Despite the popularity of the IBM PC in the West during the 1980s, it had shortcomings that prevented it from flourishing in the Japanese market, most of all support for the Japanese language. This led to a sort of parallel universe in which NEC’s PC-9800 series (‘PC-98’) was the dominant personal computer, including its NEC µPD7220 display controller with its 4096-color palette. These computer systems led to a graphics style that persists to today, along with a whole ecosystem of games and applications that never left the PC-98. In an article by [Biz Davis] this software ecosystem, its art style and their lasting impact is explored.
Although the NEC PC-9800 series of computers was primarily focused on Japanese businesses with its release in the early 1980s, it found itself adopted for educational and hobby purposes as well. During the 1980s and early 1990s they faced little opposition from IBM PCs and clones, despite them all being x86-based systems running DOS. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that mostly US companies began to explicitly design computers to work for the Japanese market, leading to a gradual decline of the PC-9800 series PCs in the market.
Despite the last PC-98 system having been released in 2000 – with the last systems running some flavor of Windows – these systems and the software for them isn’t just a unique time capsule of this part of Japan’s history, but continues to see new software releases to this day. If you wish to experience this software for yourself, a number of open source PC-9800 emulators are available, including the nyan-tastic Neko Project II.
Top image: PC-9801 system. (Credit: MH0301 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)
What, no mention of the Touhou Project? (/s, just in case)
It’s still going strong and its first five or so installments were on PC-98 before switching to Windows.
YES!!! SOMEONE MENTIONED TOUHOU!!! I LOVE TOUHOU!!!
Interesting timing for this article, recent anime adaption featured PC-98 a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16bit_Sensation final episode of the series is due out tomorrow (Wednesday Dec 27) The anime is based on manga that started a few years ago.
The anime follows a woman who somehow jumped into the past but the second major character, a boy in 1990s and man in present time, really loved PC-98 and was quite upset when PC-98 was being discontinued due to competing computer system.
Spoilers: the anime really went off the rails halfway through and switched to the sci-fi dystopian genre.
But it had a warehouse full of PC-98s working together like a super computer!!
Fun fact, the author of the article, Maya Porsch, is a huge fan of 16-bit Sensation anime and inspired her to create this article. This just shows how influential the PC-98 is in Japan and now that influence is slowly spreading outside the Rising Sun.
How do you know a Hackaday staff is a huge fan of the anime just because it’s about a PC-98 that was just finished and an article about the same computer just came out during that time range? This doesn’t make sense!
If I am a Hackaday author who writes several articles mainly about China’s tech, Z80 computers, cool tech demos and decided to write one about DOOM ported to Sharp X68000, does this make me a huge fan of DOOM just because that game is ported to basically whatever is in your mind? By applying your logic to this, this article means I am a DOOM person.
Grow up, kid!
Well, the 16-bit Sensation proved to be insanely popular. Who knows, this anime might even encourage devs to finally bring PC-98 homebrew to existence.
If 16-Bit Sensation even has a PC-98 VN, this meta take would be a total perfection, so of course Maya Porsch is a huge fan of the anime.
I mean, it’s a well thought-out tribute to the 98.
@GlamMetalFan
>Well, the 16-bit Sensation proved to be insanely popular. Who knows, this anime
>might even encourage devs to finally bring PC-98 homebrew to existence.
Would love to, but with German being my mother-language and English being my second learning Japanese as a third is pretty hard. And as that machine is mainly used in Japanese, being made especially for the Japanese market, i doubt it and me will ever be as close friends as me and the C64, the Amiga or DOS era PCs.
Alcohol Soft…
I wonder how many programmers wonder if the company they work/slave for is the inspiration for that mythical company.
B^)
Time for some hackers to revive the PC-98 in a new form then.
Nice art. One would think the Amiga would have taken off there.
Indeed, the Amiga should have taken off there. Everywhere really. The Japanese Sharp X68000 computer came out over a year after Amiga, and in some hardware ways, it was perhaps better and evolved better. But the OS was hot trash compared to AmigaOS. It looked kind of like DOS and Windows. So, crap. Check out the Sharp x68000 for some fun. A shame they didn’t team up with Commodore.
