Well, it would naturally do that, because the Outrun genre is named after the Out Run game... which, like the PC-98 series, was made in Japan during the 1980s and with Yamaha 4-operator FM synth chips. Out Run was ported to the PC-88.
yes I was thinking about the arcade game Out Run. I checked earlier and while both PC-98 and the arcade hardware used both Yamaha chips, they were different models
The FM sounds from the various Yamaha FM four-op chips are more or less the same, the main differences between the chips are things additional features, PSG channels, and ADPCM.
You can see that the channels are labeled YM2608, which is one of the many four-operator FM chips from Yamaha used in consoles and PCs (like the Genesis and AdLib).
In the early 90s, my company developed a video game that was ported to the NEC PC-98. We got a few units to develop on and I found the industrial design to be pretty nice compared to the generic PC clones we had around.
The PC-98 re-entered my life while I was working for Be. NEC had us develop a version of BeOS for what was possibly the last of the line of PC-98s. Once again, I thought the industrial design was pretty decent. The flat-panel LCD monitor matched the style of the case, mouse and keyboard. The design was reminiscent of a SparcStation or maybe a Radius Macintosh clone.
PC-88 and PC-98 have a large collection of erotic games with the best pixel arts. The games are fun too if you can read Japanese or someone kindly provided a translationed version.
Yes this cool looking cyberpunk looking game was an adult game.
Here's an overview video that I watched at one point that shows a bunch of examples of such games and talks about the history of the platform (note some images and language are a lot less safe for work): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVpX2y6KjwA
Not like this stuff is peculiar to Japan. There was an Atari VCS game where the player plays General Custer and the goal is to rape a Native American woman without getting shot by arrows.
I had a non-PC PC -- a Tandy 2000. It was the first machine I ever programmed Lisp on.
There were lots of these back in the day -- systems with x86 processors that attempted to fill the PC's niche and even ran DOS but were subtly incompatible. In the early 80s the IBM PC was not the clear winner yet, and the BIOS hadn't been reverse-engineered, so there were attempts to come up with similar, but not quite compatible, designs to compete in the same market. By the release of the PC/AT, the IBM architecture was pretty much unstoppable in its dominance.
The Japanese PC-incompatibles, like the NEC PC-88 and PC-98 series, hung on for a bit longer for a couple of reasons:
1) as explained in the article, displaying Japanese hiragana, katakana, and kanji had high resolution requirements that none of the standard IBM graphics adapters could really match until about the time VGA came out, and there was poor support in MS-DOS until the late 80s or so
2) the Japanese liked their special, idiosyncratic, very Japanese computer designs.
To the latter, there was an episode of Pretty Samy (a Tenchi Muyo spin off and magical girl parody) in which the villain was Biff Standard, a glasses-wearing software magnate who wanted to standardize all the world's software. Obviously he was supposed to be Bill Gates, and there was a rising tide of anti-Microsoft sentiment at the time in the West as well... but the episode came out shortly after the release of Windows 95, the first consumer version of Windows to natively support Unicode and international encodings without a special build. After Windows 95 came out in Japan, there was much less of a need for products like the PC-98, and Japanese software could standardize on a plain PC architecture running Windows. Computer enthusiasts at the time felt the malaise of the closing of an era.
Even to this day, when you go PC shopping in Japan, you will find there is a hierarchy of preference among brands. Japanese retailers will promote the Japanese brands (e.g., Sony (now Vaio), Fujitsu, Panasonic, NEC) most prominently, followed by the non-Japanese Asian brands (Lenovo, Samsung) and finally the Western brands (HP, Dell). Apple gets a special pass because it's pretty much the Louis Vuitton of electronics.
> Apple gets a special pass because it's pretty much the Louis Vuitton of electronics.
Based on my observations, in the 90s and early 00s before Apple had become more of a lifestyle/fashion-oriented brand, in Japan there was a small but enthusiastic fanbase. There were a few models of Mac that were sold only or mostly in Japan, and when I was roaming the web in search of Mac software and tweaks back in the late 90s I remember encountering Japanese websites at a greater frequency than I did non-English sites of any other language (if I recall, French was the runner-up).
That said I've not had much of this corroborated by anybody who lived in Japan during that timespan so I don't have a full picture. When I lived there in the early 10s I did see a number of old (10+ years) Macs in use in places like reception desks though.
My observations are based on when I went in 2011, by which point Apple was beginning to establish itself as a fashion brand.
