NEC PC9821 V13

While the West had the IBM PC's, Japan decided to go a different route! Starting with the PC-8800 (PC-88) series and 8086 processors, and leading on into the PC-9800 series (PC-98) the Japanese market produced x86 based non IBM compatible computers. While these machines may run DOS and Windows, they do not use IBM compatible hardware (The Dos/Windows software are special versions designed to work with the hardware), so games and software from the west will not work on these machines unless they do not use the hardware in any way (entirely use Dos/Windows calls).

I recently purchased a cheap PC-9821 V13, which worked great, but came without hard-drive, so I had to figure out how to get it set up and work out what it could do! Here I'll document my findings for anyone else who may have the same issues / questions Note, As these machines are Japanese, you'll have to use Japanese Dos/Windows with them, as western versions will not support the custom hardware. Useful Resources nw150doswin98 - A disk image with Dos Windows pre-installed. I flashed this to a 2GB CF2 card, and used it with a PATA converter as my main hard drive. It worked great, though I re-installed Windows 98 to get the drivers working easily (Windows installer included in image) PC98 Wikipedia article - More details on the PC98 TGP-VR4 - Drivers for the 3D card the machine came with, I had a hell of a time finding these, so I uploaded them here!

DOS!

Dos works fine, The machine uses MSDOS 6.2, but although it looks like regular dos, Normal dos apps almost certainly won't work - even MS-DOS edit is missing!

I tried an old XT game 'RearGard' - The graphics appeared corrupted, and as a second layer over the text! It seems the 'CGA' vram is in the same address range as the PC98 VRAM, however it's clearly in a completely different incompatible format, and it seems the text / graphics screens are different layers! Also the game seems to have crashed... which happens to most western dos stuff!

Amusingly ELIZA seems to work fine! I assume this is because it's text input / screen output is all done via DOS calls, not accessing hardware directly.

Western games aside, I tried some of the pre-installed Japanese games on the hard drive image, and I didn't have much luck there either! I saw a lot of graphical issues, and the PC-88 version of Xenon 2 instantly crashed!

Windows!

Results on Windows were very different to DOS! Whereas dos was pretty much useless on this machine for my western games, Windows worked very well! I tried out some of my old games on the machine!

I was able to install 'Virtua Cop' - it worked fine (bit slow on the P133 cpu), I was impressed that my western copy's setup routine seemed to support Japanese, and even came with the PC98 Directx install!!

Die hard Trilogy also seemed to install and work ok, though it's slow and refused to support my 3D accelerator (even though DirectX recognized it)

The Windows Version of 'The 7th guest' worked, though while speech worked, there was no music. That's no surprise as the internal sound card does not have FM synthesis, it's PCM only!
The Windows Version of 'The 11th hour' did not work, It complained I had no 'XMIDI' sound, and refused to load.

Black Dahlia installed fine, and worked well, but it seems to access the keyboard directly via hardware keycodes, as the keys pressed did not appear in game as I expected. I had to practice with save game names to figure out how to use the keyboard when needed in games.

Leisure Suit Larry 7 (Love for Sail) - Installed fine, but Windows95 version crashed, Windows 3.1 version worked fine (didn't have any keyshift problems either)... I didn't try the Dos version, as it would have certainly crashed!... How amazing is this game to have different versions supporting THREE operating systems!

Key shifts

The hardware key codes do not match a western keyboard, but I was able to play Blach dahlia fine once I knew the 'shifts' I had to make to compensate for the difference.

Numbers row, shifted 1 key right (1 presses escape)
Q row, Shifted 0 keys right (Q presses Q)
A row, Shifted 1 keys right (S presses A)
Z row, Shifted 3 keys right (V presses Z)
Space presses .
Del presses Space

Screenshots

The boot screen!	RearGard Graphics are corrupt!
Western Eliza works fine! Copied from my old PC1512 back in the 80s!	Even the Japanese games are struggling! Some interlacing/ screen mode problem!
Japanese Windows 98 works well! Note, first HDD is A:, and floppy is C: !!