LOL! You must be joking, right?
You can’t be serious, AmigaOS was crap.
Amiga OS was not crap. It was one of the earliest multitasking multi threaded operating systems. Based on Unix.
Yeah, it had multitasking… Unfortunately most programs hogged all the RAM/CPU, others crashed and/or bypassed the OS, and in general it was pointless.
IT was not based on Unix it was based on Tripos.
Ignore the people claiming that AmigaOS was junk. They are just clueless trolls.
I wish that the Amiga had diched the Amiga DOS but kept the rest of the OS and replaced Amiga DOS with Converge OS that Commodore was trying out for use with their Z8000 based workstation. Commodore later rewrote the DOS in c so the BPCL strangeness was removed. So I would agree that the Amiga OS might have been a good fit for the X68000. Of course an OS-9 version with GEM or even a TOS version might have been a good fit as well.
But yea that is a cool machine that I would have loved to have seen become a standard.
” Commodore later rewrote the DOS in c so the BPCL strangeness was removed.”
And thus removed parts of its lagency.
Personally, I think that Tripos and BPCL were some parts that made AmigaOS interesting, made AmigaOS stand out.
Maybe that’s why Kick/Workbench 1.x felt so different from later versions (in a good way).
I never understand why people were (are) so enamored with C/C++ all the time. It’s such a mess.
Fortran and Turbo Pascal seemed more sane to me. Plain assembly, too, sometimes (macro assembler).
Speaking of, I wonder by how much of Amiga’s performance could have been improved if the AmigaOS (AmigaDOS especially) had included assembly optimizations done by hand.
Would it had made a difference, even?
I mean, all these booter games did tinker with the bare metal directly, rather, right?
Probably not a lot. Assembly is hard to debug. Everything but the DOS was written in c or assembly. It was only the disk part of the OS was in BCPL. Even Exec was written in assembly. The OS was not slow. So that was not an issue. The problem was that the Amiga 1000 lacked anyway to boot from an HD. There was no easy way to add one since no HD interface was built in. There was also no really cheap way to add ram. Had Commodore installed 512 on the MB and then allowed the front expansion to be for more ram it would have been much better.
Eventually the issue was the lack of device independents graphics.
The real issue was a lack of software support and media coverage. All the big magazines at the time spent so much time and space covering the PC Clones that little was left for the Amiga. Why? Simple advertising dollars. Software support? Why spend all that time making great Amiga software for the limited number of customers when you could sell a ton of customers on the PC platform.
The final issue was the users. The Amiga user base pirated just about everything. Just like the C-64 and Atari user based did. Mac users tended to not pirate all that much stuff. Over all both the Atari ST and Amiga where better than the x86 PCs of the day.
Of course what do I know? I just wrote software for both the Amiga and PC x86 DOS systems and then Windows 95 up through Windows 7. I then left and started on embedded software.
As a PC dude I think that the Amiga itself was technically capable of putting out similar graphics, as well.
The Amiga 1k/2k could display 32 color at a similar resolution.
The problem with the Amiga wasn’t so much a technical problem, as it was a cultural, I’m afraid.
The Amiga was very western-centric, not to say Europe-centric, as far as the focus goes.
The whole game library is very European, with muscle men (Rambo type), platformers, shoot ’em ups (Galaxian) and arcade games (Pacman, Frogger).
The concept of text adventure games, text adventures w/ graphics or point&click adventures was the closest we had here.
Meanwhile, on PC platform, the first ports of Japanese games appeard.
That was in the early 90s, when ATs w/ VGA graphics were around.
Games like Seasons of the Sakura, Cobra Mission or Knights of Xentar got releases.
Especially the availability of VGA (640×480 16c) made it possible to faithfully display PC98 graphics (640×400 16c).
The ability to change palette of 16 simultaneous colors from 4096 colors is notable here.