Apple computers did attract a small enthusiastic user base in Japan before it became a fashion brand -- and again, the traces of this are visible in anime as well! In Pretty Samy, the OS Tenchi and his friends prefer is called "Pineapple Mach 8", in reference to Mac OS 8. In the psychological thriller Perfect Blue, main character Mima is seen being shown how to use a Mac to get online by her manager, Rumi. And my favorite example: one of the books seen on Noriko's shelf in the first episode of Gunbuster is called "Wozniak talks about the Mac".
The Amiga, by contrast, was almost invisible to the Japanese as far as I can tell. One exception was Fumito Ueda, an Amiga fan who would go on to develop games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus for Sony. Perhaps that is why his games have that haunting aesthetic quality, similar to Amiga favorites like Another World and Shadow of the Beast.
For Apple-adjacent references in anime, Serial Experiments Lain is hard to beat. It's full of them. Among other things, Lain's computer looks a lot like a Twentieth Anniversary Mac, her classmate has a CRT iMac lookalike, and most computers in the show's universe run Copland OS (named after Apple's canceled Classic Mac OS rewrite).
Well.. it's not entirely without reason that Japanese retailers promote Japanese brands. I bought a NEC laptop in Japan some years ago, and I haven't been able to find an equivalent one anywhere else since then. Screen: 13.3" Battery: 10 hours (and yes it works in practice) Weight: 730 grams. And very thin. 2440xsomething display.
That weight.. and battery time.. I didn't have to bring a charger so it was so easy and lightweight to carry to a day-long hacking session at the coffee shop. And the Japanese non-US keyboard gave me enough keys to remap to my normal non-US layout.
Super happy with that one. I actually bought an almost similar NEC for my wife, the difference is only that hers has "just" HD resolution, and it has a (very functional) touch screen, and can be wrapped around to make a tablet (mine can open up 180 degrees, i.e. flat), and it's slightly heavier - just above 800 grams.
The negative with both is that the built-in sound is weak and thin.
But one fatal evening I managed to feed one of the USB ports with 12V, via a non-protected powered USB hub (damn adapters looking exactly the same..), which blew something inside which I never managed to fix (I should add that another plus of the laptop is that is's so easy to open, if you want to e.g. upgrade the M.2)
But I can't find an equivalent replacement outside Japan. Going back there soon I hope, so will look for the current model of my old one.
My (European) company-provided laptop is also Japanese: Fujitsu. In general it's very good, though not as lightweight as my private NEC. In the past we used HP and other brands of laptop at work, I much prefer the Fujitsu.
> But I can't find an equivalent replacement outside Japan.
This is other side of industrialized West, in East Europe typical to make fixes impossible in West.
For example, formally, services prohibited to solder anything on main board, they should only change board (module) for working one. In East Europe normal to solder even CPU.
Unfortunately, soldering quality is very depend on human, so I cannot guarantee success, but it may worth to try.
Windows 95 doesn't support Unicode, it only supported the "ANSI" versions of Win32 functions, so you still had a special Japanese version of Windows. It's NT that was Unicode from the start.
Resident programs that transcoded character sets on the fly were a flourishing business back then and is still occasionally required to run some older binaries.
Besides Windows until around Vista were language specific, you couldn’t switch language but had to clean install a specific desired versions of the OS, be it French or Italian or Japanese builds.
Also I’ve heard that NT is all UTF-16 internally, but the default codepage for Japanese builds and locales was always CP932(Shift_JIS) 2-byte encoding, until Windows 10 1903 or so.
Wait, was Pretty Sammy actually a parody of its genre? Granted I have not seen it again on more than 20 years, but I have always remembered it as a magical girl show played straight.
Tangential, but I’d forgotten until this piece: I worked for a desktop publishing company in the late 80s that naturally ran on Macs. The owners decided they should find out what PCs could do so they ordered one and had me buy a copy of DOS.
After much frustration we discovered that we had PC-DOS but needed MS-DOS (or vice versa).
As far as I know no one got much further than installing the OS; the system seemed dramatically inferior at the time.
I suppose inferior depends on what purposes they are used for. Was it worth discarding a very large potential market? Even in 1987, IBM PCs (and compatibles) had ~66% of market share, with Apple ~10%. By 1990, PCs had >80% of the market.
I think one needs to take any assertion of Commodore’s marketshare numbers with a grain of salt — Commodore itself didn’t release numbers at the time and the numbers we hear these days all seem to be anecdotal.
That said, I don’t think Macs surpassed Apple II marketshare until circa 1991 or so, so one doesn’t need to look to competitors.
