Another PC-98 Owner Joins the Party

[SkyeWelse]

As of now, i'm the only one here (that I am aware of) with a real PC-98.

Hello and nice to meet you all. I too am a PC-98 owner and I'm just now making some progress with being able to use it. I came here after watching a series of wonderful videos that RobIvy64 made on Youtube and he mentioned this community as being pretty actively interested in learning and researching PC-98 hardware. I originally imported a PC-98DO and a PC9821 Ce2 after researching what was available out there and the types of games I would be most interested in, mostly the Falcom series and Microcabin's Xak / Fray series being able to play them in their original releases since I own the originals of them. I guess I had amassed a rather sizable PC-88 / PC-98 collection over the years and thought it was time I imported actual hardware to play them and get a chance to experience these and others more or less how they would have been experienced so many years ago. Emulators have come a long way for sure, but sometimes you just gotta hook up one of these beasts to get the full effect. : )




At any rate, even though my PCs arrived from Japan in working order, the one mechanical PC-98 keyboard specifically for the PC-98DO model was not in working order.



Only about 1/3 of the keys were actually making contact and as each key was a special NEC spring loaded switch soldered on the back of the the circuit board, it wasn't something I was skilled enough at fixing up, although I definitely did try to. I had pretty much given up on the idea of being able to fix this, so I had put my plans on learning about PC-98 hardware on hold for about I guess... 2 years now? My intention was to try and find a PC-98 keyboard the next time I visited Japan that looked like it was in good shape. But very recently a friend of mine from my usual haunt, an Ys community called the Ancient Land of Ys, informed me that he was into doing mod work and wanted to take a shot at fixing the keyboard and learning a bit more about PC-98 hardware. And now after many years the keyboard is fixed thanks to his help and I've started my education of learning how to use PC-98 hardware anew. My friend is also interested in acquiring PC-98 hardware at some point so this learning experience for me has been equally interesting to him since he wants to defintiely get a model that will play the same types of games were both interested in, name Falcom and the Xak / Fray series, and one called AIZA: New Generation, which is an Ys/Xak clone for the most part but a great one.

I'm currently working on 4-5 different PC-98 projects at the moment since it's not all setup the way I would like currently, but I've definitely made some progress in the last few weeks now the the keyboard has been repaired, but it's all an ongoing learning process for sure.

Project #1. Because the PC-98DO does not have FM-Sound built in (or so I've been told) and it only has the option currently for reading disks that are 5"25, I've got a few system disks that originally came with the system that are specific to the PC-98 DO. I've been wanting to make a backup of these disks but have not had a working 5"25 drive to read the disks in a machine that can translate that data to say an .FDI image or .FDD or .D88. So, my ultimate goal was to see about possibly finding a method of hooking up an external PC-98 compatible dual floppy disk drive called the CRC-FD5 to the PC9821 Ce2 so that I would end up with having a harddrive, 2 x 3.5" floppies drives and then 2 x 5"25 drives. Doing this would allow me to play the 5"25 disk based games that I owned on the Ce2 with full FM Sound and more ram/processing speed than the PC-98DO.





Fortunately (I suppose... even though I haven't gotten it to work yet) there exists a C-BUS board that is supposed to be compatible with several PC-98 series models and my model was listed as one of the supported models. There are several of these extension C-BUS cards out there, but the one I'm using is called the FDD-1MZ.



The FDD-1MZ appears to be in perfect condition and came with the box and manual which describes how you are supposed to install it depending on the type of PC98 series you have. The instructions for the Multi are rather simple and I've followed all the steps. The CRC-FD5 Dual Floppy Drive was originally not working as the capacitors were leaking battery acid and I needed to teach myself how to clean, desolder and solder new capacitors and run some jumper cables to damaged traces of the single layer PCB for just the power supply. Ultimately I believe I restored the PSU to working condition so that the two drives are fully powered, but it does not want to interface with the FDD-1MZ when a 50 pin Centronics cable is attached to both units. It will simply just not find the drives. I don't know if I need to load a driver for finding the CRC-FD5 external floppy, but I had assumed that was the job of the FDD-1MZ to talk to it. In both of these photos there is a small round hole on each of these devices that is located next to the Centronics port. I have no idea what that is, but appears to be an oversized headphone-jack style port for a cable to fit in and I'm wondering if that is part of what is missing to get this all to work correctly.

It's not completely a waste though as even though the instructions for the FDD-1MZ show how to install this for my specific model, which covers the extra FDD Floppy Port, if I detach say the second 3.5" drive and run a ribbon cable directly from one of the powered up 5"25 drives inside the external case to the extra floppy port on the FDD-1MZ, I can gain that second drive (the 5"25) drive as my Drive B (or in my case Drive C, since A is my HDD as the system boots from the HDD first) completing a 3.5" and 5"25 combination.

I attempted to try copying the data from the PC98-DO 5"25 system disks to a 3.5" disk and did not have positive results.

So my next plan would be....


