A spontaneous article about the NEC PC-FXGA: The PC-FX Game Accelerator Board for PC-98 and DOS/V. It emerged from the search for a replacement breakout box for the PC-FXGA DOS/V card in the PC-FX Fan Club Discord server. The details of the breakout box are in the second half of the article, and before that some information and photos.
There are already many resources about PC-FX(GA) (see list at the end of this article), so I won’t go into too much detail here. Basically, it’s a PC-FX on a card for your PC, with a special feature. Game Accelerator means that it also contains the 3D chip Huc6273 (Aurora) that is not present in the normal PC-FX. There are two versions of these cards: PC-FXGA, a C-Bus card for use with NEC PC-9800 series computers and PC-FXGA DOS/V, an ISA card for use with IBM PC-compatible computers running DOS/V.
Continue reading NEC PC-FXGA, PC-FXGA DOS/V, and its Breakout Box →
Changing settings in the BIOS of a japanese computer can be dangerous if you don’t have any knowledge of the japanese language or don’t what you’re doing. I don’t have that much knowledge of the language either and tried to translate the BIOS.
This is how I did it: I connected my PC-9821Xe/U7W with a sync combiner to the Framemeister and grabbed a video of the selection of each and every BIOS menu item. Then I converted the frames of the video to image files. The images were then cropped and converted into grayscale negatives to be processed by an OCR engine. Most of the output was gibberish and every single line of text needed manual processing. The japanese text was then fed into the Bing and Google translators and some common sense added to the output.
Continue reading NEC PC-9821 BIOS Translation →
The NEC PC-9821 computers output a very unusual resolution that most western monitors struggle with: 640 x 400 @ 24 kHz. I tried at least half a dozen monitors of all types and ages and none of them was able to display a picture at all (except an “out of range” message). Video scalers like the DVDO iScan VP50 Pro don’t recognize the signal either. Some sources claim that the cheap GBS-8220 converter is able to convert the signal – that is only partially true. You can see a stuttering picture that eventually becomes clear when you start the Windows 98 Desktop, but that doesn’t work in DOS.
Of course you can buy a special converter like the Micomsoft XPC-4, that will cost you 300-400€ though. There are other solutions:
Continue reading NEC PC-9821 and the Framemeister →
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