MGS – Otaclock – Designed by Otacon himself! [English Alarm Solution]

Although its kinda old now, I have been using Otaclock – a download from Kojima Productions website. Its a little clock that sits on your desktop displaying Otacon as he appeared in the Tanker photo upload section of Metal Gear Solid 2 – Sons of Liberty.

For a while I had been using the Japanese version and using a translation from MGS.org however I noticed there was now an English version available on the Kojima Productions website. There is one problem though the English version doesn’t have the Alarm functionality that it claims to possess. The Japanese version does however except it is slightly more difficult to set up.

[Post now contains information on getting the English version to work]

The clock features in this Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer around [8:15]

Here is a direct link to the Japanese version of Otaclock from www.konami.jp (Win version – Japanese Site)

Here is a translation from a post from MGSforums.com (unaccredited)

OtaClock Menu:
First Drop Menu:
- Toggles between normal and military time
- Turns alarm on/off
- Turns date on/off
- Toggles “Always in front”
- Locks OtaClock in place
- Turns shadow on/off

Second Drop Menu:
- OtaClock size settings (1x – 10x)

Third Drop Menu:
- Switch alarm noise between “LAUGH” and “OK”
- Alarm .wav setting
- Alarm looped .wav setting
- Alarm Duration Control

Fourth Menu:
- Alarm setting

Fifth Menu:
- Minimize OtaClock

Sixth Menu:
- ABOUT OtaClock

Seventh Menu:
- Exit / Close

Here is a direct link to the English version of Otaclock from www.konami.jp (Win version – English site)

Note there is a Mac version also available.

I set the clock up to play the codex sound for the alarm, makes you wonder whats going on if it happens to go off at the same time as your playing a Metal Gear Solid title.

You can download the codex sound from www.xenocoder.co.uk
(Right Click MGS Codec Call Ringtone>Save Link As>…FileName…>Save

UPDATE

Mick Charles Beaver in his comment provided the link below to his MGS:TUS post, if you don’t want to click through here is the method to getting the english alarm function to work.

Original post by Mick Charles Beaver (copied without permission)

Reason why it doesn’t work….

“The text file that is used to specify the alarm times (“Alerm.txt”) is encoding using UTF-16, which specifies all of the ASCII range in two bytes. The program expects Alerm.txt to be encoded in an encoding that is ASCII compatible (at least for [0-9:]) and encoded in a single byte”

His solution

“Delete the file and recreate it using ASCII (or re-encode the file).”

Solution (based on above)

Download English version of Otaclock from www.konami.jp (Win version – English site)

Set the alarm by clicking ‘Set Alarm’ in the context menu (right click Otacon)

Open ‘Alerm.text’ in the Otaclock folder

Set the alarm

Save the file in ANSI Encoding in the ‘Save As’ menu

If it works you’ll see the read ‘ALM’ characters in the balloon. As shown above.

Thanks to Mick Charles Beaver for the solution to this problem.