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The world of Japan's PC-98 computer

148 points - yesterday at 8:51 PM

Source
  • TD-Linux

    today at 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.

      • bitbasher

        today at 5:55 PM

        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

          today at 6:28 PM

          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.

          • msephton

            today at 3:00 PM

            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.

        • sombragris

          today at 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).

          • mrandish

            yesterday at 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.

              • aidenn0

                today at 12:33 AM

                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.

                  • mrandish

                    today at 1:18 AM

                    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.

                      • flomo

                        today at 7:42 AM

                        IBM only gave maybe 1.0 shits about gaming, to the extent they needed "business graphics" like charts, and maybe just some extra fun shit. The primary competition was loads of CP/M "business micros" with not many real graphical games at all. IBM benchmarked the Apple II+ with a Z80 Softcard because that was the ultimate mullet machine, all the business software upfront, all the gaming party in the back. CGA was good enough for an Apple II game or a pie chart, and that's all they cared about.

                          • mrandish

                            today at 6:20 PM

                            +1 for describing the "Apple II+ with a Z80 Softcard" as "the ultimate mullet machine, all the business software upfront, all the gaming party in the back."

                            I agree with your point, the bar IBM was shooting for was set by existing popular microcomputers circa 1979. The only significant consideration for future growth/competition was seemingly that the established trend of RAM size growth would probably continue. At the time there wasn't really any established trend of progressive growth in graphics resolution or colors. Pre-Apple II examples like the Cromemco Dazzler for the Altair weren't fundamentally different than the Apple II and probably not even on their radar due to being barely out of the kit/hobbyist level.

                            I'll add that when considering the 5150's initial design, the "IBM" we're talking about isn't really "The IBM" but rather a sole skunkworks project located in a backwater division down in Boca Raton Florida intended as an experiment to learn more about these new microcomputers. Most of the rest of the traditional IBM management structure barely knew about it during development and those parts that did mostly ignored it. If 'mainstream IBM' had approached the PC as a real IBM project, it would have certainly been very different and probably unsuccessful (if it had managed to ship at all). As it was, the 5150 was only able to use off the shelf components (including the CPU) because it was considered a one-off experiment initially given a month for the design and a year to ship.

                              • simne

                                today at 8:19 PM

                                > RAM size growth would probably continue.

                                True. But note - very long RAM grows ~ periodically doubling one chip size, and first chips don't have controller inside, so require very short traces to bus chip or CPU.

                                And usually, old chip becomes for example 10% cheaper, but twice size priced ~50% more than old, and to adopt new chips you need new memory controller with additional pins.

                                > At the time there wasn't really any established trend of progressive growth in graphics resolution or colors

                                Unfortunately, only partially true.

                                You may hear about RAMDAC on video forums topics. It is partially palette, but also generator of video signal, reading from RAM very fast.

                                Problem is that first "fast page" DRAM have very slow interface, so when larger chips become available (and with cheaper kilobytes than older, this was real logic of semiconductor technology progress), speed of RAM was not grow. And unfortunately, this once become bottleneck, it limits grow pixelrate, so even with twice RAM you could not got twice resolution.

                                In past, I few times calculated speed of RAM need to give classic 60 FPS, and at least up to (and including) first SDRAM machines just show their screen was enough to eat significant share of main RAM throughput, so internal graphics could even affect CPU performance.

                                On consoles problem was not so harmful, because limited resolution of consumer TV, but on few consoles used expensive frame buffer inside graphics chip.

                                On modern GPUs problem of RAM throughput solved by used overclocked designed VRAM chips and with extremely wide RAM bus, so chips run in parallel - in computers typical ~64bit, but GPUs start with 128 and top models have 512 or even 1024 bits.

                        • michalpleban

                          today at 7:15 AM

                          The Motorola 6845 CRTC chip is quite versatile, and one of its unique characteristics is that it knows and cares nothing about the resolution or number of colors on the screen. It is just a display address generator, which is meant to provide some external hardware with a memory address that contains data to be displayed at some part of the screen. What to do with this address and data is completely up to the computer hardware, which can interpret it whichever it wants. So there is nothing in the 6845 chip that prevents using it to display 256, 4096 or 16777216 colors on the screen.

                  • aidenn0

                    today at 4:00 AM

                    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

                      • mrandish

                        today at 6:31 AM

                        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.

                    • jordibunster

                      yesterday at 11:30 PM

                      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.

                  • TheHideout

                    yesterday at 10:09 PM

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

                      • Taikonerd

                        yesterday at 10:32 PM

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

                    • rollcat

                      today at 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.

                      • theogravity

                        today at 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...

                        • makeitdouble

                          today at 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/

                            • YurgenJurgensen

                              today at 1:08 PM

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

                          • krispyfi

                            today at 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.

                              • wk_end

                                today at 6:19 PM

                                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.

                            • tempodox

                              today at 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.

