamiku and Rin are not amused. @_@

But don’t worry there’s already a new firmware available over here. Currently updating via the H2 maintenance App.

Updates done, now off to some bug killing!

A short question: How does the image pop up plugin work for you? Any lagging?  Problems with the size of the pics on tiny 22” screens?

Note: No Nendoroids were harmed during this photo session.

As some folks keep asking me what happened to HoiHoi-san, I decided to post a quick update on the building progress.

Started to build her after checking out the manual for a few minutes. Maybe an old habit, cause I came across some quite weird manuals when I was building tanks, planes and such many moons ago. But as it is a manual from a Japanese company you don’t have to worry. Just start right away!

HoiHoi-san pantsu shot!

If you follow the manual you will start with her leg parts as those are the easier ones. Nothing special just take care when you have to mount her legs into her pantsu-part. I had to use some force to mount them.

Next are her apron, her upper body and her arms. Again nothing worth mentioning. You need some glue only for two small parts by the way. Everything else fits well together without falling apart.

If you have never never built some sort of kit HoiHoi’s head is probably the most “complicated” part.

Don’t use too much force. Make sure you assembled the top-skull-piece (the one with the two holes) tilted like shown in the picture above.

She looks kinda scary that way, don’t you thinktoo? @_@

Zomg, finished her on the next day, overall building time was ~3-4 hours I guess.

I just have to paint her accessories now. Actually all of them are already done, besides her katana. I’ll get a smaller paint brush tomorrow for the details on the swords handle as I couldn’t find such a small one among my old plamo tools.

Expect to see her in action in the following days over here!

Just came across the *.iso of the HoiHoi-san PS2 game which I mentioned lately. (You don’t know who HoiHoi-san is? Check out my post on her origin!)

As my readers seem to love HoiHoi-san too I’ll post this short tutorial too show you how to get this game running on your PC.

First of all download the *.iso file from here. (Consist of three part files.) Unrar the files and put them wherever you want.

Now we have to download the emulator software, the PS2 Bios files and the game *.iso itself.

As emulator I’m using PC SX2. You can download this free application for Windows and Linux here.

PC SX2 performs quite well but this depends on your PC of course. Should run fine on all modern systems though. My old 3GHz Athlon X2 DualCore processor for example isn’t really busy rendering the game.

The installation shouldn’t be a problem hopefully. After you installed PC SX2 you will need the BIOS files to emulate a PS2. Download ‘em here.

Unrar the file and copy the BIOS files into the emulator’s program folder. The folder should look like in the screenshot above.

Now we are ready to start PC SX2. Launch this app always as Admin on Windows Vista and 7!

You should see a output window with some system info and a GUI window.

(This proggy can be tweaked a lot but I’ll just guide you trough the essential steps. I’m using it in English but you can switch to a lot of different languages if you’d like to.)

Open Config>Configuration.  Usually you should see a Bios version at the bottom right. If not click on “Set Bios Directory” at the bottom left and choose the Bios directory.

In the next step we are going to edit the graphic settings. You will find those on the top of the “Configure” window. Usually PC SX2 will choose the plugin that’s supported by your CPU.

But you should check it yourself cause this will influence the games performance a lot!

That’s were the black output windows comes in handy. Check which CPU functions are supported by your processor. In my case I have to choose “GSdx 890 (MSVC 15,00, SSE2) 0.1.14” as my CPU doesn’t have the SSSE3 or SSSE41 function. (Those are a Intel thingies ^^)

Now click on “Configure” below the graphics-plugin dropdown menu.

You can set the resolution and or if you’d like to run the game windowed.

I recommend using it windowed as it will look not that good on bigger monitors.

Depending on your graphics card you have to choose either “Direct 3D 9 Hardware” for old DirectX 9 graphics cards or like me “Direct 3D 10” for DirectX 10 graphics cards. Click on “Ok if when you are done.

DirectX 10 is highly recommended as it will boost the performance! (I’m playing the game with the maximum of 60 fps for example.)

If you don’t know which card is built into your PC check it with this small application:http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/

I guess you would like to move HoiHoi-san around ingame, right?

This step depends on the controller youd like to use for the game of course.

I’ll configure the game to use it with a PC keyboard. if you are using agamepad this might look a little bit different.

Take a look at the “First Controller” settings. The plugin should be set to “Lilypad 0.9.9” (Saber Lily approved? ^^;)

Click on “Configure” below.

