Nec Pc-9801 Emulator
Cecelia Seiner
The NEC PC-9800, also known as the PC-98, were a family of computers made by NEC throughout 1982 to 2000. Despite using Intel x86 chips, MS-DOS and Windows 9x, and many other superficial similarities, the series is not IBM compatible. Some PC-98 software may work on an IBM or vice versa, but this is very YMMV.[1] In fact, the introduction of a native Japanese version of standard MS-DOS in the early 90s and subsequent entry of cheaper foreign IBM clones in the Japanese market was the nail in the coffin for the PC-98. They were not released or marketed outside of Japan, besides few attempts such as APC-III and PC-9801FC.
The PC-98 was made with office work in mind and corners had to be cut to make this machine more affordable, which was especially evident in the slow speed of its framebuffer. As a result there was no way to achieve 60fps especially in higher resolutions (which were seen often because it made Japanese characters more legible), so the PC-98 became a home of many slower-paced games, mainly visual novels, but also JRPGs and adventure games among other genres. The cult classic YU-NO debuted there. Many games for that computer were aimed for adult audiences. Faster-paced games were less popular, leaving that to Sharp X68000 and FM-Towns, but some of them have been made for this machine, including five first entries of the famous Touhou series, which were significantly different from later releases. It was later possible to run Windows on the PC-98 and install Windows-compatible fast SVGA graphics card, but games made specifically for PC-98 DOS couldn't take advantage of it.
Most of the games won't require graphics subsystems that are more advanced than EGC, and basically, all emulators have achieved full emulation of EGC, so whether an emulator could emulate more advanced graphic systems doesn't really bug.
However, some games do make use of more advanced graphics subsystems, such as some AliceSoft's adult games which support 256 color mode of IO-DATA's GA-1024A, and games originating from IBM PC such as Doom, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, etc. may make use of PEGC due to its similarities with VGA graphics.
Specifically, it's possible to install a totally out-of-spec graphic card, such as Nvidia GeForce FX 5700LE on later PC-98 models with PCI bus, but such scenarios are quite obscure and no emulators support such cases.
The PC-FXGA (GA stands for Game Accelerator) was a series of computer boards and sports the same hardware as a regular PC-FX with the exception of an additional processor the HuC6273 that can handle 3D graphics. PC-FXGA is used to play PC-FX games on PC-9800 series computer and IBM compatible computers but also makes possible for enthusiast to develop their own games.
For Windows, PC-9801-118 provides support for both FM and PCM playback as a PnP & Windows Sound System compatible card, but not fully backward compatible with PC-9801-86 under MS-DOS. Q-Vision WaveStar is yet another PnP card for Windows but is fully backward compatible.
When it comes to MIDI, most of the emulators are capable of redirecting PC-98's MIDI output (MPU-PC98) to MIDI devices on the host computer, including the built-in GS Synthesizer in Windows. Dosbox-x also provides extra emulation for Roland MT-32.
PC-98 keyboard layout presents keys that aren't available on IBM PC keyboards. Most of the emulators will map them to other keys on IBM PC keyboards, but only Anex86 and SL9821 support manually remapping these keys.
Just like IBM PC keyboards, the Later PC-98 keyboard also introduced Windows and Context keys alongside the introduction of Windows 95. Only Neko Project 21/W, and Dosbox-x support emulation of Windows and Context key.
Neko Project 21/W supports the emulation of the Buffalo LGY-98 LAN adapter. A TAP virtual network adapter driver is required to be installed on the host machine in order to connect the emulator to the host machine in host-only mode by default. Bridged and NAT-enabled Internet access is also available by setting up the TAP virtual network adapter on the host machine.
You'll need a font if you want text characters to display properly in most cases. It can be downloaded here. Put it in the same directory as the emulator executable, and select it (Emulate/Font for Neko Project II, or Config/Font for Anex86).
Neko Project II's controls are not remappable. They're 2, 4, 6, and 8 on the numpad, arrow keys, enter, space, ctrl, z, and x. For games using the mouse, hit F12 to enable or disable mouse input. Use programs like Joy2Key to rebind other keys.
