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PostPosted: March 24th, 2013, 4:04 am 
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Joined: July 28th, 2009, 1:57 am
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Location: Cumming, GA
By the way, I figured I should report my findings here as well, but at least for hooking up my two PC98's to a CRT Television monitor, the XPC-1v Video Scan Converter Unit works like a charm! : )

-Thomas

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PostPosted: April 18th, 2013, 8:21 am 
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Does the Framemeister require a firmware update to work with PC-9801?


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PostPosted: May 1st, 2013, 12:07 am 
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Joined: October 27th, 2009, 5:04 am
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Probably not?

It's easy enough to update the firmware in any case.


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PostPosted: June 19th, 2014, 7:54 pm 
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By the way, I've confirmed that the XRGB-3 does NOT do 24khz at all and is incompatible with the PC-98. The DVDO Edge has a similar problem. The only two scalers that appear to work are the Framemeister and GBS-8220.


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PostPosted: July 7th, 2014, 10:50 pm 
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I tried hooking up my newly acquired PC-9801FA to a GBS-8220. It didn't work. I did see a picture now and again, but it was scrambled and intermittent. I even tried running the signal through an Extron 580xi, but that made things worse as the picture disappeared completely at that point.

If anyone has had luck with a GBS-8220, please share your experience. Good news is I have also acquired a Framemeister. Now if only I had a cable that worked with the funky Framemeister input.


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PostPosted: August 7th, 2014, 5:10 pm 
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Hi everyone,

It's been over a year since my last posts here at Tokugawa, but I wanted to share my most recent updates and current projects I'm still looking into solving. If you have any advice or information, I'd be very happy to hear it! : ) Thanks in advance!

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Even though my PCs arrived from Japan in working order, the one mechanical PC-98 keyboard specifically for the PC-98DO model was not in working order.

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Only about 1/3 of the keys were actually making contact and as each key was a special NEC spring loaded switch soldered on the back of the the circuit board, it wasn't something I was skilled enough at fixing up, although I definitely did try to. I had pretty much given up on the idea of being able to fix this, so I had put my plans on learning about PC-98 hardware on hold for about I guess... 2 years now? My intention was to try and find a PC-98 keyboard the next time I visited Japan that looked like it was in good shape. But very recently a friend of mine from my usual haunt, an Ys community called the Ancient Land of Ys, informed me that he was into doing mod work and wanted to take a shot at fixing the keyboard and learning a bit more about PC-98 hardware. And now after many years the keyboard is fixed thanks to his help and I've started my education of learning how to use PC-98 hardware anew. My friend Xalphenos, a fellow member here, who is also interested in acquiring PC-98 hardware at some point so this learning experience for me has been equally interesting to him since he wants to defintiely get a model that will play the same types of games were both interested in, name Falcom and the Xak / Fray series, and one called AIZA: New Generation, which is an Ys/Xak clone for the most part but a great one.

So far I've managed to get some things working well enough such as writing FDI and FDD images to actual 1.2 MB formatted disks which seem to be working so far and how to more or less hook up combinations of a 3.5" FDD + a 5.25" FDD for Slot A and Slot B. I also managed to figure out how to use the Programmable Joypad I had purchased along with these systems which is nice for assigning keyboard keys to the joypad.

Thanks for all of your help so far and just as Papa_November said, the PC-98 was completely incompatible with my XRGB-3, but it does work with the other devices I mentioned in the last post as well as hooking it up using a VGA adapter converting the 7/8 pins to 5/5/5 pins hooked directly to my HP2207w monitor.

I'm currently working on 4-5 different PC-98 projects at the moment since it's not all setup the way I would like currently, but I've definitely made some progress in the last few weeks now the the keyboard has been repaired, but it's all an ongoing learning process for sure.

Project #1. Because the PC-98DO does not have FM-Sound built in (or so I've been told) and it only has the option currently for reading disks that are 5"25, I've got a few system disks that originally came with the system that are specific to the PC-98 DO. I've been wanting to make a backup of these disks but have not had a working 5"25 drive to read the disks in a machine that can translate that data to say an .FDI image or .FDD or .D88. So, my ultimate goal was to see about possibly finding a method of hooking up an external PC-98 compatible dual floppy disk drive called the CRC-FD5 to the PC9821 Ce2 so that I would end up with having a harddrive, 2 x 3.5" floppies drives and then 2 x 5"25 drives. Doing this would allow me to play the 5"25 disk based games that I owned on the Ce2 with full FM Sound and more ram/processing speed than the PC-98DO.

