Honestly, it looks like just any other PC-compatible of the era to me. I guess some of you might want to see the inside. This is a useful feature for people who spend all day in one program, like the office workers who formed the bulk of NEC’s target audience. The “VF” keys have removable plastic covers presumably, this would allow you to insert slips of paper and relabel those to match whatever functions have been assigned to them. Unlike some Japanese keyboards, this one still has a nice large space bar and a slightly-longer backspace key, so overall it’s quite comfortable even for someone more used to western keyboards to use. The layout is very much not like that of PCs of the period it actually kind of reminds me of the Amiga 1000 keyboard, with its diamond-shaped and narrower navigation cluster. I’m not sure if this is the sort of keyboard that would’ve come with this computer originally this particular model has the older style “Western Electric” NEC logo, so it’s definitely at least a bit older. I presume this is to make it harder to press by accident I don’t have the equipment to measure it, but if the whole board was this weight then I think you’d get tired writing just a sentence. It’s not a clicky switch, however– it just has a much heavier spring. There is one blue switch on this keyboard it’s underneath the “STOP” key. These are a linear variant with white sliders and standard wire stabilizers. So don’t blame them for the fact that it’s filthy, they offered to clean it for me and I declined– maybe I should’ve taken them up on it.Īs I took off the keys to give everything a solid cleaning, you can see the NEC oval switches this is a mechanical keyboard, which is always nice to see. While this wasn’t part of the donation, I did get some help from the Doors and Dungeons folks who found the keyboard for me and sent it my way. The keyboard and mouse ports are custom too. That “C-bus”, the PC-9821’s proprietary 100-pin 16-bit expansion bus. (I’ve got to fill that slot with something, any suggestions?) That’s not ISA. But look at that sound card (we’ll talk about that later), and more importantly, look farther back onto the open riser slot. Even though “Analog RGB” is an odd name for a VGA port, it still looks like VGA. Some of these ports, like the 9-pin serial, are pretty familiar. But turn it around, and things look a bit different.
#Japanese pc 98 games on steam windows
I can run Japanese versions of Windows on my American childhood Pentium machine and get just an equivalent experience. Behold a machine that runs Microsoft Windows 98 on a Pentium processor. This NEC PC-9821V13 is a snapshot of that transition. Microsoft Windows acted as a great equalizer people wanted Windows-compatible machines and Windows software, so NEC was forced to make their computers less proprietary to keep up.The more powerful VGA graphics modes enabled DOS/V, an MS-DOS variant that was just as kanji-capable as NEC’s machines, but ran on the commodity PC-compatible hardware.I talked about this a bit in the post about the DOS-V PC-FX GA, but by the 1990s, two things happened that would eventually dethrone NEC’s proprietary dominance: NEC were already experts in this realm, and business users could either look like a child, or do their word processing on a PC-98.īut such a dream couldn’t last forever. The complex Japanese writing system just didn’t lend itself to the limitations of the MDA and CGA text modes available on IBM’s PC. And they brought over their PC-88 business users by ensuring that BASIC was backwards compatible, even as Microsoft wanted to move to the incompatible GW-BASIC. In Japan, the famous saying about IBM could be said instead “Nobody ever got fired for buying NEC”. Why did NEC succeed where so many failed? With Intel’s 8086 line of processors (or occasionally an NEC in-house clone), they fall into a category of computer that died very quickly in the west: PCs that were MS-DOS compatible, but not IBM compatible. Instead, it gets its name as it was the successor to NEC’s PC-8800 series, which in turn was an upgraded version of their PC-8000 8-bit line.
#Japanese pc 98 games on steam series
The PC-9800 series wasn’t named for the year it dates back to 1982. A gift to the blog, courtesy of the Doors and Dungeons Podcast! Let’s… clean keyboards and debug sound card issues? A machine in transition And now I have one! Let’s take a look, figure out what it’s deal is, and try to do something on it. But did you know? NEC didn’t just make engines for PCs, they made PCs themselves too.