LuckyMasterEN

English fan-translation + a one-command patcher for SYGNAS 「らき☆マス」(Lucky☆Mas) — a 2007 Lucky☆Star × THE iDOLM@STER desktop-accessory pack (circle SYGNAS, catalog SGNS-0009, Comiket 73). Desktop mascots, a calendar companion that notifies you, themed calculators, wallpapers, and the four Flash screensavers — fully in English, running on real Windows XP, with no Google account needed. (The disc shipped its screensavers broken — gutted engines with no content; the patch restores the working ones, see below.)

Video demonstrating all of its features on a real CRT: youtube.

Plus a complete reverse-engineering log of SYGNAS's in-house MinkIt mascot engine and its container formats. Give the tool your own copy of the disc; it builds you an English setup.exe / ISO. No original SYGNAS file is ever redistributed.

Everything below is running in English on real Windows XP SP3 — full writeup + more screenshots on the project page ↗.

Desktop mascots & copy animation	"You've got mail"
Themed calculators	Unit conversions
The month grid	Launcher settings

The four screensavers — restored

The disc's screensavers never ran (it shipped the ScreenTime-for-Flash engine without its content — a SYGNAS packaging defect, on every locale). The patch sources the working content from SYGNAS's own "apology" re-release and merges it back in, so all four run again — on any locale (shots from a real English XP):

Chibi Characters — chibis stroll past, trailing colour	iM@S 3D — a busy 3D idol scene
iM@S 4-koma — a slow manga-panel cutscene	Lucky☆Star 4-koma — a slow manga-panel cutscene

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Get the original · support the work

• 💿 The disc is out of print. This patch applies to your own copy — find one second-hand (when it's in stock) on Suruga-ya. The circle's site is long gone; there is no official store anymore.
• 🎨 The original creator is SYGNAS (ダダ) — x.com/sygnas. There is no donation channel for the original work; if you can, buy the disc second-hand to support it.
• 💜 Support this reverse-engineering & translation work: ko-fi.com/lolisamurai — it funds more RE/preservation projects like this one.

🤖 The reverse-engineering in this project is entirely AI-driven. The format cracking, the binary and resource patching, the native period-accurate TLS server, the themed-calculator re-texturing, and this whole cross-platform toolchain were all produced by an AI agent (Claude) working from the disc.

💜 For SYGNAS, the original authors

らき☆マス was a doujin labor of love: hand-drawn Lucky☆Star × iM@S characters living on your desktop, a whole in-house animation engine (MinkIt) built just to make them move, a calendar mascot that notified you about mail and events, themed calculators, screensavers, wallpapers — an entire little world, made by fans for fans in 2007 with extraordinary care. Every character, every frame, and all of the original software is theirs. This project exists only to keep that work alive on modern machines and let more people discover it. Thank you for making something with so much soul.

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What's on the disc — and how to use it

Everything runs in English on Windows XP. Here's each piece and how to trigger it; the reverse-engineering behind it all is documented at the bottom of this README.

Feature	What it is	How to use it
🧍 Desktop mascots ("Copy Animation")	Hand-drawn Konata / Kagami / Chihaya / Makoto / Yayoi (per-pixel-alpha, driven by the in-house MinkIt engine) that replace XP's file-copy animation.	Copy or move files in Explorer — a character plays the copy. Right-click its tray icon ▸ Options to choose the character or enable it per file operation.
🗨️ The launcher	A desktop mascot (22 characters) with English speech bubbles.	Click on her chest to open the app launcher — yes, really; it's a classic anime gag — the left side opens the main menu (calculators, calendar, copy-animation, wallpaper, Display Properties), the right side opens a second menu (empty by default, for your own shortcuts). Right-click her for Calendar check / Mail check / Settings. Add or change menu entries in launcher\Launch.ini: under [Launch], Exec000…/Title000… is the left menu and Exec100…/Title100… the right; [Data] Chara=konata.Xvi swaps the mascot.
📅 The calendar	A mascot that checks today's plans — originally Google Calendar, revived by a bundled local server (no Google account, no internet).	Runs at startup, or right-click the mascot ▸ calendar check → she reads the day's events. Google Calendar in the menu opens the full month grid. Put your own events in gcal-xp\gcalsrv.lua (the EVENTS table — it hot-reloads on save).
📬 Mail check	A "you've got mail" bubble backed by a working local POP3 mailbox.	Runs at startup, or right-click the mascot ▸ mail check; the bubble opens your mail client (Outlook Express by default). Edit your inbox in gcalsrv.lua (the MAIL table).
🧮 Themed calculators	iM@S- and Lucky☆Star-skinned calculators plus a doujin unit converter.	Launch iM@S Calculator or Lucky Star Calculator from the launcher menu. The converter does BPM↔ms, ms↔fps frames, page-count↔paper thickness, and tax.
🖼️ Wallpapers	84 wallpapers (14 artists × resolutions) with an HTML picker.	Launch Wallpaper from the menu, then click a thumbnail in the gallery to set it.
🌙 Screensavers	Four (iM@S 3D · iM@S Comic · Lucky☆Star Comic · Chibi).	⚠️ Broken on the disc — a known SYGNAS defect, not anything our patch does. They're ScreenTime for Flash screensavers, but the disc shipped only the engine .scr without the content package they need, so they error out. SYGNAS later released the working versions separately as an apology; folding those into the EN build is in progress. Background: the screensaver teardown.
📦 The installer	SYGNAS's Inno Setup wizard, faithfully re-wrapped in English.	Run setup.exe — or build your own English disc from your copy (see below).

