In a long enough timeline, every artist will be forced to take Crypto

The biggest tragedy of the art spheres online moving to Twitter and buying into fear porn endlessly about crypto, then NFTs, then AI, is very obvious. Artists are losing out on a lot of tools to literally survive in the modern economy. The truth is, being bombarded with propaganda 24/7 about how bad crypto is was probably the most self-destructive thing many artists could hear. Let’s talk about why, with a background on how this happened.

During the 2010s, there was a shift away from the “commission” and “YCH auction” style of making money to Patreon and similar sites. Patreon would become a way to monetize internet art and indie games, and especially drawn pornography. For many internet artists, this was a chance to quit their job and make a living off drawing whenever they felt like it. Patreon was controversial for many, as some used it as a paywall. This would hit a breaking point and back in the /furry/ days, the most infamous spammer Bui developed yiff.party. This made online artists angry, because they were paywalling their content. But this also would become a turning point online; the future in the mid-2010s was Patreon. It was a consistent source of money for many, and the e-celebs on the platform could make some serious money each month. Even better, as Patreon is a “lump sum” on your statement, many people tend to forget they’re giving money to some guy who might have taken a long internet hiatus or abandoned his social media accounts.

Well, it seemed to be that way. And then the crackdowns on Patreon, Gumroad, and other sites began where websites got increasingly puritan about what you could and couldn’t upload. This isn’t just one site, this is across the board, and for a very good reason. It boils down to payment processors.

Payment Processors: the root of all evil

Payment processors are very notorious for cracking down on anything they don’t like. Due to the events of the mid-2010s, the corporations decided to help the government snuff out many opposition individuals online and get politically active. Banks and payment processors however had an ace up their sleeve, they could shut down bank accounts and “debank” people, and payment processors could keep people from making money.

While pornography sites were very often caught in this sort of deal, including the high profile payment processor ban with PornHub (over some very real scandals about the site not doing proper vetting and having everything from “revenge”/non consensual porn to CSAM/CP uploaded), one of the first to be caught in this were what one would consider dissident sites. This led to a great ZeroHedge post about the matter, which called for neutral banking laws. Of course this didn’t go anywhere, but it’s worth reading. I’ll post the most damning quote here because it explains it better than I could:

Consider a company like Patreon. They are an online crowdfunding service which handles donations from many supporters to many online content creators. Patreon has its own rules, uses Stripe as a payment gateway and payment processor, agrees to Stripe’s terms of service, and then Stripe coordinates with all major payment networks which each have their own set of agreements. That means every creator on Patreon must obey six different sets of rules. If the gateway were its own company, it would be seven. It is no wonder so many people get banned, as only the most tepid and inoffensive content creators could hope to meet so many different standards!

Patreon must keep Stripe happy to stay in business, and Stripe must keep all four payment networks happy to stay in business. If any one of MasterCard, Visa, Amex, or Discover pass a rule, then it affects the entire downstream ecosystem. If Discover (5% of the market) says an industry or behavior is prohibited, then Stripe must enforce that rule on all the merchants on their service (even merchants who do not process Discover). If Discover were to cut ties with Stripe, then Stripe would lose at least 5% of their transactions over night and any merchants who do want to process Discover cards. That is a large and dramatic blow to any company operating on small margins.

So if you want to upload to a site like Patreon, you have to obey 6 different sets of rules, period. This isn’t just a Patreon issue however. The CEO of Automattic, who bought Tumblr and owns this website, made a similar post as well. In it, he also blames the same people as well for this:

Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.

Essentially, allowing porn would not only hurt the Tumblr business but the core business (WordPress) as well. Payment processors hate porn like they hate anything too politically loaded. This is why Tumblr will never host porn again unless it’s spun off or sold off to new owners who realized what made Tumblr good (and even then, will it even be as good if the users are gone? Maybe some will come back.) Of course, there’s a workaround for this, and its one artists online won’t like to hear.

Crypto and bypassing banks

Just like how the situation with banks has changed, so has the situation with taking payment. Pornhub has not been completely debanked, but they cannot take credit cards. Instead, if you want to sign up for Pornhub Premium, you have to submit payment with ACH, e-wallet….and Crypto:

Another example of a website on the “lists of sites payment processors might not like” is the conspiracy-boomer-right website Infowars. While you can still give Alex Jones cash donations via the store or buy the products he promotes on his store, you can also donate crypto to him now as well. This is done for another obvious reason, he knows whales and supporters of his show might be sketchy about sending him money through a credit card, and might have tons of crypto holdings. So he accepts them as well.