Project #2 - Finding a method of A) hooking up one of my 3.5" drives to the floppy port on the motherboard of the PC98-DO and trying to copy from Drive A to Drive B hoping that perhaps the DO can "DO" it....
However... this leads me to B) The DO launches into Basic, not DOS, so I'd need to figure out how to get the PC98DO to boot in DOS or learn if copying can be done from drive to drive inside of Basic. I'm not really a programmer, so this is pretty much where I start asking questions at this point before I end up doing more damage than good. I'm sure trying to copy and read sectors too many times on this older 5"25 media probably isn't he healthiest thing so I want to learn the best possible method of backing up these floppies. I did have a friend with a Kyroflux make RAW image data copies of each of the PC98 system disks, so there is that at least even though at present I have no idea how to use them or translate them back to a floppy.

C) Anna Wu, I'm not sure if you remember me or not, but at Tokugawa Forums you had given me some programs to try and dump the PC98DO's Bios settings and perhaps some other data that I was never able to attempt to tackle without a working keyboard until now. I still have those files and if you still need those dumps, I'm willing to see if it can still be done to help try and preserve some of this data, which is really my end goal for what I'm hoping to accomplish in Project 2 in general.


Project#3 - CD-ROM Battles and Brandish 3 Renewal




So one of the highlights of getting a PC9821 Multi is that it is equipped with a CD-Rom. While there are not terribly many CD-Rom based games out there, I happen to own several of them including Brandish 1 Renewal, Brandish 3 Renewal, Brandish VT (Can you sense a pattern here....) and Revival Xanadu 1 and Revival Xanadu 2 Remix on CD-Rom and I'd very much like to get them to work, and possibly install from them once I load Windows one of these days... in due time. I'm especially interested in getting Brandish 3 Renewal working correctly because I feel that the CD released version of this game may be a higher candidate for possibly undergoing a fan-translation project since all the files are right there, installed together with no need for swapping disks (Of which there are 8 disks for the normal version) and it's the "Renewal" version. Now I don't know how much different the Renewal version of Brandish 3 is, but the point of the matter is that I really think that as a game that was only released on PC-98, the renewal CD version seems to be as the definitive version worthy of translating and figuring out how to install for Brandish fans. Brandish SNES was released in English, the "much better" remake of Brandish I for PSP called the Dark Revenant is about to be released soon by XSEED (seriously one of my top 10 video games of all time this version), Brandish 2 was fan-translated for SNES, and Brandish VT, repackaged as Brandish 4 for Windows 95/98 is currently also undergoing a fan-translation. Brandish 3 is the odd one out and it ties up some loose ends in the series, since the first 3 games are a trilogy. So finding a process for getting this to work well enough on both emulators and on real hardware is a top priority for me.



Well, that's all well and good, but what if your CD-Rom doesn't want to play nice? And that has been my most recent battle. The PC-98 Ce2 came with a NEC CDR-260(PI) that uses Real-Mode drivers consisting of Common settings defined and certain drivers references in the Config.sys file (For the Ce2, it needs the NECCD.SYS driver and runs it as CD101, which is in the header of the driver when looking at it in notepad. And it requires an autoexec bat file to run some additional executables such as mscdex.exe with some parameters and drive volume identifiers such as defining the CD-Rom drive commonly as letter Q:.

My first issue with the CD-Rom was that the button no longer worked to eject the tray, so I opened that up and fixed it sure enough and got that working. Then I wasn't sure how to really run these CD-Rom drivers, so I eventually figured that out as well and eventually made a FDD that could find a drive Q inside of Neko Project II as well as on my real Ce2 hardware. Note: If the driver runs and it finds that a CD-Rom can be used in Drive Q: that should mean that it has successfully communicated that a cd-rom drive exists in the machine. If not it will generate a "No drivers found" error message.

In Neko Project 2 for PC9821, I was able to load an IDE image file of the CUE file for Brandish 3 renewal that I had ripped from the original CD, and had the BIN file mounted as a virtual CD-Rom with Daemon Tools. Once the CD-Rom drivers load, I can type Q: dir and read all of the Brandish files from the CD image inside of Neko Project 2.

However, on my real hardware, it will not read the disc, and it will generate a Abort, Retry, Failure? I called these "ARFS" error messages. If I hit R for Retry, I can see the little LED light indicator flash on the CD-Rom drive meaning that I know the command is at least trying to access it. The laser assembly will put itself back into place when moved and started up, and the disc tray opens and closes with the press of the button, but I'm not able to see any type of red laser dot when the lights are off at night, nor is there any spinning happening with the CD. So I'm still looking at possible ways of maybe repairing this original drive, however recently I was able to find what I hope will be a comptable Real-Mode driver based CD-Rom that I believe should be close to this non-working CDR-260(PI) drive. The drive I ordered was the CDR-260R drive. The case and options on the front panel look a bit different, but I do know it's a Real-Mode CD-Rom requiring a Real-Mode driver just the same as the process I'm running above, so I'm really hoping that works out.

