Some phenomenal logos and menu screen designs in here
note: use caution browsing, in-game images on detail pages are potentially NSFW
If I wanted to play something like Brandish 2, what’s the best PC-98 hardware to look into acquiring? Or should I just stop while I can and just settle for emulation?
I was already looking at X68000s the other week and finding it hard to justify one…
Hardware is quite the investment and you would be signing up for a lot of setup/maintenance.
I would say emulate on a PC so you can use keyboard and mouse and it’s all fairly authentic. Use a good CRT filter and you’re set.
I’m in good Facebook groups for all the Japanese PCs and people seem to either collect or forever tweaking their setup rather than discuss playing games. Same sort of thing with the Discords for those systems.
I mean if this sounds fun to you then go for it, but I don’t have time for that any more.
Great summary, thanks! I’ll stick to emulation for now.
Thought about what you said here for the past day.
Setting up and using old hardware is certainly its own hobby not entirely related to the aspect of playing the games, but it’s also one where there’s just more to talk about. I don’t talk about every game I play online, but I find myself more drawn to describing issues I have and solutions I came up with when using old PCs because there’s often precious little documentation online. It’s also fun in its own right, and very satisfying to get a final result.
I also wouldn’t recommend getting an actual PC98 because it is very hard to come by outside of Japan, very expensive to ship, and annoying to come by – you’re not going to get it off ebay or amazon japan or play asia, it’s going to be japanese-only online marketplace + forwarders. Unless you’re dedicated, or just are planning a trip where you can dedicate a large luggage bag to hauling hardware home (in future year), and are into the hobby mentioned above, just use Neko Project 2 and call it a day.
But yeah, it is certainly very satisfying to have vintage computers set up ready to play. I’m kinda off the idea of stuffing my suitcase with cheap games and am ready to take a stupid amount of space lugging something stupid home the next time I’m allowed to set foot on Japanese soil.
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I took a rather long and unannounced break from this hobby several months back, but it’s like I’ve hardly lost sight of it:
Re: focus on hardware vs. software in these communities, it’s more that you can get in greater detail with buying, maintaining, and expanding things which don’t require as much Japanese knowledge. So many of the best games on platforms like the PC-98 are very much locked behind the language barrier, or at least more difficult to play and discuss afterward than with localized games. But hardware and the same stable of eminently accessible games are always in vogue somewhere.
It doesn’t help that people continue to paint the PC-98 as some sort of porn machine…which it isn’t, even if that’s one of the most visible markets it serviced back in the day. Plenty of wargames, shooters, adventures/proto-visual novels, and Japanese indie (doujin) games graced store shelves and magazine catalogs–many of them looked as nice as the erotic games, too. But since platforms this old, language-locked, and under-discussed don’t belong to the international video game canon, it’s easier to take these stereotypes and/or misguided assertions at face value and not delve any deeper.
All the factors above lead to the hardware and collecting scene having plenty of activity, but much less so the games and software part. That will improve over time, especially as fan translations and better OCR + machine translation proliferate, but it’s hard getting these games the attention I think they deserve. It’s a big reason why I stream these games, too, even if that has extremely limited reach as well.
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I need to pick an X68000 up. Having an FM Towns really opened me up to wanting more Japanese computers…which is both a good thing (fun) and bad thing (cost) lol
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MSX is definitely the easiest way of getting in on a bit of J-Micro action. I picked this one up last year and yeaaah I know its DUTCH but it was designed by Kyocera apparently! It is missing the Kanji rom so you do get a bit of blank text in some games but it hasn’t really hindered my gaming experience. A lot of Japanese software seems to use it’s own fonts and I can read Katakana and Hiragana ok so it feels like a legit experience!
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A previously paid indie game is now free
Singular Stone (MSX2)
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