You might be asking yourself why Pornhub and Infowars have no aversion to this when internet artists panic and turn it into a culture war issue against people they hate online, and it’s obvious. Crypto is one way to send money when you lose your banking access. Online dissident groups have learned this the hard way, many of them solely or also take Bitcoin or other cryptos and some of the most paranoid and more watched ones only accept XMR. Why XMR? Well, XMR (Monero) is private meaning that you don’t have to deal with a French programmer suicide situation where anyone can track where the money went. A website gloated at how they were able to easily track the identity and who got money from a suicidal programmer who got in early, likely due to sloppy opsec before his suicide. As a result, at least one person he donated to ended up taking XMR only, and Nick Fuentes claimed he was banned from banks from this (this would turn out to be a lie for clout when his online reputation imploded).

But the thing is, the far-right groups and people who were branded as such because of their viewerbase and who they orbited online (Luke Smith comes to mind) were able to get this because they already planned ahead, or saw where the wind was blowing. Some of them already lost their bank accounts, and others knew that there were many whales using cryptocurrency. After all, they were one of the first groups that Patreon and the like targeted. Nowadays literally everyone in that paranoid crowd loves to use cryptocurrency for this very reason. Even in Canada, many anti-vaccine protesters during the “freedom convoy” lost their bank accounts as supporters got doxed and fired, and many who had learned beforehand lamented the fact they didn’t use this.

And just like that, payment processors then came for the internet porn artists. If you think that any tactics used against unlikable people who take money to complain online about women and avoid working are just going to be used against them, you really haven’t seen where the internet is heading.

The Russian issue

It’s a shame that online, many artists were high on their own supply about how crypto is killing the planet or something. They didn’t take crypto because they heard it was bad from their friends, and in those circles the worst crime one can have (even more than being a sex pest) is to have the wrong takes on current issues online. So as a result, many of them are psyopped against it. Why could this be a problem? Look at Russia.

The Russian economy isn’t that great. It never was before the war either. It was like a lot of third world countries, it has a weak currency and it took a hit after two major events: COVID and the war. Before the war, there were even some companies like Sabre Interactive outsourcing development work there for less money, and Postal III was made by a Russian company as RWS thought they could make a great game for less money (it was a disaster). But also, the commission economy and Patreon were boons for artists living in poor countries like Russia, Southeast Asian, and South American countries. They’re notorious for wages where the minimum is a few dollars a day, so being able to make mad money from furries with big tech incomes or credit card maxing was a dream come true. To quote one person who wanted to make money this way in Mexico, he could live like a king on US dollars.

And then the war happened.

See, Russia escalated a war between separatists and Ukraine that’s been going on since the mid 2010s, which most people had no idea about until it would boil over once in a while such as during the infamous MH17 shootdown. While the TV was talking about the war in Syria and the middle east with the rise of ISIS, there was another one breaking out within Ukrainian border towns, and the most people saw about it was that “Russia funded guys shot a plane down”. For a while this would be a huge international scandal all over 24 hour news networks, given the severity of it and who was responsible. But aside from that, the Ukrainian war got little coverage (I only learned about many bits and pieces of it after 2022, it was that blackholed). Something like NPR was talking about a buk missile for a while and who used it, before going back to your routine coverage of ISIS and the Koch Brothers. That is, until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 with the “special military operation”.

Naturally the USA and ally response was to sanction Russia. The idea was a presumably a matter of 5d chess, to hurt the average Russian citizen so they are pushed against the war being denied access to McDonald’s and iPhones and other icons of western capitalism that were common in Russia. Some websites and programs thought that to punish Russia, it was mandatory to hurt the average Russian citizen by blocking access to RU citizens or coding in booby traps like the infamous file wiper that was on the news (nevermind the fact many are apathetic to Putin with some even disliking the war but not saying it). The idea of sanctions working or not is a mixed bag, the USA and its allies have many citizens angry about gas prices (and in Europe, natural gas prices), and Germany even had to restart coal plants.

Meanwhile Russian versions of fast food chains usually dropped the branding and switched suppliers while serving the same food. There’s also some video I saw showing that designer goods and Apple products are still being brought into the country despite sanctions and all (they cost more though due to this). There’s also been intense web filtering going on in Russia as well, and many people I know there are using VPNs or Tor to access English websites. Not even to see what’s going on with the war like the creators might think, but because they want their Twitter. I’ve even heard news reports of companies sanction dodging. Of course, prices for many things went up as a result of this as well from what I heard, but it’s not as bad as it is in the USA.

One of the first groups of people being punished for the crime of being Russian were internet artists using PayPal. As a result of the war, many artists deleted Russia from the bio. There was outrage from artists in Russia over losing access to payment processors over this as well as they really just wanted to survive in an economy where all the jobs pay poorly. That’s on top of the looming fear of being drafted into a war they really don’t want to fight or a military they don’t care about (which is a common issue for artists living in countries like this, I knew one who had a mental breakdown over being drafted in South Korea).

