FilesFound!Desktop Partner Dear Dog
Posted on 03/06/24
In the last article, I mentioned that a game I used to play a lot was The Sims, and how it made me always be interested in any sort of game where you could build a house.
Well, another game series I played a lot when I was younger also guided my hand and heart to pick the game we'll be covering in this article too.
A screenshot of Dogz II
I loved the Petz games! Dogz and Catz (two games under the same Petz umbrella - think Pokemon Red and Blue but instead one gets dogs and the other gets cats) were virtual pet games, with the earliest release going back to 1995, but with Petz 5 still maintaining the original aesthetic and coming out in 2002.
So when I saw Desktop Partner Dear Dog being sold on Yahoo Auctions, I was immediately interested.
The front cover for Desktop Partner Dear Dog
The CD for Desktop Partner Dear Dog
I'd never heard of Desktop Partner Dear Dog! Which makes sense, because it seems to have only been released in Japan, and searching for it mostly brings up scattered information about subsequent sequels. I couldn't even find gameplay footage of the original Dear Dog.
The manual was surprising too - it had cute, doodle style MS Paint illustrations, and what looked to be actual 3D dogs.
The loose illustration style reminded me of another pet game - Jingle Cats for PSX...
I wanted to play! I wanted my own Dear Dog!! When I see an image like the one below, some part of my brain created in my formative years and countless hours of Petz kicks in and takes over:
Let's get some Dear Dogs!
The installer for Dear Dog was pretty cute:
It also talks about enabling a Children's Mode - this is meant to make it easier for kids to read, using only Hiragana and no Kanji.
Look at those .exe icons, too! Darling, dear dogs...
The readme has a bit more information about the game, too:
"This is a raising game where you will raise a fully 3d polygon dog as a computer pet. It is composed of four programs, DearDog, DeskDog, SaveDog, DearDogScreensaver. Utilizing an originally developed polygon engine, it's a game where the selling point is the movement of cute dogs. Furthermore, it makes use of the newest NeuralNet and ArtificialLife technology in order to realize smooth dog movements. In total, we have prepared three hundred body types across ten types of dogs, so that you can raise your favorite dog. In addition, using the breeding functionality, you can raise your own distinct puppy. The dogs which have been born and raised can be stored to a floppy disk an exchange between users."
Huh! I guess games were talking about Neural Networks and AI even then...
Alright, let's play!
A lot of the time when I'm trying out things I find for the first time, I get so excited when it looks like something is going to be good from the get go:
Yes! That intro music with all the dogs in in their boxes...! We are entering Heaven.
But... Where's our Dear Dog?
I click around for a while, until...
Oh!! Oh!!!!!! What's this? What's this??
A beautiful 3D town? With proprietary 3D polygons??
Thank you for the meal!!
I had no idea the game would feature something like this...
Don't worry about how hard I'm finding it to simply move around, just enjoy the wonderful world.
Eventually I clumsily slip and slide over to the Pet Store:
I found them! I found the Dear Dogs!
I choose one for my very own...
We finally have our Dear Dog. I name him Yaayaa.
I was so excited to see what I could do with Yaayaa.
Where would we go together? What would we do?
The dogs can walk around the 3D town with you!!!!!
Ahh... This also explains why the movement is so odd. Your forwards movement is always the dog's forward direction, so when you press forward but your dog is turned another direction, your camera will turn and then move in the dog's forward, not your own.
It's okay, they were still figuring this stuff out back then...!
Something I haven't included a video of here is just how long I got stuck in the 3D town for.
There's no way to exit the 3D town until you go back to the front door of your own house and go back inside. There are around twenty houses, all of them different, all of them with doors, and none of them being distinct enough from the others to read as Your House.
I remembered seeing a map in the manual:
Using the map, I was able to find my way home, but I have to wonder how many kids played this and got stuck walking around the town forever...
Let's not worry about that for a moment, let's see what we can do with Yaayaa!
We can brush him!!!!!
We can wash him!!!!!
I try out the other buttons:
Food, water, and - oh no, we ended up back in the 3D town, let's just quickly go back home before we get lost-
I decided to get another pet and see what the breeding mechanic was like:
I get a new dog and name her Maamaa!
She instantly had a puppy with another dog! I name the baby, baby!
I guess that's that!
Using Maamaa, I go try out the minigames I'd previously found but couldn't do because Yaayaa was too young.
There seemed to be two minigames, with the first being called Disk Dog:
Ahh...!
It doesn't work very well...!
I thought I was just doing it wrong, but later when I competed against CPU players, none of them could do it either...
It's fine! Let's try the other minigame - Agility:
You're meant to guide your dog as quickly and as accurately as possible along a path you get shown for a brief moment at the start, but I forgot it towards the end there...
