Very glad to have helped with this, nice to see my efforts in the video and see you try out a few of the games. Definitely looking forward to what more you do with with the machine. As always, feel free to ask me about any problems you face. Fyi, as far as SimCity 2000 not having sound, I think I mentioned before in our emails that the Cu13 has integrated -86 sound, well I was close. It's very similar to a -86, the FM aspect is basically identical, just the PCM part works a bit differently (known as CanBe PCM I believe) and some games natively support that for PCM samples and others don't. With Wolf3D not working at all, I remember trying it in an emulator and it didn't work with 64mb of RAM but it did run with 32mb. Maybe that's part of it? I remember you saying you wanted to upgrade the RAM with the sticks from the other machine. Also, pretty sure Windows 3.1 didn't load because you ran it without switching to its own AUTOEXEC/CONFIGs in the AUTOCONS folder on the drive. It won't load with the YAHDI ones, though fyi I made a mistake and installed sound drivers for -86 instead of CanBe sound so you probably won't get any audio unless you can find the correct drivers, which tbh, finding Windows PC-98 specific drivers can be a big pain imo.
It's difficult enough trying to setup older hardware with all the driver issues and memory utilization (much of the knowledge of all that stuff has been long forgotten due to my advanced age - hehehe). I can't imagine trying to setup hardware that's all in Japanese.
Great video, loving your dive into the PC-98! Fun to watch someone go through the initial pain of getting YAHDI set up and hit all the same snags I did, especially the graphical boot option since that caused me so many boot issues until I finally figured out I needed to switch it. One tiny thing I hate to be that guy about, but the DOS footage is in the wrong aspect ratio - PC-98 DOS ran at 640x400 and had an aspect ratio of 16:10 (and a refresh rate of 56.42hz, if you're trying to get video of the monitor). As for Night Slave, if you want to see the cutscenes you need to change the "Visual Scene" option to on. There's also a recent English translation available if you haven't seen it yet, just don't use the Necronomicon version, since it won't run on real hardware. It's a super fun game and one of the big reasons I was sold on getting a PC-98 for myself! Can't wait to see the next video in this series! I really hope the drive recovery goes well too, I'm super interested in the Big Red Racing on PC-98 if it's still on that drive.
To be fair, some PC game ports like 4D Driving for example do look better stretched to 4:3, but a fair bit of games do seem to be intended with square pixels in mind. It's not a huge deal imo. I actually stretch my monitor when I play certain games on my own machine and squish it back for others.
@@thepirategamerboy12Yeah I imagine the ports of western games would be the only ones that do though. Sadly on AIO units (I have a Cb and CV) there's no controls to change the picture size, just contrast/brightness.
There is certainly some debate over correct aspect ratios, especially for PC-88 to PC-98 ports since some PC-88 games were intended for 4:3. ReBirth is one game I recently obtained where I noticed in the manual it specifically asks that you play in 4:3 if you can. The issue is that even back then, some analog monitors used for these systems were capable of adjusting the vertical aspect, so not everyone necessarily had the same aspect ratio. Though, to be clear, in general PC-98 should be 16:10. Most official NEC monitors were made to display with black letter boxes on the top and bottom of a 4:3 CRT. Most PC-98 experts in Japan when asked will also say that 16:10 is the correct aspect for PC-98.
@@BasementBrothers Ooooh, that's interesting! I was always under the impression that all software was written with 16:10 in mind, even for PC-88 stuff because of the lack of controls on all the NEC monitors I've seen. I wonder how big the list of 4:3 software actually is now!
A great video and looking forward to the next chapter!! Just returned from Tokyo - I nearly bought some PC88/98 hardware whilst I was there. A very cool new frontier for us retro techies! 😎
Loving the videos about this computer, after watching them I have been messing with the PC 98 series emulators and games. Great little computer series.
Hi, great video, it is making me start to understand many things. I recently bought a PC9821 and found the YAHDI GUI inside. I have a couple of questions, if someone could kindly answer me. 1) I have the same clock speed problem you have with Night Slave applied to several games like Slash (too fast and glitch not showing the status bar); how could I solve it? As far as I get I should reach the bios and set the speed, but I don't get how. 2)I would like to add new games; from what I understand the HDI files can be extracted with Vector's diskextractor and copied to the compact Flash, but what about those games that are on floppy, maybe in the .d88 extension? Thank you very much
To get to the BIOS you hold down the help key while powering on the computer. As far as running games that are in floppy disk images to the hard drive it's hit or miss. Some games will just work out of the box if you copy the files from the disk to a folder on the hard drive, others will need some tinkering via things like the SUBST command (since it'll be looking for some of the files on drive B: as it was intended to run from two floppy drives), and some simply can't be run natively from the hard drive at all since they use custom file systems and such and you'll have to either write them to floppies or boot them as virtual floppy images from the HDD using ERCVFD (which the downside here is I haven't been able to get saving to work myself). Be aware that many multi disk floppy-only games require two floppy drives to work though some (like Prince of Persia) do work from one drive. There's a program called Vfic that converts HDM, D88, etc. floppy images to the VFD format used by ERCVFD. Hope this helps somewhat.
@@thepirategamerboy12 Hi, first of all THANK YOU! Since I bought the computer I've tried asking a bit everywhere but to no avail. Thanks for the tip about Vfic, I will try it as soon as possible. If I may, I have another question: to load files onto my compact flash I'd have to unmount some stuff (it's hidden under the floppy drive), so I tried loading a couple of games (the new Night Slave translation for example) from CD with the move command. They don't work, with an error popping up when I launch start.bat referring to files not found: it was probably an archive prepared for the emulator and not for the actual hardware. Also, all the files in the folder are coloured green, as opposed to the ones I found in the games on my Compact flash, which are yellow instead. Can you tell me what this means? Is there any beginner's guide to help me figure out what I'm doing wrong? Thank you very much again.
@@danhero76 Now I may be wrong but perhaps one problem is that since you put the files directly on the CD and moved them to the hard drive from there is that they're set as read-only and maybe that's what green means. Try compressing them to ZIP files first and then decompressing them on the PC-98 with PKUNZIP for DOS. If you'd like I could send you the same image I made for Rees shown in the video with a bunch of pre-installed games that have been tested to work, though if I send the link as a comment it'll probably get deleted so you have an idea of how I could do that? Btw, out of curiosity, may I ask what model you have?
