I used to be super into reading up about obscure PC-88 and PC-98 titles way back before high school. Here is one English website/forum centered around Japanese

I used to be super into reading up about obscure PC-88 and PC-98 titles way back before high school. Here is one English website/forum centered around Japanese computing I used to browse back then, Tokugawa Corp. http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/ http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/ I remember browsing through weird Taiwanese ROM hosters around 2009 trawling for any sort of floppy/disk image I could get my hands on and spending dozens of hours downloading weird games on cross-country dialup speeds, since you couldn't find them nearly anywhere else. It was so strange and foreign to my teenage mind, even though I couldn't understand any Japanese back then, and it was quite stimulating since most people weren't interested enough to uncover it all. As the article mentions, reading though some of the contemporary magazines on archive.org, there's a wealth of interesting stories about that era in Japanese gaming that are largely missing from today's Internet. One example was a teenage game developer that coded his own homebrew SNES assembler in the mid-90's to sell original unlicensed games on Akiba's illicit markets (and sold tens of thousands of copies, if I recall correctly).