In my research I've come across many many configurations of CD-Rom drivers based on different PC-98 series and I've acquired at least what I believe is all of the NEC CD drivers, which are around 5-6 variations. If I get my CD-Rom drive working, I'd be happy to share my notes with any others that may be having issues with their CD-Roms. I can say for sure though that the other internal CD-Rom and DVD-Rom drives I've tried to install into the Ce2 freeze the system and it doesn't like them, so I think only a select few types can be used.

Project #4 - Harddrive issues....

My PC98Ce2 came with a 300MB HDD loaded with Dos 6.2 and the system was pre-configured to load from the HDD as soon as the machine powers on as the matter of boot priority. From what I've read, PC98 computers typically have the A and B drives be the floppy drives and the C drive as the first partition of the Harddrive, just like in other Windows PCs. However, if you decide to boot from the Harddrive, then it becomes drive A, and the two floppies start after the Hardrive partitions stop, so if you only had one partition, then the floppy drives would be B and C, which is what they were in my case.

Well, I did something rather gutsy and I removed the harddrive from the PC-98 in hopes to possibly see if I could read the contents of the harddrive and possibly drag files from it or onto it via Disk Explorer, but the Windows XP machine I had never saw it and when I gave up and put it back into the Ce2, there was now a problem... The HDD now longer works...

This would not normally be a problem as I can still boot Dos 6.2 with a boot diskette, but the issue is that I now have to disconnect the HDD entirely in order for the system to read the floppies. If the harddrive is plugged in, the Ce2 will freeze when trying to access the HDD. Now I know that the HDD that was in there was old and it was going to die anyway, and I've already ordered a Compact Flash adapter and card as well as a cable to help attach it all to the pins providing 5v G G 12v in order on the motherboard (front left piece) next to the IDE Bus, so I'm getting ready to install a new HDD that will hopefully last longer...

However... How can I try to write something to the Harddrive when the PC tries to always boot from the Harddrive? There must be something that told the Ce2 to boot this as a priority and I cannot for the life of me find it. Is it one of the options in the Bios settings when pressing and holding the HELP key and Reset? I just have no clue how to revert this setting so that it is A: Floppy, B: Floppy C: HDD. If anyone knows how this might be done or have some hints, I'm all ears! Thanks in advance too!

Project#5 - Working with you all here to improve you PC98 Hardware experiences and to help assist in any way that I can with adding on to this HDD image filled with Games, Utilities and Drivers. I'm also pretty excited to learn how to possibly start using ERCACHE for virtual floppy emulation.

I think there is another PC-98 / Sharp X68000 hardware owner from the Ancient Land of Ys Community as well named Yukin. I don't run into him all that often, but if I chat with him, I'll certainly try to direct him over here to participate in these HDD image and ERCACHE tests as well. I've never heard of ERCACHE before now but it's wonderful to think of a nice Floppy Disk emulator program that could be run from the hardware. I was thinking I'd have to go the Lotharek / HxC Floppy Disk Emulator route, which I know definitely works with at least some PC-98 games and pretty much all PC-88 games I tried when testing it on my PC98DO. A fellow member of the Atlanta Historical Computer Society here in Georgia showed up to a meeting one day with an HxC so I brought the DO just to see how it worked and it was actually pretty easy to use.

Thanks for reading and thanks for any tips and tricks that you might be able to provide. I'm definitely no expert when it comes to this hardware. I'm also into MSX quite a bit as well. We've been doing a exhibit for the last two years right here at he Altanta Vintage Computer Festival and we run a small MSX related website for American MSX owners that we are hoping to develop more more as time permits. Here are some pictures from this years exhibit back in April: http://usamsx.com/vcfse2014gallery/

Nice to meet you alll. 

-Thomas

[AnnaWu]

C) Anna Wu, I'm not sure if you remember me or not, but at Tokugawa Forums you had given me some programs to try and dump the PC98DO's Bios settings and perhaps some other data that I was never able to attempt to tackle without a working keyboard until now. I still have those files and if you still need those dumps, I'm willing to see if it can still be done to help try and preserve some of this data, which is really my end goal for what I'm hoping to accomplish in Project 2 in general.

Hello SkyeWelse, of course I remember me. : )
We (MESS development) are still looking for a real dump of 2HDIF.ROM 1MB FDD I/F ROM (D7000H - D7FFFH)
If you are now able to dump this NEC PC-98DO ROM, please contact me.
The dumping process as already explained should be easy.

[SkyeWelse]

Sure Anna, I would still like to help. I actually attempted to do this last night, but my issue is that I still either need to 1) figure out a good method for writing this dsk file to a 5.25" floppy disk for use on the PC98DO, or 2) figure out a solid method of hooking up a 3.5" drive via a floppy connector cable to the PC-98DO floppy port on the motherboard and finding a good way to power the the 3.5" drive since the FDD power cables inside the PC-98 Do are different than the ones used in the PC 98 Ce2.

