Over the Frail Dream

i'll maybe put stuff here instead of just keeping it in my brain to be inevitably lost when i forget about it (or i post about it in a discord that vanishes once that service goes to shit)

some stuff to start off:
the odi wiki (in general a treasure trove of old sm history)'s article on the smgroove forums is archived and surprisingly very in-depth, going over the forum's whole history: https://web.archive.org/web/20080418031 ... p/SMGroove
found out a bunch of neat stuff like the fact that red fraction was a successor forum made after a hostile takeover of smgroove (i guess this makes rfpack smgpack3... and by extension dcp smgpack4)

also the wiki had a surprisingly decent guide to charting: https://web.archive.org/web/20091012090 ... file_Guide. in particular the stuff about target audiences and styles i think is pretty important and AFAIK no other charting guide really acknowledges this. the section about layering is really good; simple but covers some not-obvious caveats (disagree w/ mini-freezes/holds though those almost always suck imo don't do them). also has an explanation for the infamous "candle" pad terminology:

some odi kid 18 years ago wrote:

A candle is a pad term that receives its name from the popular nursery rhyme "Jack Be Nimble". In a candle, such as LDURDUL, the player is making many movements over a center, untouched pad, akin to "jumping over a candlestick."

maybe i'll archive this on my site like what i did with the "advanced simfile creation bible" (which, despite the name, is way more basic than this guide. cant blame tsuka too much though this was written like 1-2 years afterwards by multiple people instead of 1 guy)

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there was a chinese stepmania forum that existed as early as 2006. it even had a subforum for keyboard play and i saw a thread discussing ckmp2 (wasnt archived though...). found this interesting because i always assumed eastern stepmania keyboard communities weren't a thing until SMOC/the various japanese fc2 blogs which were mostly later. archived link to the forum: https://web.archive.org/web/20080421065 ... lay-fid-93

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kil had a wikipedia account https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AMHR285. usually this would be pretty "who cares" information but any info on kil is hard enough to come by that i figured it was worth mentioning. also had a neat guide of difficulty reading jp text in various old games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AMHR285/ichiran

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KBMP wasn't just the first keyboard pack but also kind of brought back the entire idea of calling packs packs; before then people generally called them mixes because it was like ddr mixes. source: https://web.archive.org/web/20080412043 ... x.php/Pack

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thats it for now, i'll post anything new as replies to this forum post. any other aspiring stepmaniarchaeologists can contribute replies as well. if you want to look for interesting stuff yourself heres some old sites to dig through:

flashflashrevolution.com (probably the easiest since its still up and it was almost always the most popular) (rest of these you'll need to use archive.org)
arch0wl.com
www.rfraction.com
omgdidinsane.com
www.smgroove.com
www.keybeatonline.com

lol this thread https://www.flashflashrevolution.com/vb ... hp?t=77993
(re: the "make charts for yourself part" this post predates midare 1 by a few months) edit: rubix's post re: awareness on charts is interesting because i always thought this was a more modern issue (due to there being way more charts now and MSD making people less reliant on community for recognition of scores). emphasis in the quote added by me

MrRubix wrote:

4. Awareness. A lot of old files get randomly posted and then they get lost in the flow of time (e.g. Ayu Trance), and it's hard to see what's all out there to amass a big collection worth talking about. Legal issues make it even tougher to get a hold of certain large packs, let alone the bandwidth issues. As a result, it doesn't facilitate common play within the community. People will post scores for songs that many others have never even heard of. It's just a generally slow process to get everyone on the same page. It's all very disjoint.

Quote:

it seems to me that, on the whole, the Stepmania community is on the decline.

i guess this problem is eternal

was doing some investigative work trying to figure out the answer to an old question: who is あしまる/egg (rose quartz charter)?

i got the original interesting files collection download from here to get the original metadata (smo and eo archives fuck with the timestamps and stuff) and found something very interesting: the chart is from 2009
(the .dwi indeed contains the chordjack chart, if you were wondering if this was just a case of someone creating a new chart on top of an old 2009 chart)

this is particularly interesting because i didnt really think eastern chordjack charts existed this early, always figured it was somewhere in 2010-2012 where that started. will update this post with any new developments i find related to this

edit: figured it out! so the username of this author is "まるい足跡", here is their fc2 blog: http://yudegg.web.fc2.com
unfortunately, most of their DWIs are removed from the site now (and the remaining ones seem to be index/pad charts...). traces of their old dwi collection can be seen on archive.org, including a section dedicated to "trancer's dolls", the album rose quartz comes from, but no archives of that page exist. any mediafire links i could find are also dead.

in the process of this i also found that abokado posted an AA on this chart in 2011 that isn't on their youtube: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm13992689

i also found this site which recorded scores for a dan course made by egg: https://web.archive.org/web/20081011200 ... ry-20.html. don't recognize most of the names but do recognize AFOTHER and GTR34. i also found this page which lists some of the charts https://web.archive.org/web/20080803175 ... y-427.html. download links unfortunately link to a japanese uploader site that's long gone; none of the charts are archived

edit 2: also, i found out that egg is the one that drew the background for this chart. it's even still on his blog: http://yudegg.web.fc2.com/illust/rose_quartz_a_4_2.jpg

it's also featured in this compilation of rozen maiden fanart: https://asamegraph.sakura.ne.jp/before/mtwekcmkf8.html

i also looked for a really long time to try and find if anyone has archived the rest of egg's charts anywhere... doesn't seem like it unfortunately. this youtube channel has a lot of fairly recent (2022) videos of egg's charts however, and they have a X account they actively use still, so maybe if i really wanted I could try asking for the files?