                              • msephton

                                today at 3:03 PM

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

                                • mastazi

                                  today at 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

                                  • ngcc_hk

                                    today at 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 …

                                    • jovial_cavalier

                                      today at 3:42 PM

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

                                      • ngcc_hk

                                        today at 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.

                                        • hello_computer

                                          yesterday at 11:02 PM

                                          [flagged]

                                            • rtpg

                                              today at 2:25 AM

                                              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).

                                              • SuperNinKenDo

                                                yesterday at 11:32 PM

                                                [flagged]

                                                  • hello_computer

                                                    today at 2:00 AM

                                                    Hardcore is a multi-billion dollar industry, while PC-98 softcore is dead, and was a cottage industry even in its heyday. Have to please the advertisers.

                                                    • yew

                                                      today at 2:19 AM

                                                      Nah. The people writing racist fanfiction on AO3 are equally beardy, and those are mostly women. It's just the standard weirdos/creeps problem.

                                                      • shuuzo

                                                        today at 1:04 AM

                                                        [flagged]

                                                • charcircuit

                                                  yesterday at 11:17 PM

                                                  [flagged]

                                                    • mrandish

                                                      yesterday at 11:36 PM

                                                      > You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.

                                                      Back in the day I was fortunate to work with some of the best pixel artists in the industry like Jim Sachs (https://spillhistorie.no/2024/09/13/legends-of-the-games-ind...) and they definitely did draw the vast majority of their pixels one at a time in the best paint programs available like Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint. In the linked article Sach's is quoted "I put dots on the screen. One at a time at first. Green dots for grass, blue dots for sky, gray dots for castle blocks. Hour after hour. I was happy if I got one square inch of the screen done in a day."

                                                      To create top notch pixel art in those limited resolutions and palettes forces the artist into creating the illusion of colors and detail which aren't actually there in any one pixel. They do this by modifying the colors of individual adjacent pixels to imply shading and highlights. Jim would modify one pixel, zoom out to assess the overall effect on that area of the image, then zoom back in and modify the next pixel. I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images. Most of those pixel patterns aren't uniform enough to be from an 80s paint program and not randomly Bayer-ish enough to be a digitized image.

                                                      Jim has discussed his workflow in detail in interviews. The value of Deluxe Paint to an artist like Jim wasn't laying down swathes of pixels, it was mostly fast zooming and panning as well as detailed palette control. Of course, those artists would use whatever capabilities their tools enabled when they could but it wasn't nearly as much or as often as you're assuming.

                                                        • JKCalhoun

                                                          yesterday at 11:52 PM

                                                          I think that's right. Paint programs might give you the "broad strokes" (so to speak), fill areas — it's clear the dithering on an arm, for example, was done a pixel at a time.

                                                          I spent many hours in "fat bits" mode in MacPaint creating B&W game artwork for early shareware games I wrote. Click a pixel to invert it.

                                                            • msephton

                                                              today at 2:33 AM

                                                              Not in Japan, you can see how the dithering was done in the video I link below, which was taken from promo footage of one of the most famous period Japanese paint apps for PC-98: Multi Paint System (1992, by Woody_RINN). The artist would paint two colours and then use a dither blend tool along the contrasting edge. https://youtu.be/nIdFor2WOnw?t=430

                                                              I'm sure some people did it pixel-by-pixel, but not so much in Japan where the software was designed to make dithering like this very easy.

                                                              You can find my big list of Japanese pixel art apps at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136905

                                                                • prmoustache

                                                                  today at 11:21 AM

                                                                  any recommendation in particular for each OS?

                                                                    • msephton

                                                                      today at 2:58 PM

                                                                      You might try, on hardware or emulation: Poco (modern macOS), Blue Paint (classic Macintosh), NewtPaint (Newton), MoePaint (Palm), CHEESE 2 (MSX), Airbrush (PC-100), Ink Pot (PC-88), ESQUISSE, Multi Paint System, Z's STAFF (PC-98), GraphicsGale, Easy Paint Tool SAI (Windows 9x to current), JINZO Paint (Windows CE, I picked this up recently to added fixes and new features), Matier, Full Color Paint Tool SAI, G-TOOL (X68000)

                                                                        • prmoustache

                                                                          today at 5:44 PM

                                                                          Thanks a lot!

                                                          • qingcharles

                                                            today at 12:30 AM

                                                            100%. I worked with artists in the 2D era. They were doing sprites a pixel at a time.

                                                            • today at 1:11 PM

                                                              • charcircuit

                                                                today at 2:57 AM

                                                                >I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images

                                                                Even without zooming in you can tell that those images look nothing like what was being made on the pc98. The article was talking about the 80s which was a decade before what we are talking about with the pc98. It is not valid to assume that they were done the same.

                                                                  • mrandish

                                                                    today at 5:47 AM

                                                                    > The article was talking about the 80s

                                                                    I cited that article as only one example. It focused on one artist who created graphics mainly for one platform, the Amiga, which was sold from 1985 to 1994. However, graphics were made as I described as early as 1978 by many artists on many different platforms including the Apple II (MicroPainter was popular), Atari 400/800, TI 99/4a, Radio Shack Color Computer and others. They often did detail work a pixel at a time for the reasons I described. This wasn't unique to Sachs or the Amiga.