So there was a time when artists moved from payment processor to payment processor, hoping to get somewhere. Eventually I’m sure they found some, but being that Russia is being sanctioned based on a war, there’s a chance they could get dropped again. Some did float crypto, but some furry swopped in to say why it’s bad and many just went with the most convenient option. Given you can’t call Bitcoin for a chargeback, I’m sure many commissioners are sketchy about it too.

But what if the situation there gets worse? What if the no-name payment processor is forced to stop doing business in Russia due to a hit piece or something? The Russian artists will be forced into crypto, which is where the reality hits.

Artists will be forced into using crypto in the end

A common critique about crypto is that it’s a “solution in need of a problem”, and this is doubled up with it being hard to make crypto payments IRL, or withdraw it in many cases, or exchanges acting as central banks and freezing wallets (and forcing users to withdraw in dollars instead). I’m sure much of this was due to “that one coworker” who was desperate to get rich quick by throwing money on a “shitcoin” on Kraken/Coinbase/similar to get rich quick. No really, the people gambling on Robin Hood to get rich from meme stocks pivoted to gambling on cryptocurrency to get rich (and increasingly dodgy crypto casinos like Stake). I knew coworkers who were spending time on the clock starting at the graphs. But the hard reality is situations like this are the problems crypto is ending up solving, especially with Monero.

Monero is especially nice for this very reason, due to its privacy focus. Monero is designed to be a private coin without a visible blockchain, free from the prying eyes of individuals with seemingly infinite resources at their whim. While many exchanges don’t sell it, Changenow.io does and allows you to exchange BTC for XMR. You then send it to your wallet (using something like exodus.io, and you have to send it to the wallet otherwise it defeats the point of using a privacy coin and you can get banned for this even) and boom. You’ll have cryptocurrency to spend anonymously.

Anyhow; you have to obtain crypto and then you can spend it. But once you’re there, you’re also free of payment processors telling you what you can and cannot draw. The truth is, the situation will worsen. Different people have different groups to blame for this, from MasterCard to foreign investors. But playing the blame game and whack a mole with payment processors isn’t going to fix anything. You’ll be forever kicking the can down the road until you’re forced onto it, regardless of what that Twitter post you retweeted in 2021 about crypto killing the globe and being used to fund Nazis said.

My advice if you’re doing art online, especially of a NSFW variety, is to read into how crypto works. Don’t read fearmongering posts on your TL, read into how it actually works and ask yourself this. Your friends are being censored left and right, so why stay on something that is bound to rules when you can use crypto? As neopuritanism online increases from both sides, this will have to be done.

Some internet artists on the Fediverse already accept crypto, but these are an outlier and (usually also draw sketchier material). This isn’t a shock either. See; these internet artists are either on the fedi as they got pushed off mainstream sites for drawing said material, or they were tech savvy enough to know about crypto. After all, that’s why they’re on the social network where everyone tells you to use Linux as a custom if they’re not pushed off Twitter.

This is the future, and it’s going to be there if you like it or not. The artists drawing legally questionable art already had to, and soon the goalposts will be moved to the point the average furry porn artist has to when he wants to draw hypno art (which Patreon banned). Crypto will still be there when you have to use it. After all, PayPal infamously bans porn and many furry artists complain when theirs is banned. Which means in the end, the plan B will come sooner than later. In 2018, it might have been fringe political posters online having to take it. In 2024, it’s going to be porn artists.

Chasing the dragon of the past

The lifecycle of many people I have known on the internet goes something like this. A few years ago the internet was better, and for them it’s when like that guy in high school who never grew up they “peaked”. Everyone was going to be so great, even with the bad stuff happening the future seemed so much better still. Even when I was bombarded with bad things happening like some shooting or viral video that makes you angry, the main blackpill of the time was just college being a dead end and unable to find employment. But I had friends online, and things were looking so bright. Unfortunately for me and my friends, that’s when it seemed like everything peaked.

Just like that kid who is unemployed, has no girlfriend or the lowest quality ones, and lives with parents/a life funded by his parents (if he’s not working a bottom rung “unskilled” job like a McJob, Wal-Mart retail job, or warehouse wagie), internet addicts peaked a few years back. Then they fell victim to the drug use, the internet drama machine, and the general decay of internet culture. If you showed someone from 2015 this headline, they’d think it’s making fun of Tumblr users and if you showed someone in 2010 it, you’d think it’s a rejected comedy movie plot:

Of course, it’s obvious how we got to this phase to anyone paying attention. While Tumblr was a haven for artists and creatives (while canceling people and callout culture were big deals back then, the standards were laxer and you wouldn’t get some moral busybody yelling at you for drawing Pokemon porn), there was a blatant dark undercurrent of political drama that blew over into the mainstream when the users of that site moved to Twitter.com. You just had to be in on the current thing, you had to reblog it or you’re a bigot. Before George Floyd, it was Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, and more.

