NEC PC-9801

ESL here

If you don't know Japanese then you're an EOP. Those are the only two important languages.

I love the artstyle in most of these games. Aesthetic as fuck.

I'd love to have more time to do PC-98 just for the Touhou games, but the only emulator that is open is kind of middling when it comes to sound, and syncs badly.

When you're working under limitations like the PC-98 and older handheld game systems had, you actually have to consider how to make the best of them or you just produce garbage. Older VNs make an art of getting maximum colour out of a scene with its restrictive palette.

The artwork in these old games are really something else, especially compared to the crap that comes out now. It's too bad most of the writing is terrible pulp (which can be good or bad depending on your taste) and majority of the adventure games are "choose all the options 10 times in unspecified order to progress and then watch forced porn scene x 10" because there would have been a lot of potential as far as the graphics and pulpy writing go. I mean, seriously, more than half of the adventure (basically a VN) games that I played for this thing started off great, interesting, and turns out retarded beyond all belief.

Take Shizuku for example. It starts off great: you're a high school kid, who witnesses his femlae classmates mental breakdown in the middle of class, amid rumors of drug abuse and promiscuity, and is tasked by his uncle, a teacher, to investigate. Turns out that it is the already graduated upperclassman who is using "Electric waves" to mind control people into being his sex zombies. Depending on what girl you pick to assist your investigation, he uses his "electric waves" to force both her to get fucked by his puppets, and on top of that he finally puppets you into raping and creampieing her multiple times, before the sex zombies beat you to death. And that is just one ending that you get if you make the wrong choice(s). Like, seriously, who the fuck makes this shit, and who plays them? Guess I did. What a fucking waste of time.

On the other hand, I just started playing Kurayami, which is set on Xmas even in Tokyo and you and a cutie get stuck in an elevator. So far the only paths that I have come to have either lead to bad ending, so I can't really say if it's sexual or not.

At the same time I am also working on playing Ballade for Maria (can't get past the first party scene even thought I've exhausted all the dialogue options with all the guests) and Makyoden but the movement in the game is slow as shit, so I'll have to do that when I am not as busy with work and have more patience and less stress.

Last note, I've been trying to play Mugen Hoyo and I haven't been able to get it to work with either ANEX or NekoProject. Anyone have any success? Lemme know if you figure something out that would help.

Works fine in Neko Project.

Forgot pic.

Thanks, but can you be a little more specific. It's been ages since I've used any kind of prompt based computer based software, so anything outside of drag and drop for NP I have no fucking clue what to do. I'd really appreciate your help, cause I really like the artwork in the game.

Just download the FD HDD from here and mount it and reboot.
mega.nz/#F!jIgkXQDY!hE3FQNWl77DkzKErGdz35g

Bah, what do they know, they also pretend Visual Novels are also games. For god sakes though, don't suffer through playing games on this shit if you don't have to, Popful mail on the Sega CD has problems but being a slideshow isn't one of them. Also this game looks way too much like Cybernator.

Why is it that these games seem to have generally aged worse than console games from the same era?

In the early days of PCs they were usually just made for business, and didn't have much in the way of graphics/sound processing.

Beautiful, thank you. I had originally DLed the pack with all the games that I found on the Net but I couldn't get it to work. Speaking of all the games, they didn't include on that I have been searching for for a long time. There is a DS version but I wanna play the PC98 one; it's an advenutre game in the vein on the old Western DOS point-and-click adventure games called Tokyo Twilight Busters. Here is a vid, if anyone can find the files for it' I'd be deeply grateful. (I looked under Wolf Team on the link that you provided but it doesn't seem to be there.)

It's under Telenet Japan. Thanks for bringing that game to my attention, it looks interesting.

This is my favorite version too. Despite the awful intro, the game is more pleasant to play on Sega CD.

What's interesting is that older western DOS games with the same restrictions usually looked like dogshit. It wasn't until 256-color VGA that western devs made anything as nice looking as 16-color PC98 games.

How hard do you think it'd be to track one of these down for collectors purposes? or to just have one.
would it even be worth it?

Thanks for finding it, I didn't have the time to look at everything in that mega right now. Gonna play it tonight when I finish work. Thanks for the help again

Is all people care about now videogame-wise is collecting le retro shit to pretend they're cultured now? For fucks sake.

I'd say that's partly because of genre differences. VNs have a major advantage with palettes in that you can set them per-scene, while something like a sidescroller has to have something more universal in its gameplay. Good Western examples with a similar palette limit are pictures related. Art style matters too because it happens to be that anime with its flatter colours works great in a limited setting.

nips are just genetically superior at working with limited palettes and that's all there is to it.

I'll point to Battletoads as a good example on the Western side for visuals on that platform, don't know a lot about the NES palette limits.

I wish I could find a working ROM for Wanderers from Ys.

is the one from the MAME Software List ROM set okay? my.mixtape.moe/vsumcw.zip

they aren't equal

Is this thing worth buying for my retro-computer collection? Are they expensive? I have not heard of these personally

Easy to find, but expensive (2000-3000$).

Seem to be only like $100-200 on Yahoo auctions, if you can figure out how to import from there.

link
auctions.yahoo.co.jp/search/search?auccat=&tab_ex=commerce&ei=utf-8&aq=-1&oq=&sc_i=&fr=auc_top&p=pc-98&x=0&y=0&fixed=0

easy way to convert yen to usd (roughly) is to take the JP price and move the decimal two places to the left

That's kind of messy. Best visuals != most complex even if I might find some appreciation for it. Maybe it looks better in motion though.

Only for a ballpark figure though. Do a proper currency conversion since that also only holds for USD. AUD is about $122 to 10000 yen for example.