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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Because hug of death: https://archive.is/iBrYt
Apparently this site is hosted by a PC-98 too...
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
For those into light-novel or anime, 16bit sensation is straight into this topic, right as the PC-98 area was under pressure.
And, fully in line with its themes, the legendary Akiba Mister Doughnut it features shut its doors for the last time last year.
> …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.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38409692
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
I don't appreciate cartoon pornography being shared here. I think this website is best when it's professional.
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 …
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.