Windoze wrote: *

Tue Feb 24, 2026 11:01 pm

found something very interesting: the chart is from 2009

damn, super surprising to me too. makes me wonder how long the "convert bms charts to 4k while preserving note density" thing has been around. longer than i thought

Windoze wrote: *

Wed Feb 11, 2026 5:52 am

found out a bunch of neat stuff like the fact that red fraction was a successor forum made after a hostile takeover of smgroove (i guess this makes rfpack smgpack3... and by extension dcp smgpack4)

web_god was one hell of a person, i was on the site trying to chat with him the day he decided to ban kommi and he gradually banned everybody else on the site over the course of the conversation
iirc red faction also got 'hacked' once in a similar fashion to akuma's letting the odi crew fuck up smgroove. the combination of that, rebirth losing credibility due to dcp2 struggles and ffr going down were what eventually led to KBO

lurker wrote: *

Sun Mar 08, 2026 1:35 am

Windoze wrote: *

Wed Feb 11, 2026 5:52 am

found out a bunch of neat stuff like the fact that red fraction was a successor forum made after a hostile takeover of smgroove (i guess this makes rfpack smgpack3... and by extension dcp smgpack4)

web_god was one hell of a person, i was on the site trying to chat with him the day he decided to ban kommi and he gradually banned everybody else on the site over the course of the conversation
iirc red faction also got 'hacked' once in a similar fashion to akuma's letting the odi crew fuck up smgroove. the combination of that, rebirth losing credibility due to dcp2 struggles and ffr going down were what eventually led to KBO

interesting, i never really thought about how/why red fraction died. makes sense, though i don't know much about rebirth's dcp2 (only really know about when kil took it over, presumably after rebirth's attempt)

some other funny things i found recently

- in arch0wl.com and ODI's irc channels, saying the word flaffl would get you auto(?)kicked. i'm guessing this just existed as a way to trick gullible members into kicking themselves by making them type it. it even has an urban dictionary entry - arch0wl.com and ODI both had a forum dedicated to announcing when people were banned from the forums. in a0 this was called "Banned Fuckers" and in ODI it was called "Hammer Time". neat to look at the threads and see what ancient drama got people banned and how deserved people thought the bans were

Windoze wrote: *

Tue Feb 24, 2026 11:01 pm

was doing some investigative work trying to figure out the answer to an old question: who is あしまる/egg (rose quartz charter)?

i got the original interesting files collection download from here to get the original metadata (smo and eo archives fuck with the timestamps and stuff) and found something very interesting: the chart is from 2009

explorer_ZZwQ614jcA.png

(the .dwi indeed contains the chordjack chart, if you were wondering if this was just a case of someone creating a new chart on top of an old 2009 chart)

this is particularly interesting because i didnt really think eastern chordjack charts existed this early, always figured it was somewhere in 2010-2012 where that started. will update this post with any new developments i find related to this

edit: figured it out! so the username of this author is "まるい足跡", here is their fc2 blog: http://yudegg.web.fc2.com
unfortunately, most of their DWIs are removed from the site now (and the remaining ones seem to be index/pad charts...). traces of their old dwi collection can be seen on archive.org, including a section dedicated to "trancer's dolls", the album rose quartz comes from, but no archives of that page exist. any mediafire links i could find are also dead.

in the process of this i also found that abokado posted an AA on this chart in 2011 that isn't on their youtube: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm13992689

i also found this site which recorded scores for a dan course made by egg: https://web.archive.org/web/20081011200 ... ry-20.html. don't recognize most of the names but do recognize AFOTHER and GTR34. i also found this page which lists some of the charts https://web.archive.org/web/20080803175 ... y-427.html. download links unfortunately link to a japanese uploader site that's long gone; none of the charts are archived

edit 2: also, i found out that egg is the one that drew the background for this chart. it's even still on his blog: http://yudegg.web.fc2.com/illust/rose_quartz_a_4_2.jpg

it's also featured in this compilation of rozen maiden fanart: https://asamegraph.sakura.ne.jp/before/mtwekcmkf8.html

i also looked for a really long time to try and find if anyone has archived the rest of egg's charts anywhere... doesn't seem like it unfortunately. this youtube channel has a lot of fairly recent (2022) videos of egg's charts however, and they have a X account they actively use still, so maybe if i really wanted I could try asking for the files?

the person from the last link it's an strange one, he's been playing since 2010 aprox but their replies are strange according to AFOTHER.
I give to him abokado's death piano only to see if he can get the clear on it and he got it after that he blocked me for no reason on twitter lol.
regarding the dan courses by egg i used to have them long time ago but the hdd died last year rip...
I only recognize 3min, juspian, 34GTR, AFOTHER, Kooh, Wyld (KITUNEKOTEI).

Noire wrote: *

Sun Mar 08, 2026 5:34 am

the person from the last link it's an strange one, he's been playing since 2010 aprox but their replies are strange according to AFOTHER.
I give to him abokado's death piano only to see if he can get the clear on it and he got it after that he blocked me for no reason on twitter lol.
regarding the dan courses by egg i used to have them long time ago but the hdd died last year rip...
I only recognize 3min, juspian, 34GTR, AFOTHER, Kooh, Wyld (KITUNEKOTEI).

rip hdd... the information you've provided is still interesting, thank you. i saw the video they did of abokado's death piano, interesting to find out that you were the one who sent it