(EGA technically had 64c, but could only display 16c at once without trickery.)
VGA also was the reason that DOS/V computers came to be.
VGA’s resolution and soft font (?) capability helped displaying Kanji characters on normal AT style PCs from the west.
Anyway, back to the Amiga. It was quite capable, but it wasn’t being treated as much as a workstation as it should have been.
That’s a difference to the X6800.
It was being used by the whole game industry as a development platform.
(Even the Apple II was being used for NES development I heard.)
But again, that was a cultural problem, maybe.
Manga and anime wasn’t known in Europe of the 80s (unlike the USA).
I mean, we knew that certain Cartoons had a weird eastern look to them that was cool, but we couldn’t classifyit yet.
That changed in the early-mid 90s, I think.
That’s when we learned what manga actually was and that many classic cartoons we grew up with were animes, really (Kimba the white lion, Maya the bee, etc).
That’s maybe why the Amiga never head Japanese games, with the exception of Gem’X, maybe.
The PC/DOS platform, however, which was widely popular in the US, had titles with Japanese influence since the 80s.
Let’s just think of Zeliard or Psychic War..
That being said, nothing against the Amiga. The electronics and the OS wasn’t bad per se, but the marketing was.
The Amiga could have been more advertised as a graphics workstation or a network server, maybe.
That might have helped to regain the reputation that the A500 had destroyed, I think.
Because I think the same model that helped to conquer the bedroom as a game console also damaged the reputation as a PC.
That’s another difference to PC98, IBM PC and X68k.
These PCs always were being taken seriously.
“The Amiga was very western-centric, not to say Europe-centric, as far as the focus goes.
The whole game library is very European, with muscle men (Rambo type), platformers, shoot ’em ups (Galaxian) and arcade games (Pacman, Frogger).
The concept of text adventure games, text adventures w/ graphics or point&click adventures was the closest we had here.”
The game genres you list were dated already by the time the Amiga was released. Are you thinking of the C64 and other 8 bit machines, perhaps?
Games that were perhaps more representative of the 16 bit era included:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_Crown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(1989_video_game)
There were also ports of Japanese arcade games, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Land
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Bros.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzznic
“That might have helped to regain the reputation that the A500 had destroyed, I think.
Because I think the same model that helped to conquer the bedroom as a game console also damaged the reputation as a PC.”
The Amiga wasn’t taken very seriously in the US, facing competition from the Mac and PC. But in Europe, it was a popular choice for hobby and creative use; if the Mac had DTP, the PC had Lotus 1-2-3, and the Atari ST had MIDI music, the Amiga had desktop video used by many video production outfits small and large. There were also many development tools (e.g. SAS C, AMOS, and DevPac), productivity tools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_productivity_software , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protext_(Arnor) ), and hardware add-ons (CPU accelerators, SCSI and IDE hard drives and CD-ROM drives, PC and Mac emulators such as https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/pc286 and https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/amax ). There was also a vibrant Public Domain software movement, including graphical demos, games, disk magazines – e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapevine_(disk_magazine) , and ports of UNIX software – often distributed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish ). There were even many erotic/porn games and demos, if that was your thing.
“The game genres you list were dated already by the time the Amiga was released. Are you thinking of the C64 and other 8 bit machines, perhaps?”
Um, maybe yes. Was there a big difference?
To my understanding, C64/ZX Spectrum/CPC and Atari ST/Amiga had a shared game library.
Most games were being available on one of those platforms.
The PC was a bit outstanding in sofar that it was overly popular in the US, also as a game platform (Tandy 1000 series, PCJr). Apple II and Macintosh had a similar popularity.
So about any US games made it to the international market, even if there was no port available.
A local distributor was all it needed to sell an US game unaltered.
There wasn’t even an 50/60 timing difference, since IBM compatible PCs were mostly same all over the world.
Most US PC games available here in Europe didn’t have their Tandy 1000 support removed, despite the Tandy 1000 being rather rare here (sold in UK at some point?).
Speaking under correction.