Nowadays internet scenes are in shambles. Many of the users checked out completely, went down the rabbit hole of drama, or became unrecognizable people. Checking on what your former friends years ago are up to now is the same morbid feeling of checking up on what the cool guy in high school is up to now. Maybe he married like the neighbor I had. Maybe he married a DeviantArtist wife and had a kid. Or maybe he went down the rabbit hole of drugs and insanity, e-begging online and wallowing away in his parents place or a run down shack he rooms with, unhappy and depressed. You want to see him succeed, but he feels so distant and like trying to talk some sense into him will end up with you blocked or worse. If the worst thing you can be accused of is racism in a college town with more BLM signs than black people, online the worst thing you can have are people chasing after everything you do trying to throw your dirty laundry (which everyone online has in a long enough timeline, let’s be honest) up to every TG group/Discord server mod you meet.

Internet scenes are dead from drama and antisocial behavior, and online communities are even worse. It’s frustrating trying to find new people to be friends with when everyone else can’t get close to you, or when talking to people seems hard because everyone you meet is oversocialized and overstimulated. It’s also frustrating watching someone you like or community you like go up in flames metaphorically.

This has led to some old internet movements like neocities sites, skinwalking the past with old school 90s website aesthetics and modern-day politics. There’s remasters and remakes of games, with OSRS and WoW Classic booming along with private servers for old games. There’s an obvious reason this fails of course. It’s that 2015, or 2010, or 2007, or 1998 aren’t coming back. Those days are over. The culture changed. But most importantly, the people changed.

The people made the community

The problem with all these attempts to bring back the old internet is simple. The technology and features of these old websites were only one part of the puzzle. The other of course, is the community it’s around.

Nearly every single remnant of the old internet community wise has been driven to forums like KF (and many adjacent sites ranging from rdrama.net to forums dedicated to specific communities) and of course The Fediverse. Imageboards are dead and overrun with spam, Twitter is overrun with spam and canceling, and sites like BlueSky and Cohost are ideological echo chambers where internet notoriety is met with a ban or place on blocklists. I’ve seen people banned from Bluesky or put on blocklists for being infamous enough elsewhere. The community doesn’t care, because this is what they want.

And so this leads to the issue with many of these communities. The people who liked the old internet community wise found themselves on the fediverse or forums, the latter of which consisted of one part of the old internet. These communities are gatekept in a different way, to keep undesirable individuals either out of the site or mocked relentlessly first (if they’re seen as not a threat to the site’s existence). A famous right wing fedi instance, Poa.st, will ban people for not liking anime. A weeb coomer instance like varishangout will delete your account if you don’t post your fetishes. Others will make you say racial slurs as an initiation ritual, simply because you are not allowed to say these words on the mainstream internet giving the words a mystical appeal similar to a killphrase.

Which leads us to sites like Neocities. Neocities is full of websites that feature users making links to their big tech social media sites that feel like business cards, along with modern day politics. I’d be delusional if I said these sites didn’t exist back in the day, as the existence of the old school “transsexual” community showed (see transsexual.org as an example for a real old-school web 1.0 site in this vein), but you had to go out of your way to find these. They read less like some old school website, and more like Tumblr politics. It doesn’t take long to go on neocities to find sites like this:

Or this:

You’ll find badly made (ironically) websites talking about the postmodern personal lives of individuals there. I really think you should click on random neocities sites. While not all of them are cringe and some are from FOSS nerds such as the legendary spyware.neocities.org, it’s a great glimpse into the postmodern internet with aesthetics of the old web.

There’s a point I want to make with this. It’s not that the people are so and so. It’s that the users there are the same as you’ll find on Twitter and formerly Tumblr. They’re not the same as the people of the past. In fact, even if you look at transsexual.org, you’ll notice that pronouns weren’t a thing back then, but rather “you are the wrong gender“. There’s a reason I point this out too, it’s to show that the aesthetics of these old sites also came with a different mindset. There are a lot of things on these sites that would be controversial to say today. Case in point, just look at how Newgrounds famously had a ton of games about shooting Muslims after 9/11 and mimicking South Park’s sense of humor. If you build the old internet in 2024, it’s not going to be the same as the old internet, because the people aren’t there. Or worse, you’re not allowed to be that anymore.

