The world of Japan's PC-98 computer

Airing this anime season, "16bit Sensation: Another Layer" goes in some depth discussing this era of computing. The anime adapts the manga source by adding a time travel story, which is one of the cornerstone tropes of visual novels today, and was first realized on the PC-98.

The PC-98 is comparable to the Amiga in that its audiovisual potential cemented it as a kind of "visionary platform" for certain genres of gaming - but instead of speedy hardware that could support a lot of sprites, smooth scrolling and raster effects for action games, the high resolution and color palette pushed the balance towards slower-paced adventure and strategy games.

Both platforms habitually use enormous HUDs and tiny gameplay screens because filling the screen with assets would be too memory-intensive.

I find it surprising the Touhou series didn't get a mention in the article at all. Its definitely one of the biggest PC98 titles, a huge success spawned from the doujin spirit. ZUN (the sole creator, developer, writer, artist, composer, etc.) is still making and releasing Touhou games to this day.

While it is true the PC98 had (and still has) quite the share of doujin games, I do not like how the article makes it seem as if all software was games, as if all games were doujin, and all doujin were perverted.

That was an interesting computer. I worked for a US utility software company that had a deal with a major Japanese software distributor to make for them Japanese versions of our products and to develop new products they asked for. PC-98 was a big part of the Japanese market so we had to deal with it.

It was not quite IBM PC compatible, by Microsoft supported it in MS-DOS and Windows which hid most of the differences but that still left some surprises.

One of the biggest was drive letters. A: was always the drive you booted from, so if you had two floppy drives and one hard drive instead of A: and B: being the floppies and C: the hard drive like they would be on an IBM PC, you'd have A: be the hard drive and B: and C: be the floppies.

That broke a heck of a lot of US software that I tried to run on PC-98.

The biggest surprises I had developing software for Japan though weren't technical. They were cultural. I remember two things that caught me by surprise.

1. There was an intermittent bug that was only happening on a particular model laptop that we didn't have. The Japanese distributor sent us one. I set it up on my desk, and plugged in its power adaptor. After many days of fiddling around I managed to get the bug to happen and I was running a debugger.

It was in something that another developer was more familiar with, so I decided to take the laptop over to his office and show him.

I unplugged the power adaptor...and the damn thing instantly shut off!

It turned out that there was no battery in the laptop. Later the Japanese distributor explained that many people in Japan who didn't need portable computers used laptops anyway instead of desktops because they had small apartments and laptops took up less space.

So some laptops, like this one, had multiple bays that could hold the user's choice of batteries, hard disks, floppy disks, and optical disks. If you were just using it as a desktop you could omit the battery and use that bay for another disk, which was the case with this one.

2. We had another very intermittent bug where sometimes during installation of our newest product the computer would lock up. By "lock up" I mean everything froze on the screen (including mouse cursor if you were on Windows), CTRL-ALT-DEL did nothing, CAPS LOCK and NUM LOCK would not toggle the keyboard LEDs. No disk activity. No network activity.

We talked to the Japanese distributor about it and they decided they didn't want to delay the release over this. It seemed rare enough that they expected it to just hit a handful of people, and they'd be able to handle that via tech support (this was in the days when products came with free tech support for the life of the product).

It turned out that actually quite a few more people than expected ran into it...but they weren't reporting locked computers. They were reporting that installation was very slow. After something like 20-40 hours it would unfreeze and finish the installation and everything was fine after that.

This completely gobsmacked me. I can't imagine any American consumer being so patient with a locked computer that they would let it sit that way long enough to discover it really was just a 20-40 hour delay.

But in Japan apparently nearly everyone who ran into it did just that.

(The problem turned out to be that the way we were doing some device probes hit a case on some optical disk controllers that caused them to lock things up while waiting for something that would never happen and had a very long timeout. We were able to replace that with probing that would avoid the problem).

> Metal Gear creator / problematic gaming legend Hideo Kojima

Why is this particular phrasing necessary?

Not pc98 but speaking of obscure(at least in the US) Japanese hardware it makes me think of the luna88k. And the only reason I know it exists is that there is an openbsd port for it. and as far as I can tell one single heroic individual who spends a couple days each release making sure it still compiles on the one single machine that is actually running luna88k openbsd. The couple of days being how long it takes to compile openbsd on 1992 hardware.

Really it is very inspiring.

http://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html

> Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past.

> Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia.

> Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset.

>Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle.

> Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space.

Japanese vaporwave?

NSFW on one of the images.

Man, what a great webpage overall. Found some truly nostalgic pieces and pretty funny writing.

Sooooooooo many porn games on these Japanese systems, it's shocking really.