Thank you for your explanation and the list of games and applications! 🙂👍
“The Amiga wasn’t taken very seriously in the US, facing competition from the Mac and PC. But in Europe, it was a popular choice for hobby and creative use; if the Mac had DTP, the PC had Lotus 1-2-3, and the Atari ST had MIDI music, the Amiga had desktop video used by many video production outfits small and large. There were also many development tools (e.g. SAS C, AMOS, and DevPac), productivity tools [..] ”
That makes sense and I don’t mean to disagree.
It’s just that Commodore seemed to have had a bit of an image of a toy company.
Most of the elderly people I talked with thought of the C64 and computer games immediately anytime I mentioned Commodore (here in Germany).
Or they mentioned the Amiga A500.. I can’t recall ever hearing how great the A1000 was, for example. Sadly.
They didn’t even think of the Commodore 1702 video monitor, as I had hoped (was my Nintendo monitor).
That one was used outside the home computer scene as an affordable, dependable broadcast monitor (studio monitor), too.
It got a fairly good reputation here.
So it really seems to me that the majority of people think Commodore = bread bin computer (C64). Or wedge (A500).
That’s a bit sad, because Commodore also had a professional line.
The A2000 and the PC line were being used by professionals, too.
The A1000 existed, too, but it was more in the role of a forerunner, I think.
It was highly praised and being used as a demonstration piece, but what professionals finally decided to buy was the A2000, which was highly expandable.
Too bad we never got the Video Toasterhhere in Europe, since it was NTSC-only.
We had to use alternatives instead, which seemingly worked well enough.
About the serious thing..
Luckily artists and studio people were more relaxed when it comes to these things.
They seemingly ignored Commodore reputation as a toy maker and simply gave the Amiga a go.
Their more playful nature likely contributed to this, too.
With a flicker-fixer being installed, the A2000 was ready for any PC workplace, too.
“Manga and anime wasn’t known in Europe of the 80s (unlike the USA). ”
Bull$hit.
“we knew that certain Cartoons had a weird eastern look to them that was cool, but we couldn’t classifyit yet. ”
“weird eastern look” Seriously??? And who is “we”?
“That changed in the early-mid 90s, I think.”
You think?
“Maya the bee”
Are you German?
“That’s maybe why the Amiga never head Japanese games, with the exception of Gem’X, maybe.”
Yeah, because according to you all those arcade ports (SEGA/Konami/Taito/Etc) aren’t Japanese games, and neither are the Hudson soft ports by Faktor 5…
Oh btw, check the history of MSX in Europe before spouting uninformed crap.
“Oh btw, check the history of MSX in Europe before spouting uninformed crap.”
MSX was a niche, too. It was being popular in Brazil. Or Spain.
“Bull$hit. ”
Not bullsh*t. The majority of the population perhaps knew about cartoons that belonged into anime category,
but the artstyle as such wasn’t known by its name.
I’m not talking about nerds and geeks, but ordinary citizen.
It was the 90s, when anime/manga was being recognized in the people’s mind.
“Not bullsh*t. The majority of the population perhaps knew about cartoons that belonged into anime category,”
In fact “Japanese cartoons” was a derogatory term.
“but the artstyle as such wasn’t known by its name.”
What name? Manga eiga? Dōga?
“Games like Seasons of the Sakura, Cobra Mission or Knights of Xentar got releases.”
Ah yes, the pron games. You are a connoisseur of the genre ;-)
@Obvious joe I’m not seeking for any kind of argument. Everything I wrote was done to the best of my knowledge. I had no intention of hurting your feelings or provoking you in any way. If this happened, I would like to sincerely apologize at this point, it was not intentional. Best wishes.
“Ah yes, the pron games. You are a connoisseur of the genre ;-)”
Haha, thanks! 😘
But seriously, I can’t help it, that’s simply the genre the PC-98 was somewhat famous for. 🤷♂️
It’s what MegaTech had offered to us since the early 90s..