Closest I ever got to Japanese computers was using an IBM JX in primary school. That's a variant of the IBM PCjr – the biggest difference is, unlike the PCjr, it had a proper keyboard, and by default 3.5-inch floppies rather than 5.25-inch. It was primarily sold in Japan – but also to schools in Australia and New Zealand. The Australia/NZ model was missing the extra memory and Kanji-specific display hardware that the Japanese model came with. http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/03/ibm-jx-ibm-pcjr-...
One other (even bigger) way in which Japanese computer technology influenced Australia, was that Fujitsu had a lot of success selling their clone IBM mainframes here in the 1980s/1990s. The university I went to – and later became staff member at – had used one. By the time I joined the staff, it had already been thrown out, but I remember discovering all this evidence of its past existence left behind – masses of tangled bus and tag cables under the data centre floor tiles, a storeroom full of 9 track backup tapes, etc.
Fujitsu's mainframes mostly didn't run MVS (although they could), they ran OSIV/MSP, Fujitsu's "clone" of MVS with significantly reduced licensing costs. However, the reason why it was cheaper, is it wasn't actually a clone – Fujitsu had illegally stolen the source code to MVS from IBM. They tried to cover it up by doing things like changing the copyright notices (apparently they forgot a few though), and they also renamed a lot of the OS modules and commands – the modules of MVS' timesharing component, TSO, mostly start with the prefix IKJ, Fujitsu renamed them all to start with PDE instead; they renamed the IBM catalog management utility, IDCAMS, to KQCAMS; etc–which meant most MVS software could work, but only after a bunch of search-and-replace changes to its code. IBM saw right past this feeble cover-up attempt, and Fujitsu (and Hitachi too, which did the same independently) ended up paying IBM many hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the resulting lawsuits. That was likely one of the factors resulting in Fujitsu pulling out of the mainframe market in Australia, and most of its customers either went to non-mainframe platforms (UNIX/Windows/Linux), or else to IBM's mainframe operating systems (MVS / OS/390 / z/OS). Fujitsu's mainframe OS and hardware still survive in Japan, but are stuck on 31-bit – they never made the investment which IBM did to add 64-bit support (with the release of z/OS in 2001).
> Fujitsu's mainframe OS and hardware still survive in Japan, but are stuck on 31-bit – they never made the investment which IBM did to add 64-bit support (with the release of z/OS in 2001).
They also still make SPARC servers, but they recently announced that they will stop selling both in 2029/30, and support will end in 2034/35. Seems like more and more the world is standardizing around Linux and cloud services.
I first stumbled upon this many years ago, when checking out the list of architecture supported by FreeBSD. It served me as a reminder, that computers are just like life forms: even if we expect to find DNA, carbon, sugar, proteins, cell membranes, nuclei, etc there will always be some crazy oddities that will break some rules and surprise us - and were here, living next to us, all along.
I had a similar machine when I was in highschool - a Texas Instruments Professional Computer. It had the same basic form factor and build quality as an IBM 5150 PC, an ISA bus, and MSDOS 1 and 2 (so int 21 worked), but the BIOS was incompatible. That was always a bit of a head scratcher to me, since even if the hardware ports and video memory were laid out differently, you could still make the BIOS interrupts compatible.
Likewise, I had a Sanyo MBC550 computer, which came with its own MS-DOS, but would not run some (most) IBM PC software.
Software that bypassed the "official" API, typically for the sake of speed gains, easily became tied down to the IBM PC memory map. Thankfully, there were separate versions of some apps that ran on generic MS-DOS, including the original Turbo Pascal, and Word Perfect, so the computer got me all the way through college.
Why did I choose the Sanyo, you ask? I was able to get a complete computing system, with display, printer, and "bundled" software, for under US $1000.
I had one of these growing up too - for largely the same reason (2nd hand it was much cheaper than an IBM clone).
We ran Wordstar on it, which worked AFAIK out of the box with no modifications. Everything else was a crap shoot. The screen was incredibly slow too, like using a terminal over a slow modem. It got me through university though.
The TI-PC was released around the same time that Compaq was ushering in the era of the 100%-compatible PC clone.
Compaq, of course, created the first 100% compatible clean-room implementation of the BIOS, modified MS-DOS to work with it, ran an extensive compatibility lab to ensure existing PC software worked correctly with their BIOS/MS-DOS combo, and gave their changes back to Mircosoft to encourage the growth of a standardized platform.
Unsurprisingly, Compaq was founded by ex-TI engineers who became disillusioned with the TI's management.
