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25/01/2026 - Deltarune - installing CATZ

Or, how W.D. Gaster made me reinstall Windows

Okay. So, some of you may know what Undertale and Deltarune is. I would wager that the vast majority of you do if you're in Neocities. But for those who are maybe a bit unaware, there's a mysterious figure called "W.D. Gaster" in those games. A very hidden figure, with the W.D. being a reference to the "Wingdings" font more than likely, considering his connection to another set of characters whose names are puns on fonts (and how the very few bits of dialogue in Undertale that we do know that come from him are indeed written in Wingdings).

In the parallel story to Undertale, Deltarune, his role is largely expanded as a shadow figure among several that haunt the game's narrative. But in Deltarune, there is also a character called Noelle Holiday. A character with a lot of themes centerting around secrets, mystery, and so on. And you can visit her own site on Deltarune's main site as part of a small ARG, which lead me to find something that piqued my interest.

Link to Noelle's blog #1 - Cat Petterz.

There's a second page on there as well, a slightly creepier blog post. Not that it's actually creepy, but considering the secretive context and the themes around the character, it's interesting. I don't plan on writing an analysis of Noelle's character, but I digress. I looked at the description of the in-universe game and realized.

(Image sourced from WinWorld)

This is just Catz! It's just a somewhat fantasy-modified version of Catz!! It's a cute little game about cat caretaking. What tipped me off is that Noelle occasionally describes the game as having cats made out of spheres, which is the exact rendering method that Catz uses. And I have a Windows 3.1 VM I set up to use old CAD software anyways... so I figured to try it out.



And this is all where it started to go wrong, partially due to my stupidity and partially because of Gaster. (Totally not because I didn't know how VirtualBox handled display modes).

Alright. All good so far.

lol, I couldn't just not do it.



Then, blood spaghetti.

Now, this is actually pretty interesting. It wiggles and rotates and admittedly looks a little gross in motion (especially considering I did not expect it from Catz of all things), but I would sometime really like to look into how it detects what it does. But this is where it all went wrong.

Oh well. Guess I'll try to change the display, maybe try to figure out what display Virtualbox uses and if I need to download something for i-

Ah.

Now, more competent people would probably try to diagnose the issue. Figure out what went wrong (which is probably just incorrect display settings from yours truly). The thing is, I had virtually nothing on this VM other than some CAD software I was mildly curious about. So I naturally nuked the installation since installing Windows 3.1 in Virtualbox, which is not really emulating accurate hardware, takes a collective 30 seconds. And it gives me joy, installing these old OSs. I dunno why, but it's just really engaging for me, like unboxing a new present.

Thing is, somehow the executable for CATZ survived. I figured something would, since I nuked C:\Windows and not C:\CATZ, but I was surprised that even the executable shortcut survived. Nothing ever goes wrong when running a damaged executable on an old operating system while knowing nothing about what you're doing, aye?

I mean... it didn't break it again, but "Wing.DLL"? Of all things?? When I am doing something related to the game where the first name of the spooky shadowy character that haunts almost if not every single part of the main overarching mystery is "Wing"??

I know this is just a coincidence, it's a really funny one. But it's also really funny to say that Wing Ding Gaster himself screwed my Windows 3.1 installation personally, so I am going with that.

That's kind of it, really. Just a funny little story about Basil's mildly amusing ride. I hope your day goes well if you read up to this point! And feel free to type what you think about this stupid little thing in my guestbook.

Wowza, you reached the end of my blog!