                                                                    Regarding timing: The PC-98 platform was released in 1982 and was primarily an 80s phenomenon which had peaked sometime around 1990. While it continued to be sold throughout the 1990s, it's primary growth and dominance were established in the 1980s. Please see the Wikipedia entry for PC-98 which says: "In 1990, IBM Japan introduced the DOS/V operating system which enabled displaying Japanese text on standard IBM PC/AT VGA adapters." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98). That greatly expanded and accelerated the competition against PC-98.

                                                                      • charcircuit

                                                                        today at 6:46 AM

                                                                        Doing detail work pixel by pixel is a much different claim than drawing the line art pixel by pixel or doing the flat shading pixel by pixel.

                                                                        >Regarding timing: The PC-98 platform was released in 1982 and was primarily an 80s phenomenon which had peaked sometime around 1990.

                                                                        Look at the popular PC98 games and you will see that they were made in the 1990s. Alicesoft didn't even release their first game until 1989.

                                                                          • mrandish

                                                                            today at 7:51 PM

                                                                            I'm just relating the way I personally saw a variety of professional pixel artists work creating art for commercial products on several different platforms when I was a developer at a few different companies in the 80s and early 90s. This was all in the U.S. and on platforms with 256 x 192 and 320 x 200 resolutions and intended for composite video output (a few were effectively half horizontal res due to artifact colors yielding 160 or 128 by 192). I think perhaps our different perspectives are due to differences of degree between Hardware (320x200x16 & composite video / 640x200x16 & RGB video) and Art Styles between the US and Japan.

                                                                            > Doing detail work pixel by pixel is a much different claim than drawing the line art pixel by pixel

                                                                            This might be a difference of language or interpretation because to me "Doing detail work pixel by pixel" isn't substantially different than "drawing the art pixel by pixel". Neither one is precise, gives a sense of degree or makes a claim about ALL the pixels. The broad point of both seems to be "a lot of work was done at a pixel level". I certainly didn't intend to claim every single pixel was only ever laid down one at a time (which would be ridiculous). Conversely, I took what you said to be claiming no work (or very little) was done at a pixel level 'because they had paint programs'.

                                                                            Even though they had paint programs, in that era and with those limited resolutions and palettes, I still watched them spend the majority of their time zoomed in working on pixels. Perhaps we were both speaking briefly and broadly, so I'll detail more of the progression over time as well as the typical artist workflow I saw. Early video game art was initially sketched on graph paper, like Nishikado did on Space Invaders (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/atxb3y/o...). By the late 70s and early 80s devs were making their own homegrown tools to accelerate creating art. Initially these were simply using keyboard arrows to select a pixel and a number key to set the pixel to a color but they quickly evolved into tools like MicroPainter on the Apple II which had shape, fill and multi-pixel brush tools.

                                                                            Once they had access to paint tools, artists generally started a new image with box or flood fills of flat color or checkerboard over big regions like a blue sky at the top and ground at the bottom, although much of this would later be covered up. They might then use a line or circle tool to sketch in a horizon, building or planet. But in terms of time spent that initial rough-in was quick, akin to a painter penciling a sketch on a blank canvas. It was the zoomed in detail work on a pixel or few pixel level that occupied the majority of the artist's time. As a rough estimate based on what I saw, I'd guess it was more than ~70% time spent on zoomed in detail work vs ~30% full screen. And to be clear, that's Time Spent not Image Area percentage. I think Pareto probably applies (~80% time on ~20% of the pixels). I responded to your comment because it seemed to conflict with what I saw, which was talented pro artists spending the majority of their time per image working zoomed in and tweaking a pixel or few pixels at a time because it was necessary to create their desired output and quality level - at least in the context of 320 x 200 x 16 (or less) targeting composite video output.

                                                                            I don't doubt you may have seen artists in Japan working on higher res RGB output hardware with different tools have a different ratio of "Zoomed In vs Full Screen" time spent. I'd struggle to believe that zero pixel level work was typical and I'd be skeptical the rough ratio was regularly more than flipped (ie less than 30% time spent in detail work) but I wasn't working in Japan in the 80s or 90s (though I did visit several times) and the pixel art styles shown as "PC-98" do have larger regions of flat colors and checkerboards than typical U.S. pixel art of the late 80s and early 90s.

                                                            • spankibalt

                                                              today at 12:31 AM

                                                              > You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.

                                                              I always have to laugh when that one comes up. But yeah, many Japanese dot/pixel art graphics packages (e. g. Multi Paint System) have brushes for those characteristic dithering patterns. Fast work! And I don't think they did pixel-blending (as on Western home computers) either; the art was done on machines with computer monitors for customers with pretty much the same systems (e. g. PC-98). Manual corrections, analog/digital "transkriptions" (from raster paper for example), etc. are another story...