6 ms·

The world of Japan's PC-98 computer

158 points by ecliptik 1y ago

TheHideout 1y ago
Because hug of death: https://archive.is/iBrYt https://archive.is/iBrYt
- Taikonerd 1y ago
  Apparently this site is hosted by a PC-98 too...
hello_computer 1y ago
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…
- SuperNinKenDo 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - shuuzo 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - hello_computer 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    Nah. The people writing racist fanfiction on AO3 are equally beardy, and those are mostly women. It's just the standard weirdos/creeps problem.
- rtpg 1y ago
  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).
mrandish 1y ago
> 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.
- jordibunster 1y ago
  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.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  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.
charcircuit 1y ago
[flagged]
- mrandish 1y ago
  > 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-industry-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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
ngcc_hk 1y ago
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.
ngcc_hk 1y ago
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-DOSBox%E2%80%90X 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 …
theogravity 1y ago
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_BrsEBTR_3j88uozi1xP_kLYz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96tLZTtNcZA&list=PL_W1EM66_B...
makeitdouble 1y ago
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/ https://16bitsensation-al.com/
- YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
  And, fully in line with its themes, the legendary Akiba Mister Doughnut it features shut its doors for the last time last year.
mastazi 1y ago
Link seems to be experiencing HN's hug of death, archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250523210148/https://strangecomforts.com/the-strange-world-of-japans-pc-98-computer/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250523210148/https://strangeco... Note: the link contains some slightly NSFW images
TD-Linux 1y ago
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.
- msephton 1y ago
  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.
- bitbasher 1y ago
  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 https://archive.org/details/branching-paths
- djur 1y ago
  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.
tempodox 1y ago
> …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.
rollcat 1y ago
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.
krispyfi 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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.
msephton 1y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38409692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38409692
jovial_cavalier 1y ago
I don't appreciate cartoon pornography being shared here. I think this website is best when it's professional.
sombragris 1y ago
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).

158 points by ecliptik 1y ago

TheHideout 1y ago

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

Taikonerd 1y ago
Apparently this site is hosted by a PC-98 too...

hello_computer 1y ago

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…

SuperNinKenDo 1y ago
[flagged]
- shuuzo 1y ago
  [flagged]
- hello_computer 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Nah. The people writing racist fanfiction on AO3 are equally beardy, and those are mostly women. It's just the standard weirdos/creeps problem.
rtpg 1y ago
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).

mrandish 1y ago

> 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.

jordibunster 1y ago
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.
aidenn0 1y ago
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.

charcircuit 1y ago

[flagged]

mrandish 1y ago
> 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-industry-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 1y ago
  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 1y ago

ngcc_hk 1y ago

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.

ngcc_hk 1y ago

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-DOSBox%E2%80%90X 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 …

theogravity 1y ago

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_BrsEBTR_3j88uozi1xP_kLYz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96tLZTtNcZA&list=PL_W1EM66_B...

makeitdouble 1y ago

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/ https://16bitsensation-al.com/

YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
And, fully in line with its themes, the legendary Akiba Mister Doughnut it features shut its doors for the last time last year.

mastazi 1y ago

Link seems to be experiencing HN's hug of death, archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250523210148/https://strangecomforts.com/the-strange-world-of-japans-pc-98-computer/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250523210148/https://strangeco... Note: the link contains some slightly NSFW images

TD-Linux 1y ago

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.

msephton 1y ago
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.
bitbasher 1y ago
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 https://archive.org/details/branching-paths
djur 1y ago
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.

tempodox 1y ago

> …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.

rollcat 1y ago

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.

krispyfi 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
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.

msephton 1y ago

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

jovial_cavalier 1y ago

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

sombragris 1y ago

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).