“Megatech Software was the first licensor of anime games in the United States, and the first licensor of hentai games or eroge in English.”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatech_Software
@Obvious joe Btw, the history of Cobra Mission is quite interesting. Some of the additional artwork found in the PC DOS version (the photo dude etc) was being drawn by Chinese artists, it seems. So that makes those “manhua” drawings, technically? Man, if that’s not cultural diversity here. We’re men of culture, aren’t we? 😁
http://tinyurl.com/mrv764ew
Here’s what I found about MSX market share. MSX1, probably.
“The present and future
Success in various smaller markets like Brazil and Argentina in South America, continental European countries like the Netherlands and Spain, and Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, aside, the MSX standard proved a mostly Japanese phenomenon.
It never approached the success of its better known brethren in its home country: NEC (PC-8800 series, 1981, and PC-9800 series, 1982), Fujitsu (FM series, 1981), and Sharp (X1 series, 1982, and X68000 series, 1987) all beat the MSX in mind- and ”
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-bright-life-of-the-msx-japans-underdog-pc/
Anyway, I’m not sure if that’s true.
All I can say is that MSX2 was great and that it’s a shame that MSX2+ didn’t become popular here. It was an awesome platform! :D
“Anyway, I’m not sure if that’s true.”
This part is surely wrong:
“the MSX lives on 30 years”
As it just feted the 40th anniversary :)
In Japan it came in a distant 3rd place after NEC’s PC 88/98.
MSX filled the “cheap machine” niche, the other machines (Sharp/Fujitsu) were VERY expensive, so sold in less numbers.
“Maya the bee”
Are you German?
I guess I rather consider myself European here, but on Mondays I feel very German. 😁
Btw, just checked. “Die Biene Maja” got an US version, too. It wasn’t as obscure as I thought, it seems. Rather falls into same category as The Littles, maybe, popularity wise.
The intro song isn’t too chabby, either! Not as dramatic/sentimental as the German one, maybe, but quite catchy and uplifting – fits Maya’s personality very well. That surprises me. Well done by US standards, I think. 🙂👍
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlwueICyUxk
The Japanese promo is cute, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHjweu8Vy4E
I had no idea that the episodes with the mouse are part of another season/series (The new adventures of..). You really learn something new every day. Cool.
In an alternative universe where PC98 is ubiquitous in Europe…
Nice article. I always wondered where these masterpieces of pixel art came from. Turns out they came from the whopping VRAM on the machine. It’s a computer era that I missed. I never got into DOS games because I thought they all looked like Commander Keen.
Hi, if you’re new to Japanese games, you may also check out the MSX2 platform, as well as these titles:
Snatcher (MSX2 port has English patch), Metal Gear, Policenauts, Jesus: Kyoufu no Bio Monster (NES has Englisg patch) etc.
PC: Cobra Mission (DOS), Knights of Xentar (DOS), Seasons of the Sakura (DOS), Runaway City (DOS), Three Sister’s Story (DOS), Marble Cooking (DOS/V), Rusty (DOS/V), Mad Paradox (DOS/V), Totsugeki! Mix (DOS/V).
These games also are available on other platforms, of course, like PC98.
I’ve simply mentioned those compatible with western hardware (VGA, Sound Blaster).
Because they can be played on your old 486 PC.
DOS/V titles either need a Japanese DOS (say MS-DOS 6.20) or a Japanese font utility (say Dos-J Plus aka DOSJP).
Otherwise, the text looks garbled.
Some visual novels originating from PC98 platform can be played in English for free in a web browser, too. See Asenheim Project.
Speaking of Commander Keen, it’s not too bad.
On DOS, in early 90s, it was the closest we had to Super Mario Bros on the NES.
Considering that it used EGA graphics modes, it wasn’t bad.
Commander Keen IV even supported the Gravis Gamepad, that somewhat resembled a mixture of a NES 2 dogbone controller (shape) and a SNES/SFC gamepad (colored buttons).
But yeah, graphics wise, neither Amiga nor PC came close to a SNES in terms if graphics fidelity at the time.