The calendar, with no Google account

Hiyori on real Windows XP SP3, reading her calendar from our native XP-local fake-Google server (tools/gcal-xp/) — a single ~300 KB Win32 EXE that answers as www.google.com over the box's own 2007 WinINet↔Schannel TLS stack (Schannel ClientLogin + GData feeds + a POP3 mailbox; request logic in embedded Lua). The events are served entirely locally and the speech is our English translation — no Google account, no internet.

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Build your own English disc (one command)

You own the disc; this turns it into an English one. Give it your disc's setup.exe and your own copy of MS PGothic — out comes LuckyMas-EN.iso (a drop-in English disc image) and a LuckyMas-EN.zip. Nothing here redistributes a SYGNAS or Microsoft file. Full guide: docs/end-user-build.md.

📀 Check you have the supported disc first: docs/source-disc.md — the disc/setup.exe + per-file checksums, versions and metadata the patch is built against (and a preservation record for this out-of-print 2007 disc).

# Windows — unzip LuckyMasEN-builder-win.zip, then (runs Inno Setup natively, no wine):
build.bat --setup D:\setup.exe --font auto

# Linux (Nix):
nix run github:Francesco149/LuckyMasEN#iso -- --setup ~/setup.exe --font auto

# anywhere with Python + innoextract (+ wine on Linux):
python tools/make_iso.py --setup ~/setup.exe --font auto

One engine (tools/make_iso.py) drives it everywhere: innoextract reads the app tree straight out of your setup.exe, build_patch.py applies the English delta, the faithful wizard art is pulled from your setup.exe, the Inno Setup compiler recompiles the installer, and the disc image is written with pycdlib/xorriso. The freeware build tools are auto-downloaded pinned + SHA-256-verified (the Windows bundle pre-seeds them, so it builds offline). Pre-built Windows + Linux bundles are attached to the nightly release.

The faithful 586×364 wizard size is MS PGothic's specific metrics; no Latin font reproduces it, so the toolchain bundles a builder-supplied copy of the font (tools/get_font.py), AddFontResource-d for the wizard and installed for the app's speech-bubble serifs — so it renders correctly even on an XP with no East-Asian language pack.

How it works (for the curious / contributors)

Doc	What
docs/patch-system.md	the reproducible patch pipeline — one manifest, one engine, every file accounted for
docs/mink-format.md	the reverse-engineered SYGNAS container formats — MINK · ACZ (.Xvi) · PACKDATA (.pak)
docs/re-notes.md	the full running RE log (binaries, codecs, the Google/TLS protocol, the translation passes)
docs/end-user-build.md	the self-service build guide (Windows + Linux)
docs/source-disc.md	the source disc's identity, versions + per-file checksums (verify the supported version; preservation record)
tools/gcal-xp/	the native XP-local fake-Google calendar/mail server

Hard rule: no redistribution of original files

We ship only a delta + a tool that applies to the user's own copy of the disc — the fan-translation / ROM-hack model. No SYGNAS file is ever committed or distributed. The owner's working copy lives in originals/ and is gitignored. (The self-signed www.google.com/localhost cert fixture under tools/*/certs is not a SYGNAS file and not a secret — a throwaway local TLS fixture, committed on purpose so the served cert matches what the server trusts, byte-for-byte.)

Layout

Path	What
flake.nix	the whole toolchain — nix develop (RE/TL shell) and nix run .#iso (the builder)
tools/	the patch engine (build_patch.py), the one-command builder (make_iso.py), the extractors, and the native server (gcal-xp/)
patch/	the patch sources + manifest.toml — the single source of truth for every file we patch
installer/	the English Inno Setup script + the Windows builder bundle (installer/windows/)
docs/	the RE log, the format specs, the patch-system + build guides
originals/, out/	gitignored — your own disc input, and the build output (both contain SYGNAS bytes)

License

The tooling, patch sources, and docs in this repository are the project's own work. All original characters, art, and software are © SYGNAS and the respective rights holders; none of it is included here. This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by SYGNAS.