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PostPosted: March 13th, 2016, 1:16 pm 
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I'm currently on the hunt for a PC-98x1. I've been piecing together as much info as I can, but of course, with only a limited ability to read Japanese, it's tough to figure out exactly what I need to be looking for. I was hoping that I could get some guidance about what I need to look out for when choosing a PC-98x1 model.

So far what I know is:
- It should have a PC-9081-86 sound board or built-in equivalent installed, meaning 6 channels of FM
- It should have 2 FDDs
- The processor should be fast but not too fast
- Most games need at least 640kb of RAM
- A hard drive is nice but not necessary

I would like to know some more specifics though, for instance:
- Is a model with 3 channels of FM and 3 channels of SSG not going to be good enough?
- Do I want more RAM if possible?
- How fast is too fast for a processor?
- Are there games that need to be installed on a hard drive, or can I survive without one if I'm willing to do a lot of disk swapping?

Finally, if anyone has other important info I'm missing or any recommended (desktop) models, I would very much appreciate it. From what I've seen, a lot of games mention the PC-9801UV. These seem relatively older though. Should I aim for something more powerful?


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PostPosted: March 14th, 2016, 10:14 am 
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There's a group of PC-98 owners on the nfggames forum. You might get more replies over there.

Quote:
- Is a model with 3 channels of FM and 3 channels of SSG not going to be good enough?

It would be okay for older games or in combination with a MIDI board, but for FM synth, you gotta get OPNA. If there's a free C-bus slot, you could upgrade to OPNA by buying a PC-9801-86 board.

Quote:
- Do I want more RAM if possible?

Yes. About 5MB should be enough for most games.

Quote:
- How fast is too fast for a processor?

Opinions will differ on this, but I think a Pentium is too much, and may cause compatibility issues. A 486 is a good compromise.

Quote:
- Are there games that need to be installed on a hard drive, or can I survive without one if I'm willing to do a lot of disk swapping?

Many games require HD installation. It would be tough without one.

It really depends on what games you're interested in playing. If you want to play later games like Touhou, Flame Zapper Kotsujin, and ports of Western games like Doom, you'll want a PC-9821 with a faster processor (ideally a 486@66MHz or more), several MBs of RAM, and a hard drive. Older games and most adventures games require much less.

A number of people (including myself) are quite happy with the PC-9821Ce2. It has a 486@25MHz CPU, 5MB of RAM, built-in OPNA sound, and an IDE hard drive and CD-ROM drive. It also uses the older graphics controller, which is more compatible with older games. Some people have also successfully upgraded to a faster CPU. Since the hard drive interface is IDE, it's easy and cheap to get an adapter and use an SD card or Compact Flash card as your HDD. It's also possible to replace the floppy drives with 1 or 2 HxC floppy emulators.

Japanese retro gamers I've talked to like the A MATE series, because it comes in a big case with lots of room for upgrades and customization. However, I've acquired several of them in the past, and the power supplies don't seem very reliable. If you do get an A MATE, the first thing you should do is check the PSU and replace the capacitors.

On the other hand, the later models like the Valuestar and Ra series are not as good for dos gaming. They were built for Windows, so you'll have to deal with various compatibility issues. It's not impossible to get most things to work, but it can be a headache. On the plus side, they're usually pretty cheap.

Basically, this is the sweet spot:
PC-9821 Multi series (Ce/Ce2/Cs2)
PC-9821 A-Mate series (Ae/As/Ap/An/As2/Ap2/As3/Ap3)

Depending on what games you want to play, you could also go slightly lower-spec with the PC-9801BA/BX/BS series, or slightly higher-spec with the 9821Xe.


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PostPosted: March 14th, 2016, 1:28 pm 
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Thanks a ton! This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Just found a Ce on yahoo auctions so we'll see how that goes.


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PostPosted: March 14th, 2016, 10:56 pm 
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The other thing to be aware of is that you need a monitor supporting a horizontal frequency of 24.83kHz. Most monitors today only support the 31.47kHz frequency of the VGA standard.
You have three options:

1) get an original PC98 CRT
2) get a video scan converter like the XPC-4
3) win the monitor lottery and find a model that supports 24kHz

As far as (3) goes, I've had success with old Japanese LCD displays from Sharp and I-O Data, and I found a Mitsubishi TV that supported 24kHz unofficially. Currently I use a Mitsubishi RDT235WX, which handles PC98 signals beautifully. Too bad Mitsubishi got out of the consumer display business a few years ago. :(

Having said that, there is one possible workaround. On most PC-9821 models, you can force 31kHz by holding Grph+2 on bootup. I haven't tested it much, so I don't know whether most games will still run at 31kHz. And even if you switch to 31kHz, some modern displays will still complain, because the signal is not exactly like VGA.