Even in the sound department, it needed a Gravis Ultrasound to compete with the SNES’ SPC-700 sound module. :D
Best regards,
Joshua
PS: Also classic anim.., “Japanimation”, worth a look are Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, Dirty Pair, City Hunter, Cyber City Oedo 808, Akira, Gunsmith Cats, Orange Road, Lily C.A.T, Megazone 23, Wings of Honneamise. As well as the whole Ghibli library, of course. Just to name a few.
“But yeah, graphics wise, neither Amiga nor PC came close to a SNES in terms if graphics fidelity at the time.”
Okay, I have to admit that technically, VESA VBE allowed for higher graphics fidelity by 1990 already.
But there were limits in practice, maybe.
Early ISA VGA cards may have had an 8-Bit (256 color) RAMDAC installed and as little as 256KB to 512KB of VRAM (PVGA1A, OAK-067, ET4000AX etc) .
Those cards also had no VBE in their VGA BIOS yet.
VBE had to loaded as a TSR from DOS command line.
If someone had lost the original driver diskette, UniVBE was the only hope (sucess was hit and miss).
Early VGA monitors of the late 80s/early 90s couldn’t safely go beyond 640×480 60 Hz/31,5 KHz, also.
(Remember those little 14″ CRT screens with adjustment knobs?)
So this limits things to 640×400 256c or 640×480 256c in practice, realistically speaking.
– Flickery 800×600 in 56 Hz (interlaced) were sometimes possible, too.
That’s fairly good, but not exactly on eye level with the SNES.
The SNES could overlay graphics, for example.
By mid-late 90s, however, this had changed in favor of (S)VGA cards (VBE 2, 15/16-Bit color depth etc).
Otherwise, Snes9x and ZNES couldn’t display SNES games on DOS platform.
nice list, thanks. The compatibility notes are really handy
PC-98 was just a small corner of Japanese hobby tech. Language kept much Japan’s rich tech scene outside the view of most US hobbyists. Even when visitors spent a few days in Tokyo they rarely saw much beyond Akihabara. But the depth of Japanese tech was hidden without a trip to the bookstores. Hardware and software magazines flourished independently from the US market, and their popularity and technical excellence equaled or exceeded US counterparts.
“Transistor” magazine was a great example of what we were missing, but there are many others.
https://41j.com/blog/2015/11/hobbyist-tech-magazines-in-japan/
I followed your link and almost fell down that rabbit hole!
B^)
I think it should be highlighted that while PC-98 machines were capable of displaying 4096 colors, it could only show 16 colors at once. This is what contributed heavily to the PC-98 look, because people had to make clever use of those 16 colors for both the foreground and background, and heavy use of dithering to make it look like there were more colors than there really were.
+1
VGA on IBM PC platform had a similar ability later on. Third-party VGA cards appeared in early 1988, I believe.
But the difference was that “we” focused on 320×200 256c graphics, which initially were known as PS/2 graphics or MCGA (on IBM PC platform).
The exception to this were shareware titles, high class text/graphic adventures (Legend Entertainment games) and simulation games (SimCity, MS Flight Sim). Those used 640×480 16 (real VGA) and beyond.
So long story short, western gaming world focused on color w/ low-resolution whereas the Japanese focused on high-resolution graphics.
Our western reasoning was that the human eye is more impressed by color depth than resolution.
In combination with low end CRT screens (0.42 mm and higher dot pitch, rather than modern 0.25 mm) the color blending was working out very well and the result was very natural looking.
That worked for dithering, too, of course. Checker board patterns magically turned to grey, transparency effects for water seemed real.
I think that’s why “we” had stucken to it for so long.
It also had the convenient side effect that we westerners could continue to use our beloved old lo-fi TV technology of the day
(the Japanese were more advanced here already, too. Their MUSE capable TVs had featured HD resolution by the mid-late 80s already. They had owned Hi Vision Laserdiscs when we had admired VHS, still).