The moderation is different, too

Here’s another example of how the old web was defined by the people on it, but from a different POV. Let’s look at video games. I am sure that if you were to mimic DJ Keemstar on Halo 3 by playing Halo 2 on Insignia.live (which features pride flags on the Twitter + Discord logo as a protest about how “pride logos from corporations during a specific month don’t care about the LGBT”), I have a gut feeling you’ll get banned. It’s a good thing too many people don’t own communicators and 2.5 headsets that old phones used…yet. I mean his griefer group was called F@G.

Essentially, I haven’t tested this. But if I decided to mess with this on XEMU, a VPN, and a burner email, I’m sure I’d get banned. I just can feel it. I just know how it is from pattern recognition on old video games and the flags there. But don’t take my word for it. Look at modern gaming. Call of Duty has now added in AI voice chat monitoring even in private games with your bros after a long hard day of wage cucking it for $17 an hour. It’s also very sensitive.

This of course is an example of a different big tech problem which seeps its way into communities, which is top down moderation to influence behaviors. If they can’t make the community change, they will do it by force.

No website is a better example of this than 4chan, where the moderators refuse to deal with the spam issue. Spam is very prominent in threads, along with derailing, “sliding”, and the meme that /pol/ is literally dead from all the spam. Furthermore, moderators will send threads they hate to /pol/ (usually on topic but inevitably political threads on say /g/ as an example) or /trash/ (which has its own community of furries and whatnot, usually for NSFW threads or threads too “furry”), further trashing the discussions going on in the board. But one of the most infamous examples of 4chan moderators flexing their power has to be the now dead /qa/ board, which is almost completely locked and only 2-3 threads on it. This is because you see, members of that board infamously raided /lgbt/, which was a sacred cow to the site for obvious reasons.

After this, everyone there migrated off site to the sharty/Soyjak Party, which has been notorious for some wild raids and part of its lingo seeping into other parts of the internet. Yet it’s also been plagued with other issues such as users posting child abuse material in threads. That’s not a joke. Imageboards tend to be lightning rods for that sort of content, and that’s the other reason why nobody wants to dare touch hosting an “altboard” (any imageboard not 4chan in the anglosphere).

Why is 4chan dead culturally? It’s because of the people there in the top, who just let many people making the site bad keep posting. It’s all about the people.

This is just a look at the larger sites. Many Discord and Telegram communities are also flooded with overbearing moderators. Reddit is just as bad, with moderators having to stay within Reddit global rules to avoid a coup by the powermods or deletion. A controversial subreddit like /r/banpitbulls will have numerous warnings on the top which seem to change every few months reminding people of global Reddit rules. This is solely because they always have to keep bending over to the moderators at the top to keep hosting something that much of the site will dox users and pre-ban users for posting in.

 

The sanitized internet

Which leads us to the main problem again. The problem with all these sites wanting to mimic the old internet is they either die or become a monoculture, and that’s because of the people. The people are what make the internet go along. Cool people make the internet worth using, worth talking to friends on, and worth digging through the mountains of trash posted by spammers, low-quality users, ESLs, and nowadays ChatGPT/similar AI models.

The mainstream internet is sanitized harder than the security theater measures during COVID were. Thanks to moderation at the top, from AI chatbots to moderators who flex their power, every single part of the internet feels the same. People have different names, but they’re the same as people you’ve met and written off. The other problem is, the internet is now 100% divided. You either have to post in sanitized communities where you have to put on mental interview clothes to “fit in” and not risk getting banned, or you can post in few rules allowed communities that devolve into rage and arguing about how everything is going to ruin your life (with no solution).

Acting like a cargo cult about the old internet and thinking “if you build a website like the old websites, they will come” never works because the community already has a home, or they are run by the same exact people who ruined every other website. It won’t get better by doing this. What made the old internet what it was, was the people on it. The people on it prefer to use mainstream social media with a mask on, or post on the fedi/forums to try to network with like people.

The challenge here in the internet of 2024 is trying to make friends with similar interests, people who “know” the game and trying to connect to them when they’re not having the soul sucked out of them by the wage cage. When they’re not tired and sleepy after work and can’t focus on the chat. When they’re not ignoring you for their 400 other friends. To paraphrase someone who was oversocialized, he absolutely loved being able to log into the internet at any time and finding friends on at the same time they’re on, not caring about the quality of them, and hoping he’d find a diamond in the rough. He was later complaining to me about his ex, but failing to humor any of the interesting creative discussions we had when I first met him online. Crazy, isn’t it?

In the cancel happy sphere of mainstream social network and the private chat cliques of Discord/Telegram, it’s truly easier said than done. It’s great knowing that you’re one slip of the keyboard away from being ghosted and removed from a group when 2 days ago you shared similar interests and talked about characters you like. It’s great knowing that your oversocialized friend is likely to ditch the internet and see you as another username on a screen. You’re not his issue when he has tons of friends he can talk to, treating you like the 10^th side hoe he has this week to erp with.

