The world of Japan's PC-98 computer

https://strangecomforts.com/the-strange-world-of-japans-pc-98-computer/

by ecliptik • 1 year ago

158 39 1 year ago

strangecomforts.com

TheHideout• 1 year ago

Because hug of death: https://archive.is/iBrYt

Taikonerd• 1 year ago

Apparently this site is hosted by a PC-98 too...

hello_computer• 1 year ago

PC-98 eroge art is beautiful. These writers—who freely take pot-shots at the “perverted” hikikomori of 30 years ago—wouldn’t dare criticize the hardcore pornography (Bonnie Blue? The OnlyFans Economy!) the world is presently steeped in. It’s like they know which waggle dance lets you in, and which one gets you booted from the hive…

rtpg• 1 year ago

Plenty of PC98 games out there that are just pure smut and assault fantasies.

You could make an argument about the production environments of "actual real person" pornography but if you're talking about aesthetics and morality of the end product? I dunno... tough sell to me for a "random" one.

Plenty of "real art" PC98 stuff too ofc (there are also of course people on the record saying "we put stuff in here so we could sell our RPG" and the like... market demands).

mrandish7• 1 year ago

this now-forgotten art style native to Japan is known, shorthand, as “PC-98”

I'm really into retro computing having collected over a hundred 80s 'home' computers (all non-PC/Mac), including at least a dozen Japanese models, but have never heard the term "PC-98" to describe a particular style of pixel art, probably because I don't speak Japanese and haven't lived there. However, I do see some traits in how the examples shown were constructed which strike me as unique beyond just the obvious Japanese aesthetic of the content.

While the article highlights that Japanese computers had greater memory and graphics capabilities earlier due to the need to represent more complex fonts, there's another factor I suspect is behind the differences I'm seeing in those images. Japanese business computers tended to have analog RGB output and displays earlier and more commonly than those in the U.S. Of course, analog RGB was available in the U.S. around the same time but it wasn't usually considered worth the increased cost for mainstream desktop use in the early 80s. Monochrome or 4 colors were generally considered sufficient for 80-column capable text displays (~640 pixels wide).

Some of the dot patterns I'm seeing in those examples work well on RGB displays but wouldn't work as well on composite video displays or TVs. In the US, early home computer pixel art targeted resolutions like 256 x 192 and 320 x 200 in 4 or 16 colors but generally assumed the pixels would be displayed on a TV or composite monitor and so leveraged the pixel blending and additional artifact colors composite video can uniquely create to enhance their artwork. These composite-exploiting blends and colors are lost when those images are displayed in RGB, leaving only the original pixel patterns which aren't what the original pixel artist saw or intended when they created the image (which is why original composite-targeted pixel art is best viewed on a composite CRT or CRT emulation). I think these Japanese artists being able to target analog RGB output is behind some of the subtle (but cool) uniqueness I'm seeing in the "PC-98" pixel patterns.

jordibunster• 1 year ago

I remember trying to install Slackware as a 16 year old living as an exchange student in Japan and not getting anywhere. Turns out PC98 needed a patched kernel.

aidenn02• 1 year ago

IMO PC-98 is unique because it sits between EGA and VGA in capabilities; it is still a 16 color display, but from a much broader palette (4096 vs 64). EGA is very distinctive because of the limited palette.

mrandish7• 1 year ago

Indeed, starting with IBM's initial 5150 design, early PC graphics made cost, memory and capability trade-offs which would soon be seen as unfortunate from a graphics and gaming perspective. Although IBM specced the platform and chose Motorola's 6845 video display chip, I assign some blame to Motorola too for not having created a range of video chips with increasing capabilities to choose from. We'll never know if IBM would have ponied up a few dollars more for a chip with at least a 256 color palette or a few other niceties but it's always possible.

Strangely, Motorola did eventually decide to get serious about offering more capable graphics in the form of the RMS chipset but not until it was already too little and too late. They announced the RMS chipset in 1984 and tried to drum up interest among system designers but eventually cancelled it before release amidst lukewarm response and bugs in the early prototypes (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10977/fat...). It certainly didn't help that other options like TI's 99x8 VDP chips were now getting cheaper and the pre-Commodore Hi-Toro company was shopping around their Amiga chipset to all the major consumer computer manufacturers in 1984.

spankibalt• 1 year ago

"PC-98" is both a branding and a standard; it's capabilities run from eight-color reproduction to standard SVGA+ capabilities. Many Western ports made it to 9801 and especially 9821 machines. And that's before we factor in graphics workstations.

Practically reducing the uniqueness to graphics adapter capabilities is bizarre; a variety of reasons are responsible:

- long-honed, specific (indigenous) art styles (often with higher levels of detail, e. g. in background art)

- distinct tools (see msephton's list in the comments)

- distinct design languages and typography (UI/UX)

- higher res and sharpness (no need to use "fuzziness"-exploitation techniques of other platforms, e. g. Amiga)

- homogenous (PC-98) vs. heterogenous setups (e. g. Amiga)*

- color palette limitations (Also: Many a PC-98 artist chose lower fidelity for compatibility reasons)

* Production machine vs. consumer machine (PC-98: monitor; Amiga: TV OR monitor!)

aidenn02• 1 year ago

I didn't read your comment all the way to the end; later EGA games used similar dithering patterns (Loom[1] was one of the later and most visually impressive EGA games)

1: https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php

mrandish7• 1 year ago

Those Loom comparisons between EGA and VGA are cool. Very impressive work that they did back then. It really highlights how much 16 color palettes forced artists toward simplified cartoon or comic-like representations yet adding just a couple hundred colors enabled the best artists to evoke almost photographic dimensionality, texture and lighting effects.