I recall TI Professional PCs were repurposed as terminals in the TI factory in Bedford (UK) as late as 1991, and I'd guess other TI sites were also using them for the same purpose at that time.
I was curious about why it would have been PC incompatible, so I did some searching. Didn't find any answers, but Wikipedia led me to this incredibly detailed contemporary review in Byte magazine:
I enjoyed reading it. At one point the reviewer dials in to The Source (an early competitor to CompuServe) to download a BASIC program. The ads are great, too.
If I could have had that interrupt list and memory map (tables 1 & 2) when I was 16, that would have been a game changer. As it was, the machine was already obsolete when we thrift-stored it, so there was no way to get software or manuals besides what came with it. I still did a fair amount of BASIC and DOS-level assembly programming on it, but the hardware and BIOS was a black box.
The biggest snag I remember when it came to running DOS software from companies that were not aware of the PC-98 was drive lettering.
On PC-98 your boot drive was A: followed by your other drives of the same type and then your other drives of different types.
Let's say you had 2 floppies and 1 hard drive, and booted from the hard drive. The hard drive would be A: and the floppies would be B: and C:. If you booted from floppy the boot floppy drive would be A: and the other floppy B: and the hard drive would be C:.
A lot of DOS software that needed to find a hard drive would start its search at C:.
Interest thing, near the same time, NEC produced PC AT products, with excellent compatibility and high level of integration (for example, VGA integrated on main board, ide hdd, compatible bios, but branded).
So looks like, NEC had agreements with IBM and/or other pc brands, and have access to all need information, and invested much into professional products (create chipset was expensive), but for some reason, play games with Nintendo and other local vendors.
UK users of HN of a certain age will no doubt, like me, be scarred by the horrible RM Nimbus 186 machines which often took the place of the beloved BBC Micro / Master in classrooms in the late 1980s. Ghastly pieces of crap which weren't properly PC-compatible, similar sort of deal to this thing.
Not scarred at all - happily nostalgic! We worked out that the machine had an IBM PC compatible mode, which allowed us to boot from floppy disk to play Commander Keen. I recall that lots of other software didn't work correctly (the emultation/compatibility must have been pretty poor) but back in 1994 it kept us entertained on rainy days when we weren't allowed outside to play.
Well, for the same reason the X68000 and FM Towns are hard to get into. These machines were unapologetically Japanese and only tangentially related to the architectures of the West; being informed by (and informing them), but never being quite in the same place.
That being said, toying around with each's variant of BASIC or Windows is always fascinating.
YU-NO has an interesting time/world-travel mechanic that has interesting meta-narrative implications I haven't seen in anything modern. The closest I've found is Steins Gate and the Nier series.
While barely known in Europe or the Americas, these were incredibly popular home computers in Japan. There's an endless amount of unique, interesting and curious games for them.
Does your operating system run from a disk? Congratulations, you have a disk operating system, also known as DOS.
Are you playing your videos on a system you have at home? Congratulations, you have a video home system, also known as VHS.
Did your machine ever automatically tell you something? Whoops, looks like you are connecting from an ATM. (Sorry, I'll show myself out for this last one.)
PC as in IBM PC-compatible. As in the article is about how Japanese desktop computers used the same parts but were oddly incompatible to IBM PC. It's a technical article that compares specifics between how hardware was implemented in a PC-98 as opposed to a standard IBM PC.
English language and culture in general is steeped in obsolete terminology, words that become divorced and changed from their original meanings.
Though in this case I'd argue that it isn't obsolete terminology. You can still boot into real mode/DOS on a modern x86/64 PC, at their heart still lies an IBM PC compatible. IBM made IBM PC compatibles up until they stopped making personal computers.
You can do what you want but idk seems a little silly to be that passionate about being wrong.
"If you like that "PC" terminology, other terminology you may be interested in may be: "color TV", "transistor radio", etc."
Neither of those describe or imply compatibility with any specific set of standards.
Any rational person that doesn't know the backstory will ask you "why is a Mac, a personal computer, not considered to be a PC?"
Then you will have to disambiguate "PC as in personal computer" vs "PC as in IBM PC compatible". And then the expected rational response to your explanation would be "then why won't you call it IBM PC compatible then?" and the response to that is "because I am lazy and use language in an ambiguous way".
Did you read the article? It explained about that. A lot. The name of that particular computer had "PC" in it, and not because of IBM (NEC used that in 1979 already, for example).
https://youtu.be/EJ_k_QdlNYE