from Hacker News

The world of Japan's PC-98 computer

by ecliptik on 5/23/25, 8:51 PM with 53 comments

  • by TD-Linux on 5/24/25, 4:19 AM

    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.

  • by mrandish on 5/23/25, 11:09 PM

    > 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.

  • by TheHideout on 5/23/25, 10:09 PM

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

  • by theogravity on 5/24/25, 1:49 AM

    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...

  • by makeitdouble on 5/24/25, 3:29 AM

    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/

  • by ngcc_hk on 5/24/25, 12:34 AM

    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 …

  • by sombragris on 5/24/25, 6:49 PM

    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).

  • by rollcat on 5/24/25, 1:05 PM

    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.

  • by hello_computer on 5/23/25, 11:02 PM

    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…

  • by tempodox on 5/24/25, 11:12 AM

    > …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.

  • by krispyfi on 5/24/25, 1:08 PM

    > 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.

  • by mastazi on 5/24/25, 3:32 AM

    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

  • by ngcc_hk on 5/24/25, 12:26 AM

    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.

  • by msephton on 5/24/25, 3:03 PM

  • by jovial_cavalier on 5/24/25, 3:42 PM

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