Readme

These are a few notes on KISS and KISS archives.

Ito Takayuki's descriptions in the KISSDATA files are a good source of information, on "yuki@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp". These and all the other files were downloaded from "venice.mps.ohio-state.edu" (which a recent message indicates is closing for anonymous ftp, though is still accessable via WWW; stop press, re-opened on "venice.tcp.com", WWW "http://www.tcp.com/pub/anime-manga/", KISS Mailing List: mail "doi@usagi.jrd.dec.com").

KISS is a Kisekae (changing clothes) program originally from K.O.S (Kawaii Onnanoko System = Pretty Girls System). The original author was MIO.H of a program which ran on Japanese PC9801 computers, other versions of KISS run on DOS/V, Apple Macs, MS-Windows, and X window (UNIX/X11). There does not seem to be a MS-DOS, Atari ST or Amiga version, but there are programs to allow DOS/V programs to run on MS-DOS.

Early KISS archives seem to be designed around a 448x320 screen, later ones a 640x400 screen. Archives are compatible with "KISS218" or "KISS224C", KISSW v0.20 (for MS-Windows) can only handle KISS218, the problem seems to be the screen size.

The file KISSFMT.DOC (see Format in this directory) contains a translation by yuki (see above) of the format of KISS config files for KISS224C.

A KISS archive consists of one or more config files (.CNF, often KISS.CNF), a palette file (usually .KCF, sometimes COL.KCF), a number of bitmap image cels (.CEL), and some documentation files (.DOC or .TXT). There are sometimes other files, and occasionally sub-archives which contain the actual KISS data. The config and documentation files contain Japanese characters which are only displayed correctly given support for multi-byte characters.

The config files contain the names of all the files required to display the sets. In a few cases archives are differences or extension kits for other archives, the "standard" archive filename may have "ST" at the end, but apart from this there is no naming convention for archives indicating this, or even any obvious way of figuring out which archives you need without reading the comments in the config files or the documentation files. The name of the palette file (.KCF) may give a good hint though, as may study of the KISSDATA list files.

The filenames of KISS archives frequently start with "KISS", "KS", "KIS_", "KISS_", "KS_", or have "KISS", "KS", "KIS", or sometimes just "K", somewhere in them; do not rely on this. All seem to be compressed with LHA and have an extension of ".LZH". Archive file sizes seem to varry from 1k to 80k, larger archives may contain several small sub-archives. 

It is not currently known how the cels and palettes are constructed, presumably there is a Japanese bitmap editing program for which cels are the native format. See file KISSFMT.DOC for some hints. Programs which convert cels to and from pcx exist.

Another program of possible interest is "PAPERDOL", originally designed as a character image creator for an anime-inspired role-playing game. There appears to be far less support for this (at least in terms of number of charas) than KISS, also note it is in ARJ rather than LHA (.LZH) archive form.

R.O.McLean, 14/Oct/94
hurom@hpb.lut.ac.uk
