PC-88 / PC-98 Hardware Survey

[SkyeWelse]

Hello everyone! What we would like to gather here are three pieces of information so that we can put together a survey of what all is out there hardware-wise within the PC-98 and PC-88 Scene.

1. What PC-88 or PC-98 machines do you own?
2. What is your location in the world?
3. Please post any images you would like to share of your hardware.

I'll start this off.

I own a PC-98 DO and a PC-9821 Ce2
I live in the United States (Georgia)



Larger Size

Pictured above is an photo of both systems displayed at this years VCFSE 5.0 (Vintage Computer Festival Southeast) showcasing two finished fan-translation projects, Rusty and EVO: The Theory of Evolution.

[cuba200611]

I have a PC-9821Xb10, which is currently being shipped to me, and was once owned by Nana. It has a Pentium running at 100 MHz, with an 850 MB hard drive with DOS and a CAD program installed.

I live in the American state of Florida, in the southwest of the state. It's very hot down here.

Here's some pictures Nana provided me with:









No FM sound, though. I would really like a PC-9801-86 board, but they cost like over 10k yen in Yahoo Auctions.

[myon]

Mine is a PC-9821 V12 S5RA. I got it many years ago for free when one of my friend's family was going to throw it away. It seems to be very similar to PC-9821 Xb10. (Although it comes with a very noisy CPU fan instead of a passive cooler)

P5 120MHz (without FPU bug but with F00F bug)
40GB junk IDE HDD clipped to 4.3GB, 160GB SATA HDD, SATA DVD-ROM drive
RAM is upgraded to 96MB, and the cards installed are PC-9801-86 with Chibioto (OPNA and PCM soundcard), Allied Telesis RE1000 Plus (10BASE NIC), and IODATA SA-PCI/2R (SATAx2).

Thanks to the information from the discord PC-98 community, I got a SiI3512 SATA PCI card today. Flashing custom BIOS was very easy and it seems to work on DOS and even SATA optical drives work with mscdex. However Linux 2.4.22 doesn't support them, and Windows 2000 fails after formatting the partition until 99%. I don't have a Windows 98 for PC-98 and I had to use the Windows 2000 installer (5 floppy disks) to partition the drive. I'm going to try FreeBSD but my floppy disks are starting to die

I live in Tokyo. I came from northern Japan and I really don't like the humidity, temperature, mosquitos, cockroaches and stuff. I once used to live in Salt Lake City, Utah for a very short period when I was really small.

V12 is not very ancient or interesting, but here are the pics.

front.jpeg (424.59 KiB) Viewed 16650 times

back.jpeg (437.84 KiB) Viewed 16650 times

kbd.jpeg (409.52 KiB) Viewed 16650 times

pentium.jpeg (498.22 KiB) Viewed 16650 times

sata.jpeg (318.59 KiB) Viewed 16650 times

[cuba200611]

What do you have connected to the serial port?

[myon]

It's actually a MIDI cable.
Poor man's serial to MIDI converter

midi.s.jpeg (131.57 KiB) Viewed 16640 times

[cuba200611]

So something like this, then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qCIe0TmtQ

(I don't know how to embed links into text here)

[myon]

Some softwares such as Recomposer (a midi sequencer) supported serial MIDI, and there are software that used the VM86 mode to trap I/O access to emulate Roland MPU on PC-98 like the one in that video. One of them I know is VMD, and MMD98 works perfectly, but it required a non-standard memory manager.

[Shorono]

I have a PC-98 Xa7, with a PC-9801-86 soundboard, a PC-9801-108 LAN board and HxC Floppy Emulator.









I live in Skedsmo, Akershus, Norway.

[rockleevk]

Here from Spain.

Proud owner of a NEC PC-9801 DS/2 (5.25" floppy drives) and a NEC PC-9821 S2. Other: NEC PC-9801-86 soundboard installed on my PC-9801 DS/2.

>> images coming soon <<

Wishlist: a PC-9801 DO+ (someday ) / PC-8801 MC

-rockleevk