Despite no emulators specifically emulating this model, PC-9801FC software could run on regular PC-98, hence it's possible to run them with regular PC-98 emulators, but all non-ASCII text strings will become gibberish as their character ROMs are encoded in different schemes unless feeding in the character ROM of PC-9801FC either as ROM file or character mapping image into the emulator, which is not yet in public.
iNHERITOR II-A is an IBM PC powered by Intel Core i7 processor, running Windows Embedded 2009 and a customized PC-98 emulator (which seems to be a fork of Neko Project II judging from its menu bar), and equipped with a special PCI card and C-bus breakout board that could redirect actual PC-98 floppy drive, serial port and C-bus devices to the emulator, which makes it possible to control industrial devices relying on PC-98 via IBM PCs.
Hi there! This is Gang Fight speaking - the creator of PC-98 Bot. Our only real authority on PC-98 is that we've put a stupid amount of time playing PC-98 on an emulator. That being said, in our thousands hours of doing this we've picked up on a few things we wish was more apparent when we were first getting started. We hope this guide can help make the dive a little bit easier when it comes to swimming through the PC-98's enigmatic catalogue.
This guide will try to keep things simple for beginners by limiting its scope. It'll only cover topics users will run into when running Neko Project 21/W with software found in the Neo Kobe Collection. If you're looking for something beyond that, check out the end of the guide for some resources that might have you find what you're looking for.
Specifically, if you're looking for advice on physical hardware you should definitely check out the Choosing Your 98 page on the 9800 Western Guide by babyloveunkind. If you have any more questions in that department I recommend asking for help in the PC-98 Series Central Discord. The PC-98 Discord community is very active, friendly, and helpful; and they'll probably lend you a hand if you ask nicely.
Due to limited processing power at the time of release some games are rendered in a low vertical resolution. The hardware then makes the game fit the standard screen resolution by skipping every-other line while rendering. This can result in unappealing scanlines that darken the image. The "scanline" issue is common especially with action oriented games.
Everything should work now as intended.If you think you messed up the settings in your machine options a simple fix is to go back to machine options and hit the 'home' key on your keyboard. This will restore everything to their default values.
If you don't have an HDI that's been bundled with your CD image don't worry, we'll just have to use another HDI that has your CD-drive correctly setup. A popular image used for this solution is YAHDI. There's a lot of cool tools within this HDI, so read over the forum post if you're interested. While normally it takes a lot of preparation to get everything working right I've preconfigured and compiled a harddisk image for Neko Project 21/W which you can download here.
Asenheim has translated and ported over a bunch of PC-98 visual you can play rigt in your browser. If all this emulation stuff overwhelms you and you just wanted to jump into some English PC-98 VN's right away this is a great option. Heads up though -- most of these VN's are NSFW.
Amazing teams like 46 OkuMen are doing great work creating English patches for use on actual hardware and emulation. Only a small number of titles have been translated so far, but the list translated games is growing rapidly. ROMhacking.net is the good place to find patches, as well as this well maintained archive of translated disc images on Archive.org.
PC-98 games are well known for their gorgeous pixel art, so it makes sense that you might want to skip the gameplay and just look at the art. Unfortunately this is harder than it sounds. PC-98 games use proprietary image extensions exclusive to certain developers, and sometimes even exclusive to specific games. Because of how niche these file types are, modern support for working with them is relatively non-existent. You do have a few options though, and hopefully one of them works!
However, the most popular PC98 emulator in Japan is Anex86. Although a few games doen't work with it (e.g. Ningyo Tsukai: the original Japanese version of Metal & Lace), Anex86 has high emulating performance. Strictly speaking, Anex86 is not a PC98 emulator. It is the emulator of EPSON's PC-286, 386, 486, 586 which are compatible hardware of NEC's PC98. Therefore some games need to have the EPSON check removed: this fragment of code discriminates whether the hardware is the genuine NEC PC98 or not. You can download the check remover, DISPELL, from this page.
Several other emulators are available for the PC-88, check this page (jp) or this page (en). You can find a lengthy help page for PC-98 emulation on 46okumen.com with updated download links. You may also use DOSBox-X to run PC-98 games.
Many PC-88 came on several floppy disks, thus most of the games published in the 90s have several nested archives. You will also find a lot of disks have the [a] tag, meaning it's an alternate dump of the disk. You may come across other tags in brackets, these are based on the TOSEC Naming Convention:
More complicated load instructions are indicated at the end of the file names in this set. For example, to run the file "Fire House (Honoo no Yakata) V1 mode, MON R Ctrl-B LOAD CAS.t88", do the following (Boot up in V1 mode):
c80f0f1006