The display connector is also different, but luckily Sanwa Supply still sells a PC98-to-VGA adapter (AD-D15NE).
If you scroll down on that Amazon page, you can also see the pinout if you want to make your own adapter.


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PostPosted: March 15th, 2016, 3:09 am 
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Cool! Another potential PC-98 hardware owner is in the midst. Kobushi's advice is helpful always and he helped me too when it came time for me to choose what to import. I am also a Ce2 owner like Kobushi, but my friend Xalphenos imported a Ce. Mostly they are about the same, though I think the main differences he was telling me was that in the Ce model the Disk Drives were not the HE10 34 pin drives, but rather the ZIF 26 pin style. Also the 486 SX / 25 MHz chip wasn't soldered in, but instead was a socketed CPU meaning it would be easier to upgrade as long as you had a voltage converter adapter / or resisters to take 5 volts and make it 3.3. volts. Just about everything else should be the same I think... There may have been something about the back of the motherboard offering a SCSI type HDD or connector to the CD-Rom instead of an IDE. I think there was an IDE BUS in the front though.

My model is a Ce2 S2D model and it has two IDE Buses, which allow for a HDD in the front, a HDD in the back and it can be daisy chained to interface with the CD-Rom once drivers are loaded. It also has two FDD drives that use the standard 34 pin connectors.

Like Kobushi said, you'll likely be fine with at least 5 MB of RAM, and in the Ce and Ce2 models they usually had a RAM Board where this RAM could be installed into. If you want to see pictures of this stuff, have a look through my PC-98 directory. I have tons of photos and miscellaneous stuff in there that just keeps growing over the years including what it all looks like inside.

http://retro-type.com/PC98/
http://retro-type.com/PC98/Ce2-Interior/

I too would recommend getting a HDD setup and it's actually going to be the most beneficial to you in the long run. You can actually use a Compact Flash to IDE adapter to create an image that most of us use that Kobushi put together for a bunch of us called YADHI. You can read more about it here: http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5463.0 It's a fantastic image and it even comes with some games pre-loaded, but the real fun is with all of the extra programs and options it has for configuring your PC-98 and it's roughly a ready to go 542 MB image that you can have some fun with. I've kind of dropped the project for a bit due to some life complications, but I plan to finish a rather time consuming project to evolve YAHDI into a new collection that has even more games tested, and new options available. You can think of it as a YADHI 2.0 I guess. :) Anyhow the beauty of this image and placing it on a CF card is that you can easily write files to and from it using a regular windows PC. Unsure on a Mac though, maybe it's still possible and you can even make backups of your CF card as a digital file to share or keep.

Regarding the monitor, I was scared when Kobushi first told me this as well and I was thinking that I wouldn't be able to find many monitors that supported 24 khz, but in all honestly most of the cheap DELL flatpanels and HP widescreen panels seem to work for me. It will cut off part of the image, but when you try it you'll either get a picture or you'll get a black screen. Tested models that work are my HP w2207h and a HPL1908w.

You can see how it looks here as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQiYym9WHPo

Concerning FDD drives, they'll be pretty nice at first until you realize how much of a pain in the ass it is to copy that floppy and having to get the right environment put together to support writing to them. I've written countless disks to MSX using one program and it was easy and fast and could work in virtually any OS. With PC-98 though I think I wrote about 10 floppies before I got sick of doing it. It involved using different programs, I found it didn't always work and for me at least it required a certain model FDD drive (external I think?) and not an internal and a 32-bit OS like Windows XP or Win7 but then I've heard some people were able to get it to work on a 64-bit OS and not on a 32-bit... so... you never know I guess. If you want to try it out for yourself, most of the information about that can be found here: http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/wri ... nes.42533/

Instead, in the long run I would recommend getting a Floppy Disk Emulator such as an HxC or a cheaper Gotek. HxC's support .d88 image (which are a format used by both PC-88 and PC-98) natively, whereas the Goteks can be programmed using a cheap programmer and flashed with an HxC firmware bootloader for around 10 Euro donated to the HxC guys. There's a guide out there on Vogons for it, but if you wanted to see a video of it, I have one pretty much already recorded and ready, I just need to upload it to my Youtube channel sometime. It's a start to finish guide on how to do it and how to test to see if it's working with two Goteks. HxC's are a lot nicer than the Goteks and offer better file naming options and folders, but they are about 3-5 times more expensive than the Goteks too. They also support dual FDD emulation which is something the Goteks do not support. But yeah, a FDD emulator would have you all set for running disk only games with ease and being able to read and write to them.

Good luck in your quest!

-Thomas

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PostPosted: March 16th, 2016, 3:20 am 
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Joined: June 22nd, 2014, 6:16 am
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Thanks for the info!

