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.