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Fortunately (I suppose... even though I haven't gotten it to work yet) there exists a C-BUS board that is supposed to be compatible with several PC-98 series models and my model was listed as one of the supported models. There are several of these extension C-BUS cards out there, but the one I'm using is called the FDD-1MZ.

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The FDD-1MZ appears to be in perfect condition and came with the box and manual which describes how you are supposed to install it depending on the type of PC98 series you have. The instructions for the Multi are rather simple and I've followed all the steps. The CRC-FD5 Dual Floppy Drive was originally not working as the capacitors were leaking battery acid and I needed to teach myself how to clean, desolder and solder new capacitors and run some jumper cables to damaged traces of the single layer PCB for just the power supply. Ultimately I believe I restored the PSU to working condition so that the two drives are fully powered, but it does not want to interface with the FDD-1MZ when a 50 pin Centronics cable is attached to both units. It will simply just not find the drives. I don't know if I need to load a driver for finding the CRC-FD5 external floppy, but I had assumed that was the job of the FDD-1MZ to talk to it. In both of these photos there is a small round hole on each of these devices that is located next to the Centronics port. I have no idea what that is, but appears to be an oversized headphone-jack style port for a cable to fit in and I'm wondering if that is part of what is missing to get this all to work correctly.

It's not completely a waste though as even though the instructions for the FDD-1MZ show how to install this for my specific model, which covers the extra FDD Floppy Port, if I detach say the second 3.5" drive and run a ribbon cable directly from one of the powered up 5"25 drives inside the external case to the extra floppy port on the FDD-1MZ, I can gain that second drive (the 5"25) drive as my Drive B (or in my case Drive C, since A is my HDD as the system boots from the HDD first) completing a 3.5" and 5"25 combination.

I attempted to try copying the data from the PC98-DO 5"25 system disks to a 3.5" disk and did not have positive results yet.

So my next plan would be....


Project #2
- Finding a method of A) hooking up one of my 3.5" drives to the floppy port on the motherboard of the PC98-DO and trying to copy from Drive A to Drive B hoping that perhaps the DO can "DO" it.... ;)
However... this leads me to B) The DO launches into Basic, not DOS, so I'd need to figure out how to get the PC98DO to boot in DOS or learn if copying can be done from drive to drive inside of Basic. I'm not really a programmer, so this is pretty much where I start asking questions at this point before I end up doing more damage than good. I'm sure trying to copy and read sectors too many times on this older 5"25 media probably isn't he healthiest thing so I want to learn the best possible method of backing up these floppies. I did have a friend with a Kyroflux make RAW image data copies of each of the PC98 system disks, so there is that at least even though at present I have no idea how to use them or translate them back to a floppy.


Project#3 - CD-ROM Battles and Brandish 3 Renewal


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So one of the highlights of getting a PC9821 Multi is that it is equipped with a CD-Rom. While there are not terribly many CD-Rom based games out there, I happen to own several of them including Brandish 1 Renewal, Brandish 3 Renewal, Brandish VT (Can you sense a pattern here....) and Revival Xanadu 1 and Revival Xanadu 2 Remix on CD-Rom and I'd very much like to get them to work, and possibly install from them once I load Windows one of these days... in due time. I'm especially interested in getting Brandish 3 Renewal working correctly because I feel that the CD released version of this game may be a higher candidate for possibly undergoing a fan-translation project since all the files are right there, installed together with no need for swapping disks (Of which there are 8 disks for the normal version) and it's the "Renewal" version. Now I don't know how much different the Renewal version of Brandish 3 is, but the point of the matter is that I really think that as a game that was only released on PC-98, the renewal CD version seems to be as the definitive version worthy of translating and figuring out how to install for Brandish fans. Brandish SNES was released in English, the "much better" remake of Brandish I for PSP called the Dark Revenant is about to be released soon by XSEED (seriously one of my top 10 video games of all time this version), Brandish 2 was fan-translated for SNES, and Brandish VT, repackaged as Brandish 4 for Windows 95/98 is currently also undergoing a fan-translation. Brandish 3 is the odd one out and it ties up some loose ends in the series, since the first 3 games are a trilogy. So finding a process for getting this to work well enough on both emulators and on real hardware is a top priority for me.

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Well, that's all well and good, but what if your CD-Rom doesn't want to play nice? And that has been my most recent battle. The PC-98 Ce2 came with a NEC CDR-260(PI) that uses Real-Mode drivers consisting of Common settings defined and certain drivers references in the Config.sys file (For the Ce2, it needs the NECCD.SYS driver and runs it as CD101, which is in the header of the driver when looking at it in notepad. And it requires an autoexec bat file to run some additional executables such as mscdex.exe with some parameters and drive volume identifiers such as defining the CD-Rom drive commonly as letter Q:.