Inside the PC98DO the Molex connectors only have 3 wires, instead of 4. I attempted to power one of my Citizen 0SDE-15G-U 3.5" FDDs that were the default drives in the Ce2 using the Ce2 to power the drive. Since the side for where the FDD drive normally draw power from where too far away, I made a mistake in thinking that the 4-pin mini molex power port that normally powers the IDE Bus for the HDD int the front would do the trick and it sadly did not. Either the pins that normally power the FDD are reversed, or they are set to not draw as much power from that location of the motherboard, but in any case that drive got fried. Opened it up this morning and saw where the chip (a small square Toshiba TC8617BF-003   9401H   JAPAN‏) had cracked due to too much voltage.

I'll need to replace this chip or find a new compatible FDD drive/board to replace the FDD before I can attempt to work on this again. Since I currently only have one good working FDD drive left, I don't want to take any more chances with this Step 2 process until I have a backup.

I also tried hooking up my Dual 5.25" drives to the Ce2 and so far I've not had a successful format of a 5.25" disk using these drives. I'll need to be able to do that before I can copy the contents of the dump dsk file over to the 5.25" floppy.

-Thomas

[kobushi]

Hi SkyeWelse,

Because the PC-98DO does not have FM-Sound built in (or so I've been told)

The DO has YM2203 (OPN) sound, but not the enhanced YM2608 (OPNA) sound.

Project #2[/b] - Finding a method of A) hooking up one of my 3.5" drives to the floppy port on the motherboard of the PC98-DO and trying to copy from Drive A to Drive B hoping that perhaps the DO can "DO" it....

I highly doubt this will work, because the types of floppy drives used in those machines are completely different. I wouldn't risk it.

If you can get a 5" drive successfully hooked up to the Ce2, why don't you image the DO disks to the Ce2 hard drive using make_hd or nfdmake? Don't try to access the data directly, just make an image of the entire floppy disk.


About the CD-ROM drive:
The laser (and maybe the motor) is probably dead. I don't know about replacing the laser, but it's definitely possible to swap in a different CD-ROM drive.
Also, the "NECCD.SYS" driver is misleading. There are actually about a dozen different PC98 CD drivers, and during installation, the appropriate driver is selected, renamed to NECCD.SYS, and placed in the root directory of the hard drive. So NECCD.SYS could be anything.

Neko Project II specifically requires NECCDD.SYS (17616 bytes). I think that's also the correct driver for the original Ce2 optical drive.

In my Ce2, I am currently using a mitsumi cr-4804te CDRW drive with the NECCDM.SYS driver. The NECCDM driver was the last PC98 CD driver NEC ever made, so it's the most compatible.

The downside is that bootup takes a long time, BUT IT WORKS. You have to wait a couple minutes. I suspect that many other ATAPI/IDE optical drives will probably work as well.

Well, I did something rather gutsy and I removed the harddrive from the PC-98 in hopes to possibly see if I could read the contents of the harddrive and possibly drag files from it or onto it via Disk Explorer, but the Windows XP machine I had never saw it and when I gave up and put it back into the Ce2, there was now a problem... The HDD now longer works...

Ouch, sounds like you hosed the MBR. They aren't directly compatible. If you reformat the drive on the PC98, it'll be fine (but obviously the data will be lost).
There's a utility called CONV98AT that can make PC98 hard drives readable from modern Windows, but you have to run it on a PC98 before connecting the hard disk to a modern PC. I'll be talking about this more later in another topic...

However... How can I try to write something to the Harddrive when the PC tries to always boot from the Harddrive? There must be something that told the Ce2 to boot this as a priority and I cannot for the life of me find it. Is it one of the options in the Bios settings when pressing and holding the HELP key and Reset? I just have no clue how to revert this setting so that it is A: Floppy, B: Floppy C: HDD. If anyone knows how this might be done or have some hints, I'm all ears! Thanks in advance too!

To get your hard disk working again, you need to boot from a DOS floppy and reformat the HD. If you're having trouble, clear the memory switches by setting BIOS SW2-5 to OFF. That should reset the boot order to the default priority.
If that doesn't work you can force-boot from floppy by disconnecting the hard drive, setting the BIOS memory switch SW2-5 to ON, and running the SWITCH command from the floppy (copy SWITCH.EXE from an MS-DOS install). On the Switch menu, select BOOT装置→1MBFD. Then power off, reconnect the HDD, boot from the floppy again, and reformat the HDD.

[98digger]

Sure Anna, I would still like to help. I actually attempted to do this last night, but my issue is that I still either need to 1) figure out a good method for writing this dsk file to a 5.25" floppy disk for use on the PC98DO, or 2) figure out a solid method of hooking up a 3.5" drive via a floppy connector cable to the PC-98DO floppy port on the motherboard and finding a good way to power the the 3.5" drive since the FDD power cables inside the PC-98 Do are different than the ones used in the PC 98 Ce2.