As far as monitors go, I've already got that covered. I'm actually living in Tokyo at the moment (what spurred me to actually go ahead and get into the hardware) and found a compatible I-O Data LCD display for 2500 yen in Akihabara. I just need to pick up an adapter and vga cable and I should be good to go.

I had heard about this HDD image floating around and would definitely be interested in setting that up. I was thinking it might make sense to build up a whole bunch of images with different games and utilities seeing as it's super easy to swap out the compact flash cards (from what I've seen). Realistically I'm going to be rather busy for the next couple months, but I should have plenty of time to work on such things once May rolls around.

Since I'm here in Japan at the moment I was planning on picking up some boxed games I've seen in a few stores. Hopefully the disk drives in the model I'm after are working, but in the very least I'll be able to dump the floppies. I've also been toying with the idea of picking up an external 5.25" drive since the games I've seen have been pretty evenly divided between 5.25" and 3.5".

I picked up a super cheap NEC usb floppy drive that I was hoping to be able to use to format some floppies from images off the net. I haven't looked too much into that yet and unfortunately the page that a bunch of older threads on here link to with a guide to doing it is dead. I'll definitely take a look into getting a floppy emulator as well. Luckily the model I'm aiming for has an HDD with DOS and Windows 3.1 installed already so that at least alleviates the problem of getting a hold of DOS disks.

As a side note, seeing as I am here at the moment, know some shops specializing in vintage computers, and have a rough but workable command of Japanese, I was wondering if there's anything anyone would want me to look into / try and find. In that regard, is there a good comprehensive list of what has/hasn't been dumped? I know there are hundreds of unaccounted for titles (especially doujin stuff) but if I could have something to cross-reference that would be good for knowing if anything I find is a must-buy. I'm definitely interested in preservation / helping out the community.


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PostPosted: March 16th, 2016, 6:27 am 
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Billybob wrote:
As a side note, seeing as I am here at the moment, know some shops specializing in vintage computers, and have a rough but workable command of Japanese, I was wondering if there's anything anyone would want me to look into / try and find. In that regard, is there a good comprehensive list of what has/hasn't been dumped? I know there are hundreds of unaccounted for titles (especially doujin stuff) but if I could have something to cross-reference that would be good for knowing if anything I find is a must-buy. I'm definitely interested in preservation / helping out the community.


Thank you very much, any help would be appreciated. We're currently working on the Neo Kobe PC-9801 set and building up a list of what is already available, but there's still a lot of sorting and testing to do.

To get a quick idea of what is still undumped, go to the Refuge Tokyo PC-9801 Database (https://refuge.tokyo/pc9801/pc9801.html), click on Publisher, and look for the titles that are grayed out with no hyperlink.

CD-ROM games are also a priority, because we have less than half of those. If you're interested in CD games, I can put together an undumped list.

Otherwise, doujin and non-game software is always a plus. We have most of the major doujin titles, but you never know what else is out there. If you see something unusual, please let me know.


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PostPosted: March 16th, 2016, 10:22 pm 
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Hi Billybob,

That's very nice that you are able to spend some time in Japan. I was just there recently in February for a few weeks. It's a very fun place to visit and had a great time, but unfortunately it may be quite some time before I'm able to go back. While I was there though I was able to finally visit BEEP-SHOP located in Akihabara which had many wonderful treasures, even a few things that I was looking for with intensity such as a new PC-98 keyboard, and a few software titles. If you are up for a challenge, there are a couple of PC-98 titles that I am definitely looking for and have been for years, namely AIZA: New Generation by Tierheit, Legend of Lune by Tierheit, and 46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinka Ron. I'm interested in these not only as a collector, but also because I would very much like to scan these if they were to come with original manuals or flyers for preservation reasons and also because some of these may end up as English Translation projects at a romhacking site that I co-run over at heroesoflegend.org. There's already a lot of progress done on two PC-98 titles: Brandish 2 Renewal and 46 Okunen Monogatari. I'm hoping to add AIZA, and Xak I soon if we can find enough translators that are interested in older projects like these, and possibly Dragon Half and Oerstedia. I would love to see more PC-98 games in English. I'm also hoping that the Slayers PC-98 project eventually gets completed, but so far my efforts in reaching out to their team have not worked that well...

Anyhow if you were to be able to find any of these, I would be happy to pay for them, as long as they aren't in the same price range of say Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Snatcher and Space Manbow... The prices for those games have become so inflated over the years.

I'd be happy to have your help on adding games to the PC-98 image I'm working on that is an extension of Kobushi's YAHDI image. I've been working a bit with Caius over at NFGGames.com Forums so that we don't end up overlapping and working on adding the same titles. I would be happy to upload and share my progress with you if you would like to work together on it.

