[PC98] Why so beautiful?

[McWiggles]

Fantastic; I'm going to try that filter out too! I've been trying to find the "best" CRT filter, as relative a term as that its.

 

[FR4M3]

Are there more sites like TimeExtension and ReadOnlyMemo?

 

[tcaud1234]

This is the system that sold me on CRT filtersView attachment 6351View attachment 6352

Lol was there anyone who didn't adjust the knobs on their monitor to get a square-ish picture back in the day?

 

[McWiggles]

Lol was there anyone who didn't adjust the knobs on their monitor to get a square-ish picture back in the day?

I've "adjusted the knob" to quite a few PC-98 games in my day.

 

[MrHtuber]

I'm still very new to the PC-98 scene, but I absolutely want to delve deep into the insane library that platform has when I have the chance. As soon as I can find a nice translated title that I can sit through and be engaged by, that's probably gonna be when I fully dive into the PC-98 lifestyle. Although I might also just pick a title with only simple Japanese in it and use it to practice so I'm not permanenty stuck in N4...
The PC-98 just has one of the coolest retro aesthetics I've ever seen and it's just begging me to explore and try out the many varied and interesting games it has. It's only a matter of time.

I like to visit ReadOnlyMemo website. There's a bunch of good interviews with romhackers and news about this scene. At the end of each post, Fenlon usually posts some crispy screenshots of games covered at that issue, and the PC98 screenshots always amazes me!! I'm eager to play them, but the retroarch core on my RG35XX+ doesn't have a way to set up the controls, and many of them doesn't have a translation yet. I hope one day it becomes possible...

Have you played any PC98 game? How are they like?? Did you have a PC98??? Share your experience with us!

Oh, and let me share some of Fenlon's screenshots with you:

Unfortunately, the size of these pictures don't do justice to its pixel's glory, so make sure to visit PC98 Images website to explore this wonderful world!

Also gotta point out just how amazing some of the art featured here by OP is; PC-98 pixel artists were truly our era's Renaissance painters. Dokkyusei and Travel Junction in particular have piqued my interest for a while now, I just wish they had english patches. Dokkyusei does have a remake on steam that is in english but I want to take in those beautiful 640x400 works of pure art while I'm playing through it.

The only dating sim I've ever played in my life was the PC98 version of May Club, which I actually owned a physical copy of as a child! Anime Video (which, interestingly, used an icon of Lum from Urusei Yatsura as their company logo) officially translated the game and ported it to DOS in the late 90s. No idea how I got it – I seem to think my dad picked it up along with several other games at a flea market or something, not realizing that it was a very adult, 18+, NSFW title – but I played through the game many times and enjoyed it a lot.

It's a game where you're a young man playing a virtual reality MMO, and date several cuties doing the same. There are a few sex scenes – nothing is shown on-screen beyond bare breasts, and most explicit content is written out in text – but the real draw is the neat little sci-fi world you can walk around in, which includes a full-fledged day/night cycle and some very well-drawn background and character art.

Keiko, the lovely lady pictured above, had my favourite route in the game – she's a friendly, elegant woman who's just been dumped by her previous boyfriend and has a lot of self-esteem issues. I remember her storyline being extremely touching, and I consider her a very sympathetic and likeable character. I'm pretty sure that she's the reason I found classy lipstick-clad '90s blondes so gorgeous throughout my adolescence (and still do to this very day). Just one problem: I always thought of her as a stunning, distantly-hot older woman, but she's actually supposed to be 23, making her, as of writing, three years my junior. ???

Something like this, for example, definitively seems like my kinda game (especially with how much Dating Sims have captured my interest over the past month or so). I'm not much of a DOS guy and have no clue how emulating it works, so it'll probably be a while before I either look if there's an english patch for the PC-98 version of this game, or just figure out how to emulate DOS.
By the way, that last paragraph made me laugh so hard. Sorry for you, man. I'd better appreciate my youth while I still have it LOL.

 

[Somnia]

Like others have said, it is a platform that is very limited in what it can do, but what it can do it can do well enough to be a timeless platform for its purposes. What is so enticing about VNs as a genre is that they were fairly cheap and easy to produce. The result is you get a ton of games with incredible variety in concept and execution. This does mean that there is a /lot/ of shlock that you will just outright hate, but thankfully many VNs aren't too terribly long or involved so just checking them out and figuring out what connects with you doesn't have a lot of risk attached unless you're peering around more adult releases and are understandably sensitive to sexual assault (cause oh boy do many VN writers love their lazy SA scenes).