Inside the PC98DO the Molex connectors only have 3 wires, instead of 4. I attempted to power one of my Citizen 0SDE-15G-U 3.5" FDDs that were the default drives in the Ce2 using the Ce2 to power the drive. Since the side for where the FDD drive normally draw power from where too far away, I made a mistake in thinking that the 4-pin mini molex power port that normally powers the IDE Bus for the HDD int the front would do the trick and it sadly did not. Either the pins that normally power the FDD are reversed, or they are set to not draw as much power from that location of the motherboard, but in any case that drive got fried. Opened it up this morning and saw where the chip (a small square Toshiba TC8617BF-003   9401H   JAPAN‏) had cracked due to too much voltage.

I'll need to replace this chip or find a new compatible FDD drive/board to replace the FDD before I can attempt to work on this again. Since I currently only have one good working FDD drive left, I don't want to take any more chances with this Step 2 process until I have a backup.

I also tried hooking up my Dual 5.25" drives to the Ce2 and so far I've not had a successful format of a 5.25" disk using these drives. I'll need to be able to do that before I can copy the contents of the dump dsk file over to the 5.25" floppy.

-Thomas

Yeah, I doubt you will get 3 1/2 floppy drives working in it without some sort of controller device. I'm sure there is a C-Bus card you can use, though.

By the way, does FreeDOS(98) work with the Ce2? No one on the internet has actually tried it on real hardware yet, but I assume you could just burn the image and get it to work. Below is the "official" site:

http://www.retropc.net/tori/freedos/

Also, how are you getting the PC-9821 Ce2 to work in an American 120v outlet?

[SkyeWelse]

Hi Kobushi,

Nice to see you again! I remember your helpful posts over at Tokugawa when I was first starting to research PC-98 computers and figuring out what to set my sites on. Thank you very much for your information and also for posting that harddrive image and guide in the other thread here.

My IDE to CF card adapter and CF card hasn't arrived yet so I'm looking forward to getting into the HD image creating / additions scene with the rest of you. I have several CD games such as Brandish Renewal, Brandish 3 Renewal, Brandish VT, Revival Xanadu and Revival Xanadu 2 Remix that can be installed from the CD (once I get that part working that is ). I also have Popful Mail that can be installed from disks, but I think a HDD image of that may already be out there with that on there.

Is it fairly easy to copy the contents of one HDI image of a game as files directly over to windows and add to an existing harddrive image such as the one you all are creating?

Thank you and 98digger for telling me that hooking up a 3.5" FDD drive might not prove to be worth the effort and I'm defintiely not interested in breaking anything else in the process!

I surely want to look into using make_hd or nfdmake to make a image of the DO disks to the Ce2 to backup these images, but would this process still work for possibly creating an image and sending it over to the 5.25" FDD? I think that's the real challenge is getting the PC98DO_Dump.dsk that Anna has provider over to a media format that the PC98DO will understand.

Now, one other possible option is that I do have a pc-9801-55u CBUS card that I believe would support a SCSI device, although I've actually never hooked up any SCSI device before so I'm not sure how difficult it would be to do this and what type of cable I might need exactly, but it's certainly something to look into. I guess I haven't gotten the other CBUS card to work yet for the other External Drive, so I've been a bit wary on other CBUS cards not working or needing some difficult to find drivers, etc. Have you by chance worked with any SCSI CBUS cards before to hook anything up with success?

Thanks for the explanation about how NECCD.SYS works and yes you are correct the version of NECCD.SYS from the Neko Project II CD-Rom boot disk did work well at least with identifying the device even though as you said, it's likely that the laser assembly and/or motors that no longer work. I did attempt to order a replacement over eBay for the NEC CDR-260R which unfortunatley arrived dead yesterday. I at least looked inside it to see if some of the parts were the same and outside of the drive having different features such as volume control and headphone jack and some slight ribbon cable differences in terms of how one of the motors gets it's power, it's mostly the same. However, since it doens't turn on when power is provided to it, it's a bit diffcult to tell if there are parts working for it or not. I may have to simply try and return it and eat the costs of return shipping...

Thanks for providing a model that seems to be working well for you in your Ce2. The cr-4804te seems much more common and easier to get a hold of than the CDR-260 or 260R. That's fine if it take a bit to load the CD-Rom, I mean how often would we really play games from them? From the CD-Rom's I've tested in Neko Project II it seems they are there mainly for installing the games rather than playing them directly from the disk, or perhaps that can be done inside of windows. I know that in Dos it says flat out that you cannot play the game's executable file directly from the disc.

Would you happen to know of any compatible easily obtainable floppy drives that would work with writing 3MODE(1.44MB,1.2MB,640KB,720KB) inside the Ce2? I'd definitely be interested in replacing the one I fried... I first wanted to see if I could repair the Citizen 0SDE-15G-U 3.5" FDD‏ drive, but the chip on the PCB, the small square Toshiba TC8617BF-003      9401H JAPAN‏, actually cracked from the high voltage and would need to be replaced. So far that seems like a pretty rare chip to get a hold of as a replacement.

