Tokugawa Corporate Forums

Hey all,

As the topic suggests, I have one of these beautiful machines in the mail. It's coming with a keyboard, but I still need to get a mouse for it, and I don't have a monitor (nor feel like importing a Japanese monitor for it).

I don't have too much experience with older hardware, so I'm probably going to need some help to get started!

So before it arrives, there's a few things I wanted to get figured out.

1) How can I get this hooked up to an American monitor? If I need to build my own [xx]->VGA cable, what should I get to start out with?
2) Will I need a mouse to get started with?
3) What other things might I encounter that I haven't prepared for that would stop me from using this?
4) This machine is UNTESTED. If the hard drive is shot, do any American parts work to replace this?

And any and all general advice is greatly appreciated. If anyone has any cheap games/dupes I can buy to have a starting point, that would also be pretty cool. And just for fun as a side project, how hard would it be to get this hooked up to the internet for basic text browsing? What would I need for that?

Thanks for reading!

Here's pictures of the machine I'm getting by the way. Mine's the one on the bottom.

Front:
http://i.imgur.com/wkP6kCv.jpg

Back:
http://i.imgur.com/ynVFM4o.jpg

I've never actually seen a PC-98 in the flesh, but from looking at your photos, reading through this webpage and checking out eBay I don't think you're going to need to spend too much to get the system up and running.

In terms of specific answers to your questions:



Your photos are a bit blurry, but it looks very much like your PC-98 has a standard VGA monitor port so any VGA monitor - i.e. pre-DVI - should work with it. If you have a DVI-based monitor but not a VGA one you can get hold of an adaptor on eBay for a few dollars.



I'd get one as you'll need it for some PC-98 software and because PS/2 mice are dirt cheap on eBay.



That one's difficult to answer in advance. A broken floppy disk drive would obviously need replaced, though.



According to the site I mentioned above, your PC-98 should accept a standard IDE hard drive - don't ask me about formatting, though. Although the aforementioned site suggests that sort of thing is easier to do on a PC-98 than an IBM PC compatible.



I'd start a new topic for this.



Again, this deserves a separate topic.

Hope some of this is helpful.

Do not get a ps/2 mouse. Acording to this site http://www.pc-98club.jp/pc98-datas/pc-9821xb10_j8.html the mouse connector is a mini din 9 which is a PC-98 standard Bus Mouse. PS/2 will not work here. Perhaps if you bought a cheap bus mouse and changed it's connector.


A lot of people are using CF to IDE adapters for this purpose. Also you should check out this forum as well. nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?board=24.0 They have some ready to write HDD images that could help you get started.


You really should invest in a usb floppy drive and give this guide a try. http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/sh ... l-machines

Not really sure on this but it would take at minimum an ethernet card and windows 95 or 98. Honestly probably more trouble than it's worth.

Appologies. The photo of the system is blurry, and the mouse port looks like a PS/2 - i.e. mini din 6.

Thanks for the help everybody!

I know the photo of the bottom one is blurry, but I can't take my own until the machine actually arrives . I think the top two can be used for reference just as well, though.

Are you sure it's a regular VGA cable? The Analog RGB ports there seem to have two sets of pins, and I believe all VGA are three rows?

I do have a USB floppy drive thankfully, I appreciate the link on getting images to run on a real machine.

As for my weird internet question, I think I'll start another thread as suggested. I was thinking of actually just connecting via serial, probably routing communication through another computer... I don't believe I'd need an ethernet card if that's the case?

And lastly, I'll keep an eye out for a compatible mouse on ebay. It's not arriving till December, so I've got some time to find one.

The top system is a PC-9821Ap2/U2 - like this one:

PC-9821Ap2/U2

The bottom two systems are PC-9821Xb10JBs - like this one:

PC-9821Xb10JB

From these two clearer photos you can see that the PC-9821Ap2/U2's VGA port takes a connector with two sets of pins and that the PC-9821Xb10JB's VGA port takes a connector with three sets of pins.

So if you're getting the machine on the bottom then you're getting a system with a VGA port that accepts three rows of pins.

Oh, beautiful! I hadn't even noticed that they were of different size. Thanks again!

It actually came! I had to leave out of town immediately after it did -- naturally -- but much to my surprise everything worked pretty much immediately out of the box. While I do imagine I need a good analog monitor for it, since my LCD monitor doesn't support it, I can still get video output and see enough to get some work done.

The "operating system" seems to be a launcher for programs for an architectural office, there's CAD and something I don't remember the name of, but it's also a construction program. There doesn't seem to be DOS. One thing that caught me off-guard is that exiting the initial launcher seems to bring me to a menu for what looks like the boot screen of a PC-88/amiga without system files, where it asks you how many files to load, and then has the LOAD/etc menu at the bottom.

I still don't exactly know how to navigate that.