Up to ~300 lines, graphics could be drawn by using merely one of two fields (-assuming normal TV tech-) on a traditional color video monitor/color TV set.
That’s about the upper limit, however.
In practice, more than 256 lines were rarely used by any game console.
The consumer grade color CRTs could barely fully resolve it anyway (b/w CRTs could).
That’s were the terms 240p (NTSC) and 288p (PAL) do come from, I believe.
So historically, there was no desperate need to implement support for proper interlacing in the game consoles of the day. Same goes for some home computers.
Their video chips could simply stick to using either odd or even field.
The other was simply being “left dead”.
Some consoles also somehow drew “in-between” by utilizing flaws of the analog video standards. That might be some real hacking material for tech discussions, btw.
The Japanese by contrast, had a need for high-resolution graphics early on due to their writing system. On personal computers, at least.
Japanese game consoles didn’t use much text, either, so could get by with low-res graphics and blurry, jittery NTSC video standard, as well (Famicom, Sega SG-1000 Mark III, PC Engine etc).
Over RF connection, it had a certain charm to it, too.
The video sub systems of their PCs had to be more complex, which is why the PC-98 (-an office PC-) didn’t feature low-res graphics to begin with.
Their monitors could be higher end, too, because the resolution was equally higher end, as well.
(Though that doesn’t mean that dithering wouldn’t have had gotten some benefit from a lower end CRT monitor, as well. 🙂)
That “shortcoming” made the PC-98 so suitable for visual novels, though, which had good use for static hi-res graphics.
That’s comparable to an IBM PC of the day using a Hercules compatible graphics card/monitor.:
It couldn’t do less than 720×348, either.
– With the exception of that custom 640×400 mode (used by Korean Dungeon Boy game and a nameless C64 emulator).
Still, the sluggish Hercules turned out to be nice for simulation games and hi-res adventures in a similar way that the PC-98 graphic system was predestined for displaying visual novels, quiz and puzzle games.
Speaking under correction.
My apologies for the bad wording/poor English.
What I wrote is merely meant as an orientation.
Because, I think the topic is highly fascinating.
I really recommend reading more about it online.
Platforms like PC-88 and FM-7 or FM Towns are interesting, too.
Then there’s the failed AX platform, which essentially was an PC/AT compatible DOS PC with EGA-ish graphics and a Kanji font in ROM (rather than English/CP437 found in western PCs). DOS/V platform essentially made it superfluous.
Fun fact, the author of the article, Maya Porsch, is a huge fan of 16-bit Sensation anime and inspired her to create this article. This just shows how influential is the PC-98 in Japan and this influence has slowly spread outside Japan.
Btw if NEC kept innovating instead of falling beneath the kneels of IBM, who knows how would the PC-98 continue. Maybe it would support stuff like Nvidia earlier than regular PC (I wish Bubblegum Crisis had a PC-98 RPG, how cool that retro anime was?).
I mean there’s literal RPG just not a PC-98 game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_Crisis_(role-playing_game)
But there’s at least one PC-88/PC-98:
バブルガムクライシス〜CRIME WAVE〜
https://refuge.tokyo/pc9801/pc98/01431.html
https://www.8-bits.info/gamelist/PC88/info/info_SWVEGrBfxjnbfMRq.php
As well one PC Engine(TurboGrafx-16) game:
バブルガム・クラッシュ!
https://vndb.org/v32532
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_Crisis#Video_games
I worked in a car factory in the 90. It was a joint venture between Mitsubishi and Chrysler. It was a clone of a Mitsubishi factory.
It had a pc-9801 as the console to the mainframe that ran the robots on the assembly line. If that of didn’t provide a heartbeat to the mainframe the assembly line stopped.
Silly things like running out of printer paper would stop the heartbeats.
I looked at the software on that. Most of the programs on it included source code. It was a Japanese turbo Pascal. Source was English like normal, comments were in kanji.
This brings back memories.
The DSM plant in Normal? I own four of those cars. :)
That’s the one.
I love the eclipse convertible, maybe some day I’ll own one.