I still seemed to get pretty good points! Good job, Maamaa!
That just about covers the core of the main game, but another thing that Desktop Partner Dear Dog comes with is the desktop part of the game, where you can have your Dear Dogs with you on your desktop!
The Petz games did this too, but it almost feels cooler to see an actual 3D model running around the screen as opposed to Petz depth sorted 2D sprite guys. Don't get me wrong, I love how the Petz pets look, but... A real 3D dog? On my Windows computer desktop? That's pretty futuristic...
Since there didn't seem to be any gameplay videos of Desktop Partner Dear Dog on YouTube, I went ahead and uploaded a longer video showcasing the things I covered here, but all together in one easily digestible video:
Another thing I couldn't find online anywhere was the soundtrack! I honestly find it nice and charming... So I went ahead and uploaded that to YouTube too:
That's about everything for Desktop Partner Dear Dog! Wasn't it a nice surprise?
Let's wrap up by taking a quick look at the files of the game...
The game runs by both installing some files to your PC and using other files from the CD during runtime. It seems to try to keep all the heavy data files on the CD, including what seems to be the base data for the 10 dog breeds:
When I played the game earlier, I entered and exited the new pet menu for a while repeatedly to try and gather up some unique looking dogs:
I wanted to try and extract the models and their animations somehow...
Hey! It's .bac and .tra files again, just like when I tried to get the model data from Pingu Desk Top Character!
Turns out that Desktop Partner Dear Dog was actually made by Hi Corporation, who also made Pingu Desk Top Character and the proprietary Mascot Capsule 3D engine that both games use. They're even installed to the same Program Files folder:
I went on a journey last time trying to get at those .bac and .tra files, and while I still wasn't sucsessful this time, I did learn more about them...
Editors, converters and viewers for these files do exist! In fact, there are multiple communities who are working to reverse engineer and emulate games that use the Mascot Capsule engine.
But, it seems like Desktop Partner Dear Dog and Pingu Desk Top Character use much older versions of the engine than the tools that were archived can handle... They are from 1995 and 1997 to be fair, and the tools that still exist are mostly from the early 2000s.
It was interesting to try and learn about these files again and to understand them a bit more! I actually joined two different discord groups working on Mascot Capsule emulation and the people who replied to me there pointed me in the direction of some of the archived tools that I hadn't been able to find. It's a shame they didn't work for my ancient files, but it was amazing to me that there were people who had archived them at all. Fun!
Anyway - is that a wallpapers folder???
Ohhh yeah, this is what I like to see!
Some of these wallpapers are clearly meant to be used as your desktop background when you have your Dear Dog run around there, I really liked this one:
I even found... Ending screens??
I didn't know this game had an ending...
Ahh... There they go... Our beautiful, dear dogs...! They're all grown up...
Thank you, Dear Dogs!
If you'd like to raise your own dear dog with Desktop Partner Dear Dog, you can download my archive.org upload of the CD here.
For the Desktop Partner Dear Dog Manual, you can read through it here.
I wanted to play! I wanted my own Dear Dog!! When I see an image like the one below, some part of my brain created in my formative years and countless hours of Petz kicks in and takes over:
Let's get some Dear Dogs!
Installing the Game
The installer for Dear Dog was pretty cute:
It also talks about enabling a Children's Mode - this is meant to make it easier for kids to read, using only Hiragana and no Kanji.
Look at those .exe icons, too! Darling, dear dogs...
The readme has a bit more information about the game, too:
"This is a raising game where you will raise a fully 3d polygon dog as a computer pet. It is composed of four programs, DearDog, DeskDog, SaveDog, DearDogScreensaver. Utilizing an originally developed polygon engine, it's a game where the selling point is the movement of cute dogs. Furthermore, it makes use of the newest NeuralNet and ArtificialLife technology in order to realize smooth dog movements. In total, we have prepared three hundred body types across ten types of dogs, so that you can raise your favorite dog. In addition, using the breeding functionality, you can raise your own distinct puppy. The dogs which have been born and raised can be stored to a floppy disk an exchange between users."
Huh! I guess games were talking about Neural Networks and AI even then...
Alright, let's play!
Playing the Game
A lot of the time when I'm trying out things I find for the first time, I get so excited when it looks like something is going to be good from the get go:
Yes! That intro music with all the dogs in in their boxes...! We are entering Heaven.
But... Where's our Dear Dog?
I click around for a while, until...
Oh!! Oh!!!!!! What's this? What's this??
A beautiful 3D town? With proprietary 3D polygons??
Thank you for the meal!!
I had no idea the game would feature something like this...
Don't worry about how hard I'm finding it to simply move around, just enjoy the wonderful world.
Eventually I clumsily slip and slide over to the Pet Store:
I found them! I found the Dear Dogs!