My first issue with the CD-Rom was that the button no longer worked to eject the tray, so I opened that up and fixed it sure enough and got that working. Then I wasn't sure how to really run these CD-Rom drivers, so I eventually figured that out as well and eventually made a FDD that could find a drive Q inside of Neko Project II as well as on my real Ce2 hardware. Note: If the driver runs and it finds that a CD-Rom can be used in Drive Q: that should mean that it has successfully communicated that a cd-rom drive exists in the machine. If not it will generate a "No drivers found" error message.

In Neko Project 2 for PC9821, I was able to load an IDE image file of the CUE file for Brandish 3 renewal that I had ripped from the original CD, and had the BIN file mounted as a virtual CD-Rom with Daemon Tools. Once the CD-Rom drivers load, I can type Q: dir and read all of the Brandish files from the CD image inside of Neko Project 2.

However, on my real hardware, it will not read the disc, and it will generate a Abort, Retry, Failure? I called these "ARFS" error messages. If I hit R for Retry, I can see the little LED light indicator flash on the CD-Rom drive meaning that I know the command is at least trying to access it. The laser assembly will put itself back into place when moved and started up, and the disc tray opens and closes with the press of the button, but I'm not able to see any type of red laser dot when the lights are off at night, nor is there any spinning happening with the CD. So I'm still looking at possible ways of maybe repairing this original drive, however recently I was able to find what I hope will be a comptable Real-Mode driver based CD-Rom that I believe should be close to this non-working CDR-260(PI) drive. The drive I ordered was the CDR-260R drive. The case and options on the front panel look a bit different, but I do know it's a Real-Mode CD-Rom requiring a Real-Mode driver just the same as the process I'm running above, so I'm really hoping that works out.

In my research I've come across many many configurations of CD-Rom drivers based on different PC-98 series and I've acquired at least what I believe is all of the NEC CD drivers, which are around 5-6 variations. If I get my CD-Rom drive working, I'd be happy to share my notes with any others that may be having issues with their CD-Roms. I can say for sure though that the other internal CD-Rom and DVD-Rom drives I've tried to install into the Ce2 freeze the system and it doesn't like them, so I think only a select few types can be used.

Project #4 - Harddrive issues....

My PC98Ce2 came with a 300MB HDD loaded with Dos 6.2 and the system was pre-configured to load from the HDD as soon as the machine powers on as the matter of boot priority. From what I've read, PC98 computers typically have the A and B drives be the floppy drives and the C drive as the first partition of the Harddrive, just like in other Windows PCs. However, if you decide to boot from the Harddrive, then it becomes drive A, and the two floppies start after the Hardrive partitions stop, so if you only had one partition, then the floppy drives would be B and C, which is what they were in my case.

Well, I did something rather gutsy and I removed the harddrive from the PC-98 in hopes to possibly see if I could read the contents of the harddrive and possibly drag files from it or onto it via Disk Explorer, but the Windows XP machine I had never saw it and when I gave up and put it back into the Ce2, there was now a problem... The HDD now longer works...

This would not normally be a problem as I can still boot Dos 6.2 with a boot diskette, but the issue is that I now have to disconnect the HDD entirely in order for the system to read the floppies. If the harddrive is plugged in, the Ce2 will freeze when trying to access the HDD. Now I know that the HDD that was in there was old and it was going to die anyway, and I've already ordered a Compact Flash adapter and card as well as a cable to help attach it all to the pins providing 5v G G 12v in order on the motherboard (front left piece) next to the IDE Bus, so I'm getting ready to install a new HDD that will hopefully last longer...

However... How can I try to write something to the Harddrive when the PC tries to always boot from the Harddrive? There must be something that told the Ce2 to boot this as a priority and I cannot for the life of me find it. Is it one of the options in the Bios settings when pressing and holding the HELP key and Reset? I just have no clue how to revert this setting so that it is A: Floppy, B: Floppy C: HDD. If anyone knows how this might be done or have some hints, I'm all ears! Thanks in advance too!

Thanks for reading and thanks for any tips and tricks that you might be able to provide. I'm definitely not an expert when it comes to using actual PC-98 hardware. I'm also into MSX quite a bit as well. We've been doing a exhibit for the last two years right here at he Altanta Vintage Computer Festival and we run a small MSX related website for American MSX owners that we are hoping to develop more more as time permits. Here are some pictures from this years exhibit back in April: http://usamsx.com/vcfse2014gallery/

Thanks again for all of your help and thanks for reading.

-Thomas

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