To bring back the old internet, the mindset needs to change. If it doesn’t change, it will forever remain a skinsuit of ironic references to the past with modern day current year politics indistinguishable from any other person online (left or right wing). You just can’t get the old internet out of people who want to complain about someone else online, or their mom, or their life. Or maybe it was all an enigma and I was just projecting part of what I saw on the past through a rose-tinted lens of Flip Video compression, but I do remember the art sure was better then.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the PC-98

In the mid-2010s during a computer buying binge, I remember seeing a laptop from one of the many JP sellers on eBay who flip stuff on us eBay for a profit, given there’s more money to be made there than on YAJ. I bid on some random PC-98 laptop, lost it, and then discovered the Discord community. I would order a Cs2, play with it for a while, get tired with how slow it was and the misinfo in the scene at the time (mostly from the former Discord owner who was very much crazy), and gave it to someone who probably didn’t use it much (because everyone was pushing the myth that you needed a 100v stepdown, inaccurate with the 98). The second one I got was a V16 Tower, but I sold that off because I bought the wrong FM sound card and couldn’t get YM2203 sound working on DOS.

Fast forward to late 2021. A lot of stuff happened with me personally, and online/IRL at the same time. When I mean a lot, I mean a lot. This isn’t a political post, but I’m sure anyone who was there in both times know just how hard the internet and culture changed in a few short years, outside of mass market Hollywood/modern AAA games/music where everything got slowly worse or stagnated. Of course, my friend circles weren’t immune to this and I think anyone who lived online in this time can attest to this. At this time, somehow a switch went off in my head and I decided I wanted another PC-98. I bought a PC-9821Cx3, a machine with an onboard YMF297 FM sound chip. As it turns out, this could run many DOS games and I was actually hooked on messing with the PC-98 again. A few other things happened in the PC-98 scene as well around this time, which I’ll talk about in another paragraph, but I was hooked on buying PC-98s. Flush seemingly with cash from a job I hated, I was spending money on old Japanese computers to distract myself from the disaster of my current (at the time job) which honestly sucked.

Essentially, I was working long depressing hours at a server factory diagnosing failed servers and seeing what was wrong with them. I was looking for something to enjoy, so I ended up throwing money down the hole of working on old PC-98 machines. I bought several different machines including a laptop, a barely documented high-res workstation, and even an Epson Clone of the PC-98. So I might as well talk about what got me into the PC-98 and to buy enough machines for me to enjoy.

It’s a PC, but not really.

The PC-9801/9821 is a very unique machine for one reason: it’s like a PC but it’s not. IBM clones are very popular computers to the point people have developed recreations of the motherboard in the ATX form factor. There’s YouTube channels and ecosystems dedicated to enhancing old computers and making them usable gaming machines. There are mountains of documentation in English, and outside Japan the PC cloners sold tons of machines.

Japan on the other hand was like Europe in a way: there were different proprietary computers competing with each other for market share. As the PC-98 was the business machine of choice, it sold millions in that realm and as a result had numerous games and software written for it. The PC-98 dramatically outsold and outlasted any other domestically produced Japanese computer, getting some upgrades in the form of more colors, faster CPUs, and even PCI towards the end.

It’s also incompatible with the PC. The PC-98 features a different BIOS, memory map, video/sound hardware, and more. The INTs in DOS are very different, along with the IRQ mappings of cards in the system. The expansion bus is this cool expansion bus called C-Bus, where cards slide in the back of the machine and are screwed down into the case. However, for a while PC-98s also didn’t have HDDs you could slap in, using hardcard style cages or external SCSI cards (think like on old Macs/the Amiga). As a result, the only PC programs that will work on a PC-98 are Windows programs., due to Windows using a HAL to abstract away the hardware.

It has tons of games (with a caveat)

A lot of old computers I had been getting into at the time lacked software and especially dumped software. UNIX workstations come to mind, many commercial programs are undumped or had to be found on software collection CDs with DRM. Many programs that are FOSS don’t even exist prebuilt, you have to compile pico and gz and whatnot on a RS/6000 running AIX 3.2.5 or HP 425t running HP-UX 9, as an example. Good luck finding that program you read about in a magazine, let alone any games or stuff to show off. I’m sure X11 didn’t help matters, being how bloated it was. This is as opposed to MS-DOS, which was very low level in comparison giving you easy direct access to the underlying machine.