Thank you very much for explaining two methods of getting the machine to restore the default boot order. It's been a rather frustrating experience so far trying to figure it out so it's refreshing to have someone so knowledgeable about the inner workings of PC-98 hardware drop by like this. Defintiey hope we'll be seeing you around more often!

By the way, does FreeDOS(98) work with the Ce2? No one on the internet has actually tried it on real hardware yet, but I assume you could just burn the image and get it to work. Below is the "official" site:

http://www.retropc.net/tori/freedos/

Also, how are you getting the PC-9821 Ce2 to work in an American 120v outlet?

I'll check it out sometime and see if I can get it to work, thanks for providing the link to the file.

As for how I power the PC-98 machines in the US, I basically use one of these for pretty much all of my Japanese consoles and computers such as the PC-98s and MSX.

http://www.voltageconverters.com/japan_voltage.html

-Thomas

[kobushi]

Is it fairly easy to copy the contents of one HDI image of a game as files directly over to windows and add to an existing harddrive image such as the one you all are creating?

Extremely easy. Open the HDI image in Disk Explorer, and then just drag and drop to the main disk image. The main disk image can be opened in another instance of Disk Explorer, mounted as a virtual disk, or written to an SD/CF card and accessed like a flash drive.

I surely want to look into using make_hd or nfdmake to make a image of the DO disks to the Ce2 to backup these images, but would this process still work for possibly creating an image and sending it over to the 5.25" FDD? I think that's the real challenge is getting the PC98DO_Dump.dsk that Anna has provider over to a media format that the PC98DO will understand.

Sure. In that case, I would use VFIC to convert PC98DO_Dump.dsk to mahalito format, copy that to the hard disk image, and then use mahalito to write the floppy image to the 5.25" FDD. Basic syntax is MAHALITO E A:\DO_dump B: (assuming the HD is A: and the 5" FDD is B:)

Thanks for providing a model that seems to be working well for you in your Ce2. The cr-4804te seems much more common and easier to get a hold of than the CDR-260 or 260R. That's fine if it take a bit to load the CD-Rom, I mean how often would we really play games from them? From the CD-Rom's I've tested in Neko Project II it seems they are there mainly for installing the games rather than playing them directly from the disk, or perhaps that can be done inside of windows. I know that in Dos it says flat out that you cannot play the game's executable file directly from the disc.

I can vouch for the cr-4804te in particular, but if you have another ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM lying around, it's worth trying with the NECCDM.SYS driver. I bet many drives will work.

Also, the slowdown is only during the initial bootup of the computer itself. Once you get to the DOS prompt, the CD drive is perfectly normal and responsive. I just turn on the computer and go make a cup of tea. Everything's ready by the time I get back.

Would you happen to know of any compatible easily obtainable floppy drives that would work with writing 3MODE(1.44MB,1.2MB,640KB,720KB) inside the Ce2?

I use NEC FD1231T drives in my Ce2 and V20. I don't think they're too scarce yet. They seem pretty reliable, too.
EDIT: It seems there are multiple types of FD1231T floppy drives. Only PC98 FD1231T drives will work. IBM PC/AT compatible FD1231T drives will not work.
When searching for the PC98 version of the FD1231T, look for:
- exposed ribbon cable pins (PC/AT type has an enclosing black plastic bracket)
- a 3-pin drive select jumper beside the power connector (PC/AT type has no jumper pins)
- a part number of P/N 134-506790-011-x (PC/AT type is P/N 134-506790-xxx-x)

[SkyeWelse]

Hi Kobushi,

Thanks again for all of this information. One of these days you'll have to tell us the story of how many trial and error hours you've spent figuring all this sage-like knowledge out! Haha.

That's fantastic to hear that it should be easy to copy and possibly write images back an forth like that from the HDD programs. I'm really looking forward to getting started on all of that once all the parts arrive in the mail. I've got a CF Card coming from one seller, an adapter coming from another and I think it's coming from Hong Kong so it may take awhile before it arrives. I would seriously have some peace of mind if I'm able to backup the 3 PC98 System disks that the owner included with the system.

Thanks for recommending the Mitsumi cr-4804te and the NEC FD1231T drives. I happened to find a good deal on those this evening and have ordered them off of eBay.

If it's not too much trouble, would it be possible to share your disk image of this CD-Rom Driver setup using NECCDM.sys driver along with your common files and autoexec bat? I feel like I've found so many variations of settings and command lines and driver sys files on the internet that I'd prefer to make sure I'm using the correct files and settings at least.

Thanks again! 

-Thomas

[kobushi]

If it's not too much trouble, would it be possible to share your disk image of this CD-Rom Driver setup using NECCDM.sys driver along with your common files and autoexec bat? I feel like I've found so many variations of settings and command lines and driver sys files on the internet that I'd prefer to make sure I'm using the correct files and settings at least.

