Mastodawn

Nina Kalinina Nov 24, 2023

Okay, folks, as you know, I'm watching an anime "16-bit sensation", a show about NEC PC-98 nostalgia. It made me power up my PC-9821 Aile and boot into DOS/V, and finally try to launch some high-end PC-98 games. And I am speechless. Even on an LCD screen from mid-90s, the art is legendary.

PC-98 series is a special beast. Conceived by NEC as a business computer, the first models were based on Intel's powerful 8086 (the year was 1982). Unlike IBM PC clones, PC-98 supported Japanese out of the box, with complicated input system and thousands of kanji. To make the kanji look good, or, rather, at least minimally readable, the computer's graphics was 640x400 in 16 colours.

As you can imagine, adding Japanese support to a regular PC is hard. No one could do it, and NEC PC-98 became the biggest thing.

For PC games, it made all the difference.

🧵

#pc98 #retrocomputing

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Nina Kalinina Nov 24, 2023

There were a few things that made PC-98 games look so unique.

First, it's the combo of resolution and small palette. Western games of the era could default to 320x200 in 32-256 colours (Amiga and VGA) and deliver a colorful image that doesn't really have any prominent details. Check out this Amiga's version of Monkey Island 2 in 320x200x5bpp. Japanese games needed horizontal and, preferably, vertical resolution, so 640x400 is a must. In 16 colours, that's 128K; twice as much as VGA's 320x200 in 256. If you had more RAM, you'd better have more video RAM pages than more colours, too.

Second, the palette isn't fixed. In the PC world, there were "Super EGA" cards that allowed custom palettes, but if you can have 256 colours, even if the resolution is lower, why bother?

Third, PC-98 were "all business", and the video chip there had no sprite support. Redraws were slow, static images and games with menus made more sense than animating moving elements.

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apophis Nov 25, 2023

@nina_kali_nina thank you for this thread... the technical difference really does explain a lot about how these games got that specific look and feel!

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Nina Kalinina

@apophis as it turns out, in the West there were computers which had similar features, but either they weren't popular enough, or artists didn't care about them that much. So it also could be a very cultural thing.