If you haven't seen it, you might find this site useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_color_palettes. I use it as a reference when I'm exploring original retro pixel art from various platforms.

sponaugle• 1 year ago

'I'm really into retro computing having collected over a hundred 80s 'home' computers (all non-PC/Mac)," I like where you are going with this! I have a small collection of vintage hardware, but a bit more cross brand: https://youtu.be/XHvdqB6LSg0

The dot pattern example reminds me of Starlfight, which took advantage of the color effects on composite output from a CGA card. Great stuff!

mrandish7• 1 year ago

Very nice collection. I was purely focused on all-in-one 'keyboard home computers' that were designed to connect to a TV or composite monitor since that's the first kind of computer I got (circa 1981). So I have all the Ataris, Amigas, Commodores, Sinclairs, Apples, etc which fit that description. Plus a bunch of overseas models from all over the world. Well over a hundred unique models now, including some extremely rare ones.

Fortunately, I started my collection in the early 90s and finished by around 2000 (since I pretty much had one of every machine that fit my style). Gathering them when everyone was just giving away or trashing those machines meant I never paid more than $25 + shipping for any of them. My teenager started looking them up on eBay and said got to over $100,000 in current value before doing even half of them. I told her to stop because they aren't worth anything since they're not for sale. I wanted them them when they were trash no one cared about and that hasn't changed now that they're "vintage collectables" :-)

ngcc_hk2• 1 year ago

So far only collect 2 Casio one basic and one, well, lisp (!) calculators … interesting artefacts. Still try to get a national those tube-like display scientific calendars used during my senior secondary school.

This is a total different genre. So hard level …. In 1980s just thought it was a j model to be … wonder any simulation would see as collecting one just have a look is impossible.

ngcc_hk2• 1 year ago

This emulation seems to say pc98 is msdos based and hence can run on dosbox-x

https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3APC%E2%80%9098-emulation-in...

Seeing some yt even more confused as pointed out by wiki it is a 16/32 bit …

theogravity• 1 year ago

I totally recommend the Basement Brothers YouTube channel which has a large set of reviews with summarized playthroughs and historical background for PC-88 and 98 games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96tLZTtNcZA&list=PL_W1EM66_B...

makeitdouble• 1 year ago

For those into light-novel or anime, 16bit sensation is straight into this topic, right as the PC-98 area was under pressure.

[0] https://16bitsensation-al.com/

YurgenJurgensen• 1 year ago

And, fully in line with its themes, the legendary Akiba Mister Doughnut it features shut its doors for the last time last year.

mastazi• 1 year ago

Link seems to be experiencing HN's hug of death, archived link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250523210148/https://strangeco...

Note: the link contains some slightly NSFW images

TD-Linux• 1 year ago

Almost none of the games pictured are actually "doujin" games - they are commercial publishers.

Also, the reason we don't remember PC-98 is because it was never sold in the US (except for the very unpopular APC-III). It was the most popular computer on Japan from late 80s to early 90s and is well remembered there. Being the most popular PC, there is a huge amount of software for it, including huge amounts of office and productivity software, many genres of games, and plenty of Western ports.

msephton2• 1 year ago

I agree. Whilst it's great to see a mention of PC-98 the article views it through a very odd lens, and gets a lot of things confused or even just plain wrong.

bitbasher• 1 year ago

I agree. I posted a documentary on actual doujin gamedev in Japan, but it looks like the documentary was removed from Youtube. You can still find it on archive.org though for those that are interested in the scene.

https://archive.org/details/branching-paths

djur• 1 year ago

And there similarly was a market for relatively low-budget and/or pornographic and/or copyright-infringing computer games in western markets, it's just that people today find weird old ecchi VNs with anime art more interesting than weird old strip poker games with digitized photos.

tempodox• 1 year ago

…incompatible with MS-DOS computers at the time…

Thank goodness! The PC-98 colors are great, while the colors on DOS boxes of the time were so horrible, it's a miracle our retinas and optic nerves survived.

rollcat• 1 year ago

I've learned about the PC-98 by accident, by browsing FreeBSD releases. It used to be a tier-1 target, later degraded, and finally dropped in 12.0. Since FreeBSD is now moving to drop all 32bit CPUs entirely, it wouldn't have lived much longer.

In a way, supporting PC-98 sounds like exactly the kind of problem we currently have with Arm. The ISA is technically the same, but everything else is just what it is. The x86(-64) PCs with BIOS/UEFI are the closest we have to a standard, but still- check all the ACPI&friends quirks.

krispyfi• 1 year ago

Metal Gear creator / problematic gaming legend Hideo Kojima got his start on the platform with his classic potboiler “Policenauts”

That should be "Snatcher". Criminally overlooked game.

wk_end• 1 year ago

Hmm. I'm pretty sure Kojima directed Metal Gear before Snatcher (and worked on various other Konami games before that). And Snatcher was a PC-88 game, not a PC-98 game. All great games, at any rate.

msephton2• 1 year ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38409692

jovial_cavalier• 1 year ago

I don't appreciate cartoon pornography being shared here. I think this website is best when it's professional.

sombragris• 1 year ago

In some previous life, while studying biochemistry at my university's Faculty (school) of Chemical Sciences, I hung around the Botany Department (yes, they had one. Because you know, chemistry schools teach pharmacy, which in turn uses plants and so...). That was in 1989-1992.

The Department had a NEC PC 9801 (IIRC), with two floppy drives and no hard disk, and they used to register plants cataloged in their herbarium using a simple dBase-II application. Quite nice setup for that time. I never saw any graphics; all I saw was a very well-built system with a beautiful text font (it looked very well IMHO representing Western Latin characters).

The world of Japan's PC-98 computer

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