It's all in the hard disk image I posted in the other thread. All the CD-ROM drivers are listed at the end of the config.sys, just uncomment the line you need. Then go into autoexec.bat and uncomment the MSCDEX line.

[SkyeWelse]

Perfect! Thanks very much. I was able to extract what I needed just for the purposes of making a test CD-Rom boot disk using the NECCDM.sys driver to quickly be able to test to see if newer cd-rom/dvd roms would work. I saw that your settings for this disk also work in Neko Project II as well when I tested it earlier.

In case anyone else wants to make a quick disk to test their CD-Roms, this should load the newest driver.
http://www.retro-type.com/PC98/files/CD-ROM-boot-disk-Newer-CD-Roms.zip
Edit: There was an error in the config.sys file that was not referencing the neccdm.sys file correctly which has now been fixed!

Though I got the disk to work on my Ce2, sadly the CDR/DVD drive I pulled out of another machine dated back in 2007 which I thought looked old enough was incompatible. It was an LG Super Multi. I'll wait for the Mitsumi drive to be delivered and in the mean time try to repair the NEC CDR-260 drive with the CDR-260R parts.

Edit: After receiving the Mitsumi cr-4804te drive and fixing the issue with the boot disk above, I can now confirm as well that this cr-4804te drive works, as well as a standard DVD-Rom drive from Dell, which was a Toshiba TS-H352. The LG Super Multi drive I tested earlier may work as well, I just need to check again now that I've repaired the boot disk.

http://retro-type.com/PC98/cd-rom-working.jpg

I had one other question I wanted to ask you about, but as it pertains to working with adding games to HDD, I'll ask you in your other thread.

Thanks again.

-Thomas

[98digger]

By the way, does FreeDOS(98) work with the Ce2? No one on the internet has actually tried it on real hardware yet, but I assume you could just burn the image and get it to work. Below is the "official" site:

http://www.retropc.net/tori/freedos/

Also, how are you getting the PC-9821 Ce2 to work in an American 120v outlet?

I'll check it out sometime and see if I can get it to work, thanks for providing the link to the file.

As for how I power the PC-98 machines in the US, I basically use one of these for pretty much all of my Japanese consoles and computers such as the PC-98s and MSX.

http://www.voltageconverters.com/japan_voltage.html

-Thomas

Hello,

I just ordered the exact same PC-98 as the one you have (PC-9821 Ce2 ), but the original monitor was included with it. This monitor draws power from an outlet built into the computer itself. The computer's sticker says that it uses, 37 watts, and at maximum, 75 Watts, although I don't know whether the monitor is included in that maximum (38 watts seems a little low for a monitor). SO, I was wondering, which one of those voltage converters should I buy, if the monitor is also going to be used with the computer?

Thanks! 

[SkyeWelse]

Hi 98digger, since I didn't order a monitor with mine I'm a little uncertain how much power they would consume really. I would think though that if the CRT monitor would be drawing power from the Ce2 itself, it would be plugging into the smaller power port (labeled AC100V - 3A) next to the main power port that uses the standard 3 prong power cable (labeled AC100V).

Photo of back of my Ce2

I couldn't tell you with guarantee that the step down converter that I have would be safe enough since I have the cheapest one sold at that site, the 100 watt VC-100J. I mean it's rated at 100 watts and if the absolute maximum is 75 watts, you may be alright, but if it's over 75 watts you might want to go up one more and get the VC-300J for just a little more just to be certain you are covered.

At any rate though I think getting one of these step-down converters if rated high enough should serve your purposes well enough and you'll be all set. Usually in my experience with older Japanese electronics, I've been told that just by simply plugging them in to a U.S. outlet may not be enough to fry it immediately, only that it puts extra strain on the life of the power supply.

They'll be quite a few of us with Ce2's or similar machines here now.

I have a Ce2, Kobushi has a Ce2, Tw3ek has a Ce2 not currently working, and RobIvy64 has a Cs2 which is pretty similar.

-Thomas

[98digger]

Hi 98digger, since I didn't order a monitor with mine I'm a little uncertain how much power they would consume really. I would think though that if the CRT monitor would be drawing power from the Ce2 itself, it would be plugging into the smaller power port (labeled AC100V - 3A) next to the main power port that uses the standard 3 prong power cable (labeled AC100V).

Photo of back of my Ce2

I couldn't tell you with guarantee that the step down converter that I have would be safe enough since I have the cheapest one sold at that site, the 100 watt VC-100J. I mean it's rated at 100 watts and if the absolute maximum is 75 watts, you may be alright, but if it's over 75 watts you might want to go up one more and get the VC-300J for just a little more just to be certain you are covered.

At any rate though I think getting one of these step-down converters if rated high enough should serve your purposes well enough and you'll be all set. Usually in my experience with older Japanese electronics, I've been told that just by simply plugging them in to a U.S. outlet may not be enough to fry it immediately, only that it puts extra strain on the life of the power supply.

They'll be quite a few of us with Ce2's or similar machines here now.

