Private Eye Dol in Windows 95 is a disc that contains the Private Eye Dol OVA series in addition to screen savers as well as wallpapers.
You can find the full disc image on Archive.org.
What is Private Eye Dol?
Private Eye Dol is a PC Engine Super CD title released by HuneX. It’s an adventure game that focused on making full use of the CD format for cutscenes and voice acting. Its opening is light-hearted, but the first chapter is fairly ominous.
Later, a three episode OVA series was released on the PC-FX via the Anime Freaks digital magazine.
Private Eye Dol OVA
When Private Eye Dol in Windows 95 is installed, the videos are watched via an in-application TV. However, they’re stored on disc as mpg files and can be easily pulled off the disc.
While I haven’t done a complete comparison, included are not direct recordings of the PC-FX versions. The frame is a bit wider and shows off more of the scenes. There are a lot of compression artifacts though, so whether or not the quality is improved over is debatable.
Above is a comparison between one of the wall paper images on the disc, the mpg video and the PC-FX version captured from my unit. Color differences on PC-FX may be due upscaler settings.
Wallpapers
Included on the disc are a series of forty 640 x 480 bmp images. Due to the compression of the OVA on Windows 95 and the low resolution of the PC-FX releases, these wall papers may be cleanest imagery to still exist. Though it seems like some other types of artifacts are present.
If you are aware of any other releases of the Prviate Eye Dol OVA, please reach out to me on Twitter.
For space reasons, the above have been converted to jpgs. The full set can be downloaded as bmps from Archive.org.
Screen Savers
Above is a video demonstration of the three screen savers featured on disc. The audio in this video has been edited in and is not a part of the screensaver portion of the software. The music featured is from the original PC Engine release of Private Eye Dol.
The screen savers don’t seem to function properly in Windows 10, but I was able to get these running on a JP Windows 95 PCem installation. They may not be running at full or a consistent speed.
This screen saver makes use of two screen caps from the anime, featuring May and Navi.
Screen Saver 1 (Can be viewed at start of video): A series of boxes that alternate between two images and resize between one square and a 4×4 block of squares.
Screen Saver 2 (Can be viewed at 1:50): Puzzle pieces automatically fill in an image. Once complete, the picture is hidden and the next puzzles begins with the second image. This repeats, however the color of the background seems to change each time.
Screen Saver 3 (Can be viewed at 3:06): Text that reads “Private Eye Dol Screen Saver,” or “Private Eye Dol スクリーンセーバー” to be exact, scrolls across the screen and shows the picture in the background. Once finished, it briefly displays the full picture, then repeats with the next image.
What’s Left to be Done
Other releases with a different or higher quality.
If there are other versions of the Private Eye Dol anime that could possibly be of a different or higher quality, these should be archived.
Archive original animation cels.
If there are any animation cels that exist, these will need to be acquired, scanned and preserved. A brief search of “プライベート・アイ・ドル セル画” did not bring up any results.
Further explore the media player that’s installed with the disc.
Possibly due to being an emulated PC, the two menu items at the top of the video player cannot be selected (highlighted in red). The right most option says Screen Saver. In general, my instance of the video player is very buggy and basically unusable.
Capture screensavers running on real hardware.
Verify if the screen savers running on a proper Windows 95 PC on real hardware moves at the same speed.
Related Materials to Research and Archive
(Image Source: Varst.net)
A book and disc release by Tokuma Intermedia Mook titled “PC Engine Best Characters” features May from Private Eye Dol and a CD. This includes illustrations, however it’s unknown if this includes any material related to the OVA. This was followed up by three volumes of PC-FX books. Given the anime’s release on the PC-FX, it is possible it could be featured in these books in some form.
A karaoke video seems to exist featuring the game’s ending theme, “Let’s Love.” According to Makapy @ Pasokara on Ameblo.jp (Archived), the video is based around the Private Eye Dol OVA footage. The above was provided as a possible screenshot.
Another karaoke video can be found here, but uses the game’s end credits as visuals.
