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