I have a Ce2, Kobushi has a Ce2, Tw3ek has a Ce2 not currently working, and RobIvy64 has a Cs2 which is pretty similar.

-Thomas

Thanks for the info!  I think I'll try and buy the VC-500J (just to be safe).

I actually do have a few more questions about the Ce2 that I've been meaning to ask:

1. Did you have to go through the FCC in order to import the PC-98 from Japan? I know that most of the time, the importer is the one to fill out the paperwork, but I've heard of some cases where people were forced to fill out a form by shipping companies upon the arrival of their Japanese electronics in the U.S. The form is called "FCC Form 740" (there is a PDF available).


2. What is the chip with a sticker on it that is underneath the C-Bus slots? I'm assuming it is the BIOS. Also, what type of chip is it (Mask-ROM, EEPROM, EPROM, FLASH-NAND)? I'm asking because, I'd like to make sure that it is not some type of chip that will destroy itself over time (EPROMS/EEPROMS/Flash memory are known to last only 15 years).

Thanks! 

[SkyeWelse]

98digger,

Sure no problem. Glad to be of help.

1. I never had to do anything regarding filling out a FCC form to receive electronics from Japan to the United States, so it's news to me that this might be a requirement. My last shipment of anything electronic from Japan was about 2 years ago though. If it helps, I've always ordered the larger items via a Sea/Sal shipping method. It takes longer, but it's usually much cheaper.

2. I'm not really a hardware expert, so it would be difficult for me to tell what types of chips these are, but awhile ago I did take extensive photographs of the Ce2 motherboard if it helps.

http://retro-type.com/PC98/Ce2-Interior/

You've raised an interesting point though. If there were chips that do have a bios flashed onto them that are slated to be destroyed over time, it might not be a bad idea to consider some options for programming / flashing a backup of the bios onto new chips to install. Perhaps a discussion about that might warrant it's own thread for teaching hardware owners how to best preserve their machines.

While I am a beginner at electronic components, I've come to realize that if I want these electronics, computers and consoles to last many more years, I'll need to learn how to best preserve them and replace anything I can with newer parts. I've been teaching myself how to desolder and replace capacitors for this reason, but chips are a whole new territory for me.

-Thomas

[RobIvy64]

EPROMs don't have a 15 year lifespan. I'm not sure where you got that information from. I've owned arcade PCBs from the early 80s that still had original EPROMs. It is possible for the data to corrupt over time, but you can erase the EPROM with a high-powered UV eraser and reprogram.

I've imported more electronics from Japan than I care to admit, and i've never heard of this FCC form requirement.

[AnnaWu]

EPROMs don't have a 15 year lifespan. I'm not sure where you got that information from.

Maybe from this board?
The results are really very contrary and not binding.

[98digger]

Well, I went around and did more research on it and discovered that the specific chip in question is most likely the BIOS. It is labeled "NEC D27C4000D-15". Below is a picture of a similar chip:

http://www.cpushack.com/chippics/EPROM/27040/NECD27C4001D-15.html

Now, in the time it took me to hunt down and find my own PC-98 (which is still in shipping), I've seen a very large amount of broken PC-98 on Yahoo! Auctions; the symptoms being "does not boot up" or "powers on, but displays nothing" or a similar problem. If the BIOS is removed from a computer, it would exhibit these exact symptoms. So, I think it is safe to say that dying EPROMs are probably the cause of all this.

http://my.ais.net/~xtreme/SF/Bit-Rot/

The good thing is, judging by SkyeWelse's photos (thanks for posting those), the chip is socketed, which means that anyone with a ROM reader could easily pull it from the motherboard and back it up. Because the BIOS is probably model-specific (for example, the BIOS from the PC-9821 Xa7 would probably not work with a PC-9821 Cs), I'd advise everyone to back up the BIOS in their own machine rather than to rely on BIOS found on the internet for when the EPROM dies.

Personally, I'm going to consult the people on Vintage Computer Forums about backing-up EPROMs. They deal with dying EPROMs allot, and probably know how one could go about doing this (they also know what type of ROM-readers to buy).

EDIT: I am moving discussion on the BIOS EPROM to the thread titled "PC-9821 BIOS UV-EPROM".

[kobushi]

Now, in the time it took me to hunt down and find my own PC-98 (which is still in shipping), I've seen a very large amount of broken PC-98 on Yahoo! Auctions; the symptoms being "does not boot up" or "powers on, but displays nothing" or a similar problem. If the BIOS is removed from a computer, it would exhibit these exact symptoms. So, I think it is safe to say that dying EPROMs are probably the cause of all this.

Not necessarily. Capacitor problems and hard drive failure are more likely to happen first.
Also, many of the PC98 sellers on YAJ are simply liquidating old office stock, so "displays nothing" could simply mean that the seller didn't know to connect a 24kHz-capable monitor.
Anecdotal evidence is not proof, but I've purchased around a dozen PC98s over the years, and I have never encountered an EPROM issue.