Always wanted to track some OG hardware down and get into playing more games on the platform. I appreciate this post for boosting that back near the top of my priority list for retro collecting hehe.

Off-topic but I'll always appreciate the Vita for finally getting me into VNs. I scoffed at the genre for the longest as more or less a waste of time, but the Vita being a system with a more limited library and being one of the first platforms to get a lot of officially localized VNs meant it was the system that finally got me to bite the bullet and eventually fall in love. It's a far more engaging, diverse and expressive genre than many on the outside give it credit for in terms of the types of stories it can tell and the ways it can use more limited gameplay systems to help tell that story.

 

[Deebo]

PC98 is beyond gorg. Thanks to all leaving resources in the thread--I've always found PC98 emulation and sourcing programs to run a little daunting. I'd love to get a cozy setup for this on my handheld; if I can only run it on desktop I normally end up not playing with it lol

 

[Eclipse14]

Been playing Slayers on PC-98 every once in a while after seeing footage of it (and also getting a translation in September). Been a really neat experience, so far. I'll be diving into it more over time.

 

[Another Iori]

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

I like to visit ReadOnlyMemo website. There's a bunch of good interviews with romhackers and news about this scene. At the end of each post, Fenlon usually posts some crispy screenshots of games covered at that issue, and the PC98 screenshots always amazes me!! I'm eager to play them, but the retroarch core on my RG35XX+ doesn't have a way to set up the controls, and many of them doesn't have a translation yet. I hope one day it becomes possible...

Have you played any PC98 game? How are they like?? Did you have a PC98??? Share your experience with us!

Oh, and let me share some of Fenlon's screenshots with you:

Unfortunately, the size of these pictures don't do justice to its pixel's glory, so make sure to visit PC98 Images website to explore this wonderful world!

There are 3 types of PC 98 games

-shit game
-good game
-visual novel

Any PC-98 game that isn't talked about is generally expected to be ass cheeks. Even the games that are can be ass cheeks. The ones that aren't are the ones you literally can't read because they're text heavy with Japanese text and are probably a VN. That said, go play Rusty, Touhou 4, Touhou 5, Flame Zapper Kotsujin, and Peret em Heru. Those are good games. Can't speak on stuff like Given Megami Tensei cause no one talks about it or Madou Monogatari because I haven't tried those (though I do hear they're kinda eh)

One thing that's for sure is that the music will never let you down

 

[Toppis]

PC-98 has so good pixel arts

 

[Ezri_Muldoon]

The PC98 Fuels my eternal rage at pixel art indie games which do the bare minimum and claim their sub-par art is a deliberate, stylised choice when pixel art can be just as beautiful, if not more so than contemporary games.

90% of Indie Pixel art games are visually lazy.
A screenshot from 1989 shouldn't blow your "award winning" 2015 game out of the water.

It's one of the reasons I will forever throw money at Va11 Ha11-A for capturing the PC98's charm

Post automatically merged: Feb 26, 2025

Been playing Slayers on PC-98 every once in a while after seeing footage of it (and also getting a translation in September). Been a really neat experience, so far. I'll be diving into it more over time.

My girlfriend would adore a translation of any Slayers game, so if this comes to pass I will forever be in your debt.
Especially if its the PC98 one since she's into live streaming now, this would be a fantastic way to introduce her to retro gaming in a format that plays well with streaming & social gaming.

 

[Somnia]

The PC98 Fuels my eternal rage at pixel art indie games which do the bare minimum and claim their sub-par art is a deliberate, stylised choice when pixel art can be just as beautiful, if not more so than contemporary games.

90% of Indie Pixel art games are visually lazy.
A screenshot from 1989 shouldn't blow your "award winning" 2015 game out of the water.

It's one of the reasons I will forever throw money at Va11 Ha11-A for capturing the PC98's charm

Post automatically merged: Feb 26, 2025

My girlfriend would adore a translation of any Slayers game, so if this comes to pass I will forever be in your debt.
Especially if its the PC98 one since she's into live streaming now, this would be a fantastic way to introduce her to retro gaming in a format that plays well with streaming & social gaming.