The PC-98 selling tons of machines led PC-98 game development to be a primary target for many developers, and especially smaller developers who only had a PC-98. This is not a shock, the same trends were seen in the west when a computer dominated a specific region. However, what makes the PC-98 different is the PC-98 was not sold elsewhere as with the MSX, and it also did not gain a cult following in the west with retrogaming nerds like the FM Towns and X68000 did. You’ll find videos from YouTubers and nerds online talking about those two computers, but you won’t find many talking about the 98 until recently. For the longest time, the PC-98 was this obscure computer that was Japan only.

And then emulators happened and Touhou bloomed in the west. Touhou was originally a PC-98 game, and to play the first 5 games in the series you need an emulator or a real PC-98. On top of this, many visual novels and NSFW games initially got PC-98 versions and later were ported to Windows (due to the fact that many of these games used interpreters, like SCUMM did). This in turn would lead to diehard nerds importing the PC-98 thanks to a newfound interest. This in turn led to fan translations as debuggers improved, leading to PC-98 games getting fan translations online. Many of these are hosted on Discord or GBATemp (due to romhacking.net’s censorship of a certain SNES rom hack that used a no-no word in it), and the PC-98 would get games now playable in English on a real machine or emulator. The problem is, there are hundreds to thousands of PC-98 games that need Japanese knowledge, but simply are not translated to English. Furthermore, many were warez dumps from the 90s which sometimes hid surprises like malware intended for the IBM PC. There’s also the fact that due to a lack of content regulation, many were NSFW or otherwise shocking games. That’s not to say there were lots of games you can safely play with your kids in the room or have your kids play, it’s just there’s a lot of games that you wouldn’t want your coworkers knowing you played.

There’s also of course ports of famous western PC and OSes, including Windows, Netware (only one version is dumped), OS/2 (only 2 versions are dumped), Turbo C++, Turbo Pascal (still undumped), MS Office, and many more.

But this isn’t the sole reason the PC-98 blew up online in certain circles. There’s another crowd, one who doesn’t even care about playing games.

The PC-98 “aesthetic”

The PC-98 featured a unique video system involving two GDC (uPD7220 and later D7220 chips) in a “master/slave” configuration. NEC would then add more VRAM for more colors on screen, a blitter chip to “accelerate” graphics, and finally a 256-color video chip. Due to the video chipset being so tightly integrated, upgrades were impossible and to upgrade the video chipset, you had to buy a new machine or an incompatible video card that mostly had Windows support. To install the video card, you had to connect the video card to the onboard chipset, and a relay would switch over when Windows or one of the few compatible games/programs would load. Complicating things is that the 256-color video chipset only came out in 1993, was standardized on NEC machines in 1995, and was never in Epson clones. Essentially, NEC and Epson were selling PCs with a 486 that could only display 16 colors.

As a result, most games for the PC-98 focused on modes on older machines: first a 640×200 8 color mode similar to that of the PC-8801, before focusing on the iconic 640×400 at 16 color resolution. The PC-98 would let you pick from 16 out of 4096 colors, and the master GDC would overlay text on top of this (and it was really zippy at that). This would give the PC-98 a unique visual aesthetic that was spread via Tumblr posts/blogs and the current day PC-98 Bot. Drawing was a bit different, as art would either be traced with cling wrap or scanned in to the PC-98’s hardware, and then would be colored and edited on the machine itself. Borders were used with minimal colors to increase the number of images that could fit on floppies for Visual Novels, and many PC-98 games used these.

The dual GDC setup also allows for a few other cool parlor tricks like displaying backgrounds on a DOS prompt, using the graphics GDC to display something and then the text GDC overlays the MS-DOS prompt on top of this. This trick can be done with freeware tools, some included in the famous YAHDI image.

But there was another thing the PC-98 would become known for: the music. The sound chip on early models was a YM2203 with 3 FM channels and 3 PSG channels, and it would be succeeded by the YM2608. While western games featured sound written to run on a number of sound cards with MIDI (and also the MT-32, SC-55, many General MIDI wavetable boxes, and more), the PC-98 only had two popular sound chips. There were a few less popular sound chips such as the OPL2 and the Y8950 from the MSX (the Sound Orchestra line), the PC-9801-14 (which had a weird TI chip from analog synths that usually had more chips in the setup), the OPL3 (PC-9801-118/CanBe sound in Windows, SB16 in DOS), but aside from the -14 these cards usually had YM2203 chips for backwards compatibility. Many PC-9801 machines such as the FA and Epson’s clones also had the YM2203 onboard, while the later ones had the YM2608 or it’s cheaper cousin the YMF-288/297 (a 288 with a OPL3 core for Windows) onboard too.