I choose one for my very own...
We finally have our Dear Dog. I name him Yaayaa.
I was so excited to see what I could do with Yaayaa.
Where would we go together? What would we do?
The dogs can walk around the 3D town with you!!!!!
Ahh... This also explains why the movement is so odd. Your forwards movement is always the dog's forward direction, so when you press forward but your dog is turned another direction, your camera will turn and then move in the dog's forward, not your own.
It's okay, they were still figuring this stuff out back then...!
Something I haven't included a video of here is just how long I got stuck in the 3D town for.
There's no way to exit the 3D town until you go back to the front door of your own house and go back inside. There are around twenty houses, all of them different, all of them with doors, and none of them being distinct enough from the others to read as Your House.
I remembered seeing a map in the manual:
Using the map, I was able to find my way home, but I have to wonder how many kids played this and got stuck walking around the town forever...
Let's not worry about that for a moment, let's see what we can do with Yaayaa!
We can brush him!!!!!
We can wash him!!!!!
I try out the other buttons:
Food, water, and - oh no, we ended up back in the 3D town, let's just quickly go back home before we get lost-
I decided to get another pet and see what the breeding mechanic was like:
I get a new dog and name her Maamaa!
She instantly had a puppy with another dog! I name the baby, baby!
I guess that's that!
Using Maamaa, I go try out the minigames I'd previously found but couldn't do because Yaayaa was too young.
There seemed to be two minigames, with the first being called Disk Dog:
Ahh...!
It doesn't work very well...!
I thought I was just doing it wrong, but later when I competed against CPU players, none of them could do it either...
It's fine! Let's try the other minigame - Agility:
You're meant to guide your dog as quickly and as accurately as possible along a path you get shown for a brief moment at the start, but I forgot it towards the end there...
I still seemed to get pretty good points! Good job, Maamaa!
That just about covers the core of the main game, but another thing that Desktop Partner Dear Dog comes with is the desktop part of the game, where you can have your Dear Dogs with you on your desktop!
The Petz games did this too, but it almost feels cooler to see an actual 3D model running around the screen as opposed to Petz depth sorted 2D sprite guys. Don't get me wrong, I love how the Petz pets look, but... A real 3D dog? On my Windows computer desktop? That's pretty futuristic...
Since there didn't seem to be any gameplay videos of Desktop Partner Dear Dog on YouTube, I went ahead and uploaded a longer video showcasing the things I covered here, but all together in one easily digestible video:
Another thing I couldn't find online anywhere was the soundtrack! I honestly find it nice and charming... So I went ahead and uploaded that to YouTube too:
That's about everything for Desktop Partner Dear Dog! Wasn't it a nice surprise?
Let's wrap up by taking a quick look at the files of the game...
Looking at the Files
The game runs by both installing some files to your PC and using other files from the CD during runtime. It seems to try to keep all the heavy data files on the CD, including what seems to be the base data for the 10 dog breeds:
When I played the game earlier, I entered and exited the new pet menu for a while repeatedly to try and gather up some unique looking dogs:
I wanted to try and extract the models and their animations somehow...
Hey! It's .bac and .tra files again, just like when I tried to get the model data from Pingu Desk Top Character!
Turns out that Desktop Partner Dear Dog was actually made by Hi Corporation, who also made Pingu Desk Top Character and the proprietary Mascot Capsule 3D engine that both games use. They're even installed to the same Program Files folder:
I went on a journey last time trying to get at those .bac and .tra files, and while I still wasn't sucsessful this time, I did learn more about them...
Editors, converters and viewers for these files do exist! In fact, there are multiple communities who are working to reverse engineer and emulate games that use the Mascot Capsule engine.
But, it seems like Desktop Partner Dear Dog and Pingu Desk Top Character use much older versions of the engine than the tools that were archived can handle... They are from 1995 and 1997 to be fair, and the tools that still exist are mostly from the early 2000s.
It was interesting to try and learn about these files again and to understand them a bit more! I actually joined two different discord groups working on Mascot Capsule emulation and the people who replied to me there pointed me in the direction of some of the archived tools that I hadn't been able to find. It's a shame they didn't work for my ancient files, but it was amazing to me that there were people who had archived them at all. Fun!
Anyway - is that a wallpapers folder???
Ohhh yeah, this is what I like to see!
Some of these wallpapers are clearly meant to be used as your desktop background when you have your Dear Dog run around there, I really liked this one:
I even found... Ending screens??
I didn't know this game had an ending...
Ahh... There they go... Our beautiful, dear dogs...! They're all grown up...
Thank you, Dear Dogs!
If you'd like to raise your own dear dog with Desktop Partner Dear Dog, you can download my archive.org upload of the CD here.
For the Desktop Partner Dear Dog Manual, you can read through it here.
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