#DESKTOP MAGIC ENGINE SOFTWARE#

“What’s wrong with that? Wallpaper Engine is only a framework. When Kristjan Skutta, one of the main developers, was invited to China in 2019 to attend an event, Chinese media asked what he thought about the fact that the app was being used to watch certain types of videos.

#DESKTOP MAGIC ENGINE SOFTWARE#

The developers, who keep a relatively low profile online, likely know how their software is being used thousands of miles away. The user proceeded to log over 5,000 hours in Wallpaper Engine. “What’s the sickest is that someone straight up uploaded porn to the Workshop,” reads one March 2019 review in Chinese, upvoted by 456 others. The top 70 most upvoted reviews of all time on Steam for this software are all written in simplified Chinese.

They are also some of the most devoted users of Wallpaper Engine. Compare this with 40%, and it’s clear that Chinese users are overrepresented in Wallpaper Engine’s user base. A different stat by Steam suggests that 21% of overall traffic came from China in the seven days before the publication of this story. Meanwhile, only 24.75% of total Steam users set their default language as simplified Chinese, according to Steam’s latest sampling survey, from June 2022. (Language is a common proxy for Steam users’ geographical distribution, which is hard to collect on Steam.) More recent reviews follow the same trend: during the first seven days of July, the software received 2,907 Steam reviews, and MIT Technology Review has found that 40% of those were written either in simplified Chinese or by someone with a simplified Chinese username. It’s impossible to know exactly how many of Wallpaper Engine’s users are from China, but evidence suggests that at least 40% of them are Chinese, almost twice Steam’s Chinese user percentage.Īmong the nearly half a million Steam reviews of Wallpaper Engine, 40% were written by someone whose default language was simplified Chinese, compared with English at 28%. His article in the Chinese media helped bring the software’s hidden uses to the attention of those who were not yet in on the secret. There he found porn, hentai anime, Donald Trump memes, and even pirated copies of Hollywood movies, like Joker. Having been a gamer and a Steam user, he downloaded Wallpaper Engine and tested it. Did people like to change their wallpapers so often?”Ĭui Jianyi, a Chinese writer and journalist, wrote about the phenomenon in 2020 after he saw someone mention it on social media. And even today some PC-Engine games are still without an equivalent on modern consoles.“It was at least two or three years ago when this went viral,” says Zhou, a Chinese gamer in Beijing who asked to use only his last name due to privacy concerns. It also had a very good game collection, with unique and high quality games. This was quite an impressive machine, with good graphic capacities (16-bit video processor, 512 colors, 64 sprites) and a fast and powerful 8-bit CPU. The first model came out in 1987 followed one year later by a CD extension that made the PC-Engine the first console to have CD games. The PC-Engine - also known as the TurboGrafx-16 in the USA, was a nice little machine made by NEC. Magic Engine is a PC-Engine console emulator.

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