On top of that, Japanese music composers were very familiar with FM sound composition and so they used the sound card in a different manner. Many games featured FM music that was well made, but the later sound cards had PCM chips for Windows, which in DOS was repurposed as a drum channel. Done well, this music has a very distinct sound to it:

Another video on YT goes into more depth about how interesting the PC-98 sound chip was when used properly:

The aesthetics are quite popular with many weebs who cannot read Japanese and as a result it’s influenced many indie games on Steam/itch.io even in the same way the classic Mac aesthetic has.

But there’s one more thing drawing people to them:

PC-98s are still quite cheap in Japan

One of the largest entry barriers to any computer is cost. Amigas come to mind, being very pricey used even if you import one from Europe. UNIX workstations have crept up hard in value as enthusiasts compete with some business running a radiology machine or special program on an old UNIX box with parts dwindling or being hoarded. Put it this way, it’s so bad that when enthusiasts made a PSU replacement for the SGI Fuel, many customers weren’t nerds but businesses trying to keep their fuel in service.

The PC-98 on the other hand was a mass-produced line of computers spanning two decades, and while models popular with businesses (such as the FC-9801 line of factory computers), enthusiasts (the higher end ones with FM onboard), or both (the 98MATE A/A-Mate, or PC-9821Ae/As/An/Ap/Af) go for higher prices, old business models that lack FM that nobody wants can be had for under 5000 yen, and sometimes even less. Keyboards are cheap (they’re not SUN keyboards though, don’t even think about using one on a PC-98 like some normie YouTuber tried), and mice can be substituted with any Microsoft InPort compatible bus mouse. There are also many “junk” models, but given the lack of documentation in English other than google translated websites and “trial and error”, buying a junk one is very much a massive risk. This is especially true with battery leakage, laptop LCD failures, and cap leakage being common on laptops and older machines. Sometimes you can jerry rig an ATX PSU to work, other times you might be looking at a seriously damaged motherboard with eaten traces.

As with importing a car from Japan or Europe, you’ll also have to import replacement parts, which can be slow shipping wise and costs can add up. Basically buy a working model from the mid-late 90s with FM and you’ll be set, while buying an As/Ap/Ap2 will leave you with having to do a motherboard recap and having to also repair any other issues that crop up. There’s also lots of other weird quirks you’ll need to deal with, like making 1.2mb floppies with a USB drive, buying specific RAM upgrades for older models, special CPU upgrades that implement A20 in the way the PC-98 expects, and most importantly Windows/DOS being in Japanese.

There’re a few other quirks, but one that comes to mind is that many games will have timing issues on anything newer than a fast 486 at best, and some games will even have timing issues on anything faster than an 8mhz NEC V30. This isn’t an accident, many PC-98s shipped with this CPU as either a main CPU or a selectable one via DIP Switch 3-8. Flipping the switch allows games that use this CPU to work with no timing issues. There’s the GDC having to be set to 2.5mhz to run without the “split screen” issue, while a handful of games like FlixMix demand a 5mhz GDC clock or you’ll get the “split screen” issue as well. There’s even Epson machines “rebooting” when a game tries to boot because certain versions of DOS and NEC Disk BASIC have an anti-clone check which looks for a NEC string in the ROM, and reboots if the OS cannot find this. You’ll also need a 100v/120v stepdown if you live in a 220v country, or you can get one of the ATX PSU machines like a Ra series, V200, or similar and swap in a switchable voltage PSU. Oh and if you get one without a sound card, you’ll be spending $60-120 on one as well on top of that to make it “usable” for DOS games.

One last quirk I forgot to mention, PC-98s are held together with JIS screws, not phillips screws. They are very easy to strip unless you use a JIS screwdriver like a decent Vessel or whatever comes in that ifixit Mako toolkit/clones like the Harbor Freight one. I’ve heard good things about the Moody Tools set for camera repair (also JIS) but it only goes up to +1, not +2 like Vessel makes.

Tl;dr

The PC-98 is a fun computer that I’ve really gotten into over the past few years (only wagie jobs and being stressed/disinterested in gaming in general has kept me from really playing mine), they’re fun to tinker with and use. Before you buy one and see the shipping costs, just be prepared. Download NP21w or a similar emulator and set it up, and ask yourself if you like the games on it or want to mess with a weird DOS system. If you do, buy it. Emulation for it is still very rough around the edges and it hasn’t had the same breakthroughs like with PCem/86box for PCs, and QEMU/MAME for unloved UNIX workstations and other fun non-x86 boxes and even other nonstandard x86 boxes.

But I’m sure emulation will give you a taste and a desire to import your own, if you want. It definitely gave me something to be interested in, I just need to make some space to hold my PC-98 stash. Maybe this year during one weekend or if I burnout from this latest job and end up quitting it, I’ll get to that.