There is a fundamental difference between a game trying to capture PC98's aesthetics and a game trying to capture some other era. Hell even if they aren't using a system like the NES or the SNES as a benchmark, comparing the largely static images seen in VNs to what more traditional experiences like beat-em-ups or platformers have to do feels misguided. Of course when you're creating a handful mostly static image with little to no interactivity you can truly go all out with your artwork and art stle.

Idk, it just feels like an apple and oranges comparison, especially when the example of a game "doing it right" is another VN-style experience. I love VNs, but I wouldn't pretend that someone could make a platformer look as consistently amazing as a static PC98 screenshot without putting in absolutely dreadful amounts of work in. Still, we do have examples like Hyper Light Drifter and The Last Night that try to use a lot of contemporary techniques to create some jaw-dropping scenes, with the latter of which being in development for like a decade or so.

 

[Varyag]

I've gotten to have a minor period of retro PC emulation of 90's Japanese machines and while I focused more on the x68k, I was and still am absolutely flabbergasted at the quality of the art and aesthetics of the anime games of this era and tech. I can't really play the many untranslated VNs, but there's other games I just want to keep looking at thr art of. Mecha designs, spaceships, and beautifully drawn anime ladies.

One of these days I'll figure out a way to experience them, Retroarch or not.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Given Megami Tensei

Took me this long to notice the typo in Giten

Post automatically merged: Mar 3, 2025

I've gotten to have a minor period of retro PC emulation of 90's Japanese machines and while I focused more on the x68k, I was and still am absolutely flabbergasted at the quality of the art and aesthetics of the anime games of this era and tech. I can't really play the many untranslated VNs, but there's other games I just want to keep looking at thr art of. Mecha designs, spaceships, and beautifully drawn anime ladies.

One of these days I'll figure out a way to experience them, Retroarch or not.

here's a link to an archive of some of the translations

 

[Grumpy_Old_Man]

All i can say is that Possessioner "yuri cyberpunk" is quite beautiful.
Apart for the countless Visual novels that got ported to Dos and early windows, like Gloria or True Love. I really liked that Macross skull leader complete turn based strategy game, great chiptune renditions of the anime ost, good pixel art and the "battle system" based on squads more than individual units.

 

[Daniel Delastrode]

honestly, these look epic, and i have an emulator on my laptop. there have been a lot of classic computer games i need to try, and i feel kinda sad i dont have the time to be on these. but ill get to them eventually. the pc 98, sharp, fm towns, amiga, and so many others are just so underrated in the popular gaming space, and maybe thats for the best.

 

[Eclipse14]

My girlfriend would adore a translation of any Slayers game, so if this comes to pass I will forever be in your debt.
Especially if its the PC98 one since she's into live streaming now, this would be a fantastic way to introduce her to retro gaming in a format that plays well with streaming & social gaming.

Apparently, I never got a notification for this quote despite having them on. Weird.

Here you go.

You're also gonna need this. Trust me. Some things about the game aren't made very clear when it comes to maps.

 

[DevilBusterAkemi]

Been playing Slayers on PC-98 every once in a while after seeing footage of it (and also getting a translation in September). Been a really neat experience, so far. I'll be diving into it more over time.

i'm very excited this got a translation. i love Slayers, so i'm excited to try it.

There are 3 types of PC 98 games

-shit game
-good game
-visual novel

Any PC-98 game that isn't talked about is generally expected to be ass cheeks. Even the games that are can be ass cheeks. The ones that aren't are the ones you literally can't read because they're text heavy with Japanese text and are probably a VN. That said, go play Rusty, Touhou 4, Touhou 5, Flame Zapper Kotsujin, and Peret em Heru. Those are good games. Can't speak on stuff like Given Megami Tensei cause no one talks about it or Madou Monogatari because I haven't tried those (though I do hear they're kinda eh)

One thing that's for sure is that the music will never let you down

my girlfriend is Japanese; she's played Giten. it's HORRIBLE. the only reason it has any reputation in the west is because it's an obscure megami tensei game that westerners cannot typically play.

 

[Antilocal123]

That’s pretty wtf