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PC-98

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The NEC PC-9801 (PC-98 for short) is a series of personal computers developed by NEC, equipped with 16 and 32-bit Intel x86 CPUs. While outwardly similar to IBM's PC and compatibles including use of DOS, it was for the most part a proprietary architecture. It succeeded NEC's Z80-based PC-88 series computers. "PC-98" is also a term to describe the first five Touhou Project games.

All the Touhou Project games from Highly Responsive to Prayers (the 1st Touhou game) to Mystic Square (the 5th Touhou game) were developed for this platform. They're distinguished from "the Windows games" (the 6th Touhou game onwards) for having been distributed by Amusement Makers. Upon his graduation and subsequent employment, and the release of Mystic Square, ZUN paused development of Touhou Project games.

On 19 September 2002, ZUN ceased sales and support for the games. Except for Highly Responsive to Prayers, it's still possible to download the trial versions of the games[1], but compared to the Windows games their circulation is very small, and it's extremely difficult to obtain them. During the time Lotus Land Story was released, only 200 to 300 copies were sold,[2] while only fewer than half as many copies of Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream as Lotus Land Story have been sold[3].

Games for this platform

System Details

ZUN targeted the PC-9821 series for these games, which include Intel 386 or 486 processors; most of the games require a 66MHz 486 for play without slowdown. Various expansion cards could be installed in PC-98s, including more capable video or audio cards, but only the base hardware is required for the Touhou games.

The PC-98 uses dual µPD7220 video display processors, one for text and one for graphics. In graphics mode, they can display sprites with four 16-color palettes selected from 4026 possible colors, along with rudimentary shape drawing functions.

As for sound hardware, the PC-9801VX came default with the PC-9801-26k soundcard. This in turn includes the Yamaha YM2203 FM synthesizer, providing 3 FM synthesis channels plus the three channels of the on-board YM2149 SSG unit. Users could replace this with the PC-9801-86 soundcard with the much more capable YM2608, doubling the amount of FM channels plus a number of other features. As such, the PC-98 games have two versions of the in-game music, for either 3 or 6 FM channel hardware. All of the music was programmed in MML and M. Kajihara's Professional Music Driver (PMD), except for Highly Responsive to Prayers which used Mdrv2 for the music driver. Story of Eastern Wonderland also supports outputting to a MIDI device. ZUN subsequently released many of the music themes from the PC-98 games in MIDI format onto his old website.

ZUN has stated in Akyu's Untouched Score vol.3 that he loves FM music and would continue to create FM music in the modern world.

Overview on the Touhouverse

Terminology

"PC-98" as a term refers specifically to the five first games of the Touhou Project by the Western community. The Japanese community usually refers to the PC-98 as "Touhou old works" (東方旧作 Touhou kyuusaku) or more commonly "old works" (旧作 kyuusaku) in short.

Setting

Unlike the modern era of the Touhou Project, there hasn't been much details on the location of the series. Various sources said that Touhou is set in "an Eastern Country", with a statement in Highly Responsive to Prayers saying it's in a "strange world" and Mystic Square calling it the "Human World". There's various locations in the eastern country, such as Makai, Human Village, Dream World, Mugenkan and Reimaden. There's also the Hakurei Shrine at the east, being the prime location in the PC-98.

The place is inhabited with various humans and youkai, with demons living in said list of locations. There's known to be a young shrine maiden called Reimu Hakurei (博麗靈夢) who lived at the shrine with Genjii, with having Marisa Kirisame visiting her at times and Mima being notable around the shrine who torments Reimu when board.

Unlike incidents that have happened in the Windows games, the incidents mainly involves youkai destroying the Hakurei Shrine, where Reimu has to go out and solve the issue. Other character who may also solve such incident may have their own personal reason rather than seeing the shrine destroyed.

Additional Information

  • It has been shown in an interview that ZUN still owns a PC-98 computer, where he played Highly Responsive to Prayers for the first time in years. He felt nostalgic.
  • Since any software made for Windows 95 or later can be run both on the IBM-compatible Windows and the PC-98 Windows without compatibility problems, and PC-98 editions of Windows exist up to Windows 2000, technically all the Touhou games up to at least Undefined Fantastic Object should be able to run on a PC-98 as long as the appropriate DirectX version is installed. However, since the last PC-98 system was released in 2000 (the PC-9821Ra43, which had a 433MHz Celeron, whereas the system requirements of EoSD ask for a 500MHz Pentium) this is generally not viable in practice.

Fandom

  • Because PC-98 computers are no longer sold, many fans use an emulator to play these games on modern PCs. The emulators most commonly used for the PC-98 games are Anex86, T98-Next, and Neko Project 21 (for the latter it's advised to use the unofficial fmgen builds that're linked from here instead).
  • PC-98 characters are commonly shown in fanworks with the modern Windows era characters as though the two canons are connected.
  • There are many FM Synthesis remixes on a lot of ZUN's creations that's suppose to mimic the PC-98 style. There's also known artwork of modern Touhou characters drawn in 16-bit colours.

References