In the “Genral Tab” I have selected “Raw Input” as it worked best for me.

Under the tab “Pad 1” set the keys to whatever you like.

I would recommend to configuring it like shown in the picture above though. (This pic is not from the emulator, it’s just for those who have no idea how such a controller thing looks like) Click “OK” after that.

The last thing we are going to edit in the “Configure” panel is the option “Cdvdrom”.  Choose the plugin “Linuz Iso CDVD” from the dropdown menu. Click on “Configure”. Choose “Select Iso” and navigate to the folder where you saved the *.iso file at the beginning. Click on “OK” and save this setting by clicking on “OK” at the “Configure” panel too.

Enable “Patches” in the “Misc” menu.

Finally you are ready to play the game.

Click on either “File>Run CD/DVD” or “Run>Execute”.

And the last step: have fun!

If you have any problems or question feel free to ask them below.

Hobby Link Japan is currently NOT charging your for EMS shipping costs to promoted their upgraded check out system if you pay via PayPal.

Original text from their homepage below:

We’ve just upgraded our checkout system to make it easier than ever to pay with PayPal! In order to showcase the safety and convenience of using their service, HobbyLink Japan is offering free express shipping on all orders placed and paid for with a PayPal Billing Agreement between now and September 28.

Once you set one up, a PayPal Billing Agreement lets you pay for all your HLJ orders without ever having to visit the PayPal website yourself.

For more information head over to their info page.

Unfortunately HLJ does such campaigns always shortly after I spent some moolah elsewhere!

CONSPIRACY! I guess the NHK is involved too but I’ll have to investigate this a little bit further.

As my bank account is still suffering from purchasing a certain lolicious figure I couldn’t get all those lovely, shipping-cost-free waifus I wanted so bad… (ToT)

But I was quite lucky to come across this figure which I had to get!

A 1:1 HoiHoi-san from KOTOBUKIYA sold for 3000Yen! You might want to get yours ASAP as the are already running out of stock! HLJ product page link: http://www.hlj.com/product/KBYKP-98

She is partially pre-painted and according to comrade Rob only her weapons need some paint.

When I tweeted about my purchase a few hours ago a lot of comrades seemed to have no idea who she is. And so I decided to share some knowledge with you.

Ichigeki Sacchu!! HoiHoi-san (= One-Shot Bug Killer!! Interceptor Doll HoiHoi-san) started out as a manga published in the magazine Dengeki Dai OH.

The setting is in year 20XX at a time when insects are immune to all insecticides, so Japanese pharmaceutical companies have had to come up with the next level in insect extermination: small but heavily armed robots.

Hoihoi-san is the bug killing robot of the title, a 10.5 cm tall doll like robot that comes with a wide range of weapons. There are other robot models called RRX-7.8 Combat-san and PEST-X-san but I don’t want to post some spoilers.

Quite awesome, eh? As if this scenario alone wouldn’t be already enough there are a lot of weird things going on in this story.

Btw: Did the name “RRX-7.8” ring, a bell? Gundam’s aren’t that cute though ^^;

You can get a torrent for the manga over here.

In 2004 a short OVA was produced, feel free to check it out below.

Love her walking sounds xD Would be great if my 1:1 HoiHoi-san would walk around like that too!

There was also a PS2 game which got re-published three times!

The game, released 2003-11-27, is a third person shooter where the main aim is to complete levels defeating hordes of various kinds of insects, while avoiding collateral damage to furniture and other household items.

If you want to download and play this game on your PC check out my blog post over here.

Some game footage below.

Unfortunately the manga wasn’t continued (besides HoiHoi-san Legacy which got never translated.) I would like to see more adventures of HoiHoi-san and her “sisters” but I guess this won’t happen. Hopefully KOTOBUKIYA releases a Combat-san (edit: some sculpt was already seen on the interwebs!) and a PEST-X-san kit in the future.

Isn’t she cute? Can’t wait to receive mine.

I’m wondering if you liked this not so usual post as I tried to cover a topic which wasn’t all over the interwebs. It’s kinda boring to read about something you have already seen several times elsewhere in my opinion, right?

As I’m already talking about random stuff:

How do you like my new blog design? Any suggestions?

And random blubb 2: Happy Birthday, Blowfish-san! Party hard with your waifus!