This will be a long, multi-part story which has already carried on for years. Figured out that I could do some degree of intermediate documentation about this topic, as it's been taking so long and I don't know when (if) I'll get any video(s) out of it. Amusingly enough, also this post has been over 95% completed for months on my computer - I simply forgot to finish and post it. That's what happens when I have no active audience to remind me about things.
In any case, the topic for today is NEC PC-9801 BX/U2 computer. I purchased this mid 1990's Japanese computer already couple years ago from Yahoo Auctions Japan by using proxy service. Last Autumn I finally got that device into an actually usable condition. There is still work to do with it, but let me start it from the very beginning...
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| There was a time when this alone would have deprived me of any hope... |
First rumours about PC-98
As a kid and actually till all the way to close to at least late 2010 I barely knew the existence of NEC PC-98 series (that there also is PC-88 and others before those I only found out years later...but that's another story). In some old computer magazines there were some random cases references to some mysterious "PC-98" as an alternate platform for some game, which was perplexing to me. PC for me as a kid used to mean IBM PC and compatible computers, so in the world I lived a "PC" meant ubiquitously an IBM PC compatible (even while I'd never see a genuine IBM computer almost anywhere). Therefore my logic dictated that this "PC-98" in computer magazines would refer to a "PC compatible" of some kind.
However, this did did not always fit the logic. If a game was already released on (IBM) PC, what for it would be separately mentioned that it is also released on PC-98? In addition there was this incident when in a major Finnish computer magazine of the time MikroBITTI, issue 1989/12, released an article about a console called PC Engine by this company NEC... So it's all about PC Compatible console or why such name? No, no, NO! It took me a while to get grasp of this alien PC-98.
I believe it was reviews of Cobra Mission and Metal & Lace: The Battle of the Robo Babies in MikroBITTI and maybe Pelit magazines in early 1990's where I'd for the first times genuinely noticed references to PC-98. At the time, they started to port some PC-98 games to West for PC computers. The most distinguishing features of these games seemed to be manga style graphics and nudity - both very uncommon at the time in European and American games (in mainstream gaming that is). In fact manga/anime materials were still fairly uncommon outside of Japan in early 1990's, so some people got their attention to the games purely for the graphical reasons. Fom my perspective those Japanese animations and comics rose to later mainstream popularity through video game & (tabletop) RPG nerds' limited circle studies, after which they also arguably lost their value as underground specials.
To me those games were meaningless back then. M&L was a fighting game and I didn't really understand what people saw in those. Cobra Mission on the other hand was linear-story JRPG, and despite my interest in RPGs otherwise, I saw JRPGs as boring console games. Also about anime and manga I started to get more interested only later in 1990's (through game and RPG circles, like referred earlier), as I realized there'd be much Sci-Fi and Fantasy stuff made in Japan, some of which being actually good storytelling.
I could add though, that by hindsight also the games had a bit unusual gameplay for the time in comparison to contemporary games available in the West. JRPG games were not too common yet back then, apart from some consoles, and having played Cobra Mission through later on it felt okayish. I mean, quite relaxing to just walk through - it's not endlessly long and especially it's not very difficult one, where you could get lost or wander pointlessly on your own very far. It was almost like going through some visual novel in the level of interaction and gameplay choices. I suppose those features would've not appealed to me back then anyway. Also, regarding to M&L, in my opinion it was not yet terribly common to have almost any degree of narration in between game scenes maybe in a slightly Wing Commanderish style in action games in 1993, even if the "narration" in this game wasn't necessarily that refined...
Of course it took me years to get used to various quirks of the manga/anime style, where there often is no consistent style but serious stuff can lapse into slapstick any moment likewise in adult oriented stories there might pop up some random and illogical sex scene unwarned. Or some stuff is stretched to ridiculous amounts and otherwise overall there can be huge degree of exaggeration with everything, and typically narrative arches gradually grow from individual to epic. Not to mention I still dislike how all characters look so much alike, apart from their clothes and hair style. If I was able to close my eyes from features I found stupid, I found long-term evolving narration uncommon in Western fiction in many ways.
Digressions apart, I was still far from comprehending the actual existence of NEC-PC 98 computers. To genuinely comprehend their existence, I needed to find the genre of visual novels somewhere in mid 2000's. By then we already had this Brave New World called Internet (later diminished into internet). It came as a surprise that this sort of weird genre (remember from a previous post how I refer to the death of text adventures in West by 1990's) had apparently insane amount of visual novel titles, out of which only very few were translated and imported to English speaking countries. Unfortunately, those translations were also plagued by hentai, which on the other hand maybe was the premise for some publishers to import them to West to begin with. Then again I found out that there were several titles that had interesting stories or atmospheres despite them being hentai games (or actually, I guess eroge is the word here). Nocturnal Illusions, Three Sisters Story and Critical Point were some examples, which I found quite interesting at least for parts, even while they had lots of scenes that seemed completely unnecessary. To be honest, might well be that should I now try them again after 15 years, I might deem them all (or at least some) simply horrible and disgusting in multiple ways, so perhaps I should not try them again. (As a side note I, figuring out the name of Critical Point made me stop writing here, as searching for it took the rest of the evening.)
Genuine interest of getting to try NEC PC-98 at this point was still very low, since I'd never learn to read Japan, and majority of the semi-interesting games (adventure, RPG, strategy) for NEC PC-98 platform seemed like they'd require language skills. Emulators probably already existed, but why bother for something I understood as a Japanese counterpart of IBM PC series with mostly similar games (apart from visual noves) just in a foreign language. Later on I found out there'd be much more to the picture than meets the eye, but that is to be talked about another day.
P. S. Speaking of videos at start, at Friday I took some videos with my Panasonic GH3 for the first time since April, ouch (to add insult to injury, this sentence was written in September 2020). On the other hand, that is when I bought my first decent grade smartphone S10, for which one of the main selling points to me was its camera. At Friday it took me like half an hour to get up all the equipment (lights, stands, microphone, camera...) in ready to use state. I had less than an hour time to do my videos until my wife and child returned to home, by which I started to finish my video making session and it took maybe ten minutes to pack everything up again. With the smartphone I'll need like 5 minutes to set up a light and I'm good to go - although then I'll also use no stand (don't have very good stand setups for a smartphone, yet at least). Smartphone video has features I'm not so fond of (such as being incapable of shooting in 25 or 50 FPS, so the format would be more compatible with my other camera footage), but if I'll have 30 minutes moment to record something, it would make no point getting out my more dedicated camera setup. Maybe some day I'll have a studio and will not need to unpack everything every time I try to do something.
P. P. S. About this MikroBITTI issue 12/1989: Very coincidentally and completely unrelated, our childhood unit of this very magazine issue was lost for decades. Last year I happened to see that on sale on a net auction, so I figured I'll just purchase a new copy of it to fill in the missing link. I didn't realize beforehand that the PC Engine article was on this specific issue, even while I so well remembered having seen it as a kid.
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