So anyway, I guess the first order of business is getting DOS 6.2 on this thing, which I'll be doing when I get back. Very excited! The fans do sound a bit pained though, haha. Everything boots just fine, and they're not loud or noisy or anything, but they do sound like they're starting up a bit slow. It could just be my imagination, and comparing it to my experience with modern computers though.


EDIT: I guess I should also work on getting a 5" floppy drive for the thing. I shouldn't have too worry too much about incompatibilities with american parts on this in particular though, I reckon.

Alright, so I've got a couple of disks burned for it, and I hope to get things started soon.

First of all, when trying to boot from my dos 6.2 bootdisk (everything should be made properly at least, I followed the pc98 tutorials to a T), I see a message saying "SET THE SOFTWARE DIP SWITCH" and then get nothing but a black screen. I take it this is required for booting from a floppy, but opening up my computer, I don't even see any dip switches about. Where should I be looking?


Could it perhaps be behind the front faceplate? I've seen people take them off, but mine doesn't seem to be interested in budging.

Aside from that, would people be interested in medumping the architecture soft that came installed on this? I have no clue if it's on the internet elsewhere.

Okay, so by "software dip switches" it meant so in the literal sense. I just had to go to BIOS to set them. But I still can't get it to boot into anything but a black screen from floppy disk. Either I have the settings wrong, or, also possible, is that this drive is just busted.

So I messed around with BIOS a bit, I might take pictures of how my setup looks momentarily.

Regardless, I don't get the software dipswitch request anymore, but nothing else changed. Once it's done loading RAM, the floppy drive lights up for like 3 seconds (I can't hear any work going on inside the computer though) then turns off and leaves me with a black screen. Tried reseating the IDE cables, but no luck. I think this thing is just dead. Tested the disks afterwards with my external floppy drive and they still work just fine.

Should I be able to replace this floppy drive with just any ol' IDE drive I can find? That would certainly make life easier.

Hi Nana,

Glad to see another person getting into the PC-98 Hardware scene. I have a PC98 Ce2 model with about 20 Megs of Ram. I've had some experience with replacing a 3-Mode FDD drive since I accidentally fried the chip inside one of mine that came originally with the system in an experiment. I had to replace it with a compatible 3-Mode "PC-98" drive and ended up getting another drive off of eBay. If you suspect the drive is bad, then you would need to try and replace it with a compatible PC-98 drive instead of a PC/AT drive. PC/AT drives won't work and since only PC98 drives are compatible, they are a bit hard to find now. Anything you might find outside of Japan will likely be a PC/AT drive.

I'm surprised as this site was so very helpful, but it apparently went down: http://www.geocities.jp/cpuparts98/FDD/ ... /98FDS.htm. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine Internet Archive saved a copy back from May: https://web.archive.org/web/20110501020 ... /98FDS.htm and remains today as the most comprehensive list of compatible PC-98 FDD models, 2-MODE and 3-MODE.

Another option that you might consider, is to get a floppy emulator such as the HxC. I still really want to get one of these and I do know that they are compatible with PC-98, but depending on your PC-98 model it may require some extra hardware to get it to work.

Anyhow, before you rule your drive as being busted, I know you said you followed a guide for writing a program to disk, but I'm curious as to whether you might have tried this guide. This is the one that I used and had success with. It's been awhile since I last tinkered with PC-98 due to other activities I've had going on, but if I remember correctly in order to verify that the disk image that I was attempting to write to disk was in fact working as it should, I believe I followed these steps:

1. I followed the guide for formatting a fresh PC-98 compatible disk, and then converting the .FDI or .FDD files to .HDM files and then using the Disk Image program to write this to the actual disk using a external harddrive that was compatible (also in the steps of that guide) and a 32-bit operating system. Note you may want to see my extra note there about possibly leaving skip error track checked for the process to work.

2. Once the image is on the disk, use either that same program or something like Disk Explorer to save that disk image from the floppy you just made all the way back to HDM or FDI/FDD.

3. Queue up that new HDM / FDI / FDD image back in Neko Project II (I'd forego using Anex as I've heard it's not a true to actual PC-98 hardware) and see if it loads the program. If it does, then it might mean your FDD is bad. If it doesn't then it's likely due to the fact that the program or writing process to the disk itself is the culprit and not the FDD.

If you try all these things and end up not having a use for the drive, I may be interested in it if I could verify with you if it has a certain chip. You can see in this photo that the Toshiba (TC8617BF-003 9401H JAPAN‏) chip has received so much voltage that the chip has actually exploded.

Also, you may want to check out another forum community that at least for a little while had a fairly active startup PC-98 hardware community and you might be able to ask some questions related to the BIOS questions you had there as well. Here's the link: http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?board=24.0

Best of luck with your new PC-98!

-Thomas

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