A little about it though. It's intended to be a "Best Collection" of PC-98 titles that can either be made to A) Work directly off of the Harddrive or B) Run using Ercache provided that the user has enough RAM installed to load disks into memory. Many games that were originally on disk can definitely be installed on a HDI image and written to a CF card to play on a real machine. But, there are just as many games that unfortunately cannot be run directly off the harddrive or at the very least, it has been attempted with no success so far.

Because the goal of this project is to add great games that we think people will really enjoy, and to introduce new people into PC-98 hardware and software, I've set up a boundary of trying to stay away from adding too many titles that have an abundance of hentai or echhi adult content. The PC-98 has gotten a bad rap over the years of being a computer series that has a sea of adult software and not much else. I want to change that viewpoint a bit and want to keep it mostly all-audience friendly out of respect to some female PC-98 users that I've come to meet over the years. There are some games that do have adult content in them, but they sometimes they can be turned off in system settings such as in the case of Night Slave and Briganty: The Roots of Darkness. Nudity is of no concern in the games that I'm adding, but anything that clearly is sex/hentai I'm staying clear of for these images if at all possible unless the gameplay itself warrants it being added to the image.

The end goal is to have 2 images a YAHDI A and YAHDI B that are 542 Mb each, split between various genres and a 128 Mb image called YAHDI C which will use Dos 3.3 and allow older games to run off it that would normally not work too well under Dos V / 6.

YAHDI A - Action/Arcade Based games (Easy stuff to get into if you don't really speak much Japanese)

Categories: Fighting, Puzzle, Action, Dancing (Just one game here haha), Simulation, Racing, Shooting, FPS

YAHDI B - Text Heavy Games, RPGs, Visual Novels (Japanese may be required to really enjoy these titles, though some of these Farland Story 1-6 and eventually Brandish 2 will be in English).

Categories: Action RPGs, Traditonal RPGs, Strategy RPGs, Adventure / Visual Novel.

YAHDI C - Anything else that can be added as standalone titles that would normally need a Dos 3.3 environment to run such as Popful Mail, 46 Okunen Monogatari, Karateka, The Screamer and others.

I guess if you think about NEC and the NEC PC-Engine DUO, this originally started off in my head as the YADHI DUO, and then became the YAHDI TRIO. haha.

Are you on Skype by any chance? My name on Skype is SkyeWelse.

-Thomas

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Last edited by SkyeWelse on March 19th, 2016, 9:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: March 17th, 2016, 2:11 am 
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kobushi,

I'll definitely take a look through that list and see if I happen to come across anything missing.

Thomas,

I just recently checked out Beep in Akihabara. It was like walking into fantasy - so much cool old gear. I'll definitely go have another look asap and see if I can find any of the titles you're looking for. I know they have a decent stock of PC-98 software.

As far as working on the hard drive images, I'm happy to help any way I can. I do use Skype. I'll add you.


On another note, I've also got a Commodore 64 and the C64 scene is pretty huge on the internet, but what really got me thinking was c64.com, which has a complete downloadable collection of all known dumped games. I'm sure you're familiar with pc98.org, which is a great resource except that the games aren't hosted live. I was thinking that it should be relatively cheap and simple to set up a web archive with downloadable FDD/HDD images for individual games for PC-98. It would be nice to have something more reliable than all the file-sharing links people use that then go down. It seems like there are several people with really large collections of games, but no easy way to share them.

- Zefan


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PostPosted: May 31st, 2016, 10:26 am 
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How do the 9821Cx13 models fair for gaming?

They seem to be Pentium based, and can run Windows 95, so they might be a little too new. Not sure whether they have newer GPU than the Ce2, or whether that is disastrous or not.

I mostly want a system that can run games like Rusty, and a handful of others of the same quality. The Cx13's seem to be more plentiful than the Ce2 models, and they come equipped with a joystick port, which is a big plus compared to the Ce2.

Do they have the right FM module equipped though? Us PC98 hopefuls really need an expanded range of viable models to look for since the ones on the short list are not exactly plentiful on Yahoo auctions.


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PostPosted: August 22nd, 2016, 9:06 pm 
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So life sort of got in the way of my PC-98 dreams, being rather too busy to afford time to it in the last few months. But anyhow, I got my 9821 Ce back home after a long time in the mail, only to find it must have been dropped or something, because the chassis was heavily bent. Luckily it still boots from the hard drive just fine, but sadly, one of the floppy drives has ceased to function. A damaged capacitor came loose from the board inside the drive, but the construction is such that it seems nearly impossible to get access to that section to solder a new one. Kinda lousy. Currently looking for solutions.


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