> this now-forgotten art style native to Japan is known, shorthand, as “PC-98”
I'm really into retro computing having collected over a hundred 80s 'home' computers (all non-PC/Mac), including at least a dozen Japanese models, but have never heard the term "PC-98" to describe a particular style of pixel art, probably because I don't speak Japanese and haven't lived there. However, I do see some traits in how the examples shown were constructed which strike me as unique beyond just the obvious Japanese aesthetic of the content.
While the article highlights that Japanese computers had greater memory and graphics capabilities earlier due to the need to represent more complex fonts, there's another factor I suspect is behind the differences I'm seeing in those images. Japanese business computers tended to have analog RGB output and displays earlier and more commonly than those in the U.S. Of course, analog RGB was available in the U.S. around the same time but it wasn't usually considered worth the increased cost for mainstream desktop use in the early 80s. Monochrome or 4 colors were generally considered sufficient for 80-column capable text displays (~640 pixels wide).
Some of the dot patterns I'm seeing in those examples work well on RGB displays but wouldn't work as well on composite video displays or TVs. In the US, early home computer pixel art targeted resolutions like 256 x 192 and 320 x 200 in 4 or 16 colors but generally assumed the pixels would be displayed on a TV or composite monitor and so leveraged the pixel blending and additional artifact colors composite video can uniquely create to enhance their artwork. These composite-exploiting blends and colors are lost when those images are displayed in RGB, leaving only the original pixel patterns which aren't what the original pixel artist saw or intended when they created the image (which is why original composite-targeted pixel art is best viewed on a composite CRT or CRT emulation). I think these Japanese artists being able to target analog RGB output is behind some of the subtle (but cool) uniqueness I'm seeing in the "PC-98" pixel patterns.
aidenn0 · 3h ago
IMO PC-98 is unique because it sits between EGA and VGA in capabilities; it is still a 16 color display, but from a much broader palette (4096 vs 64). EGA is very distinctive because of the limited palette.
mrandish · 2h ago
Indeed, starting with IBM's initial 5150 design, early PC graphics made cost, memory and capability trade-offs which would soon be seen as unfortunate from a graphics and gaming perspective. Although IBM specced the platform and chose Motorola's 6845 video display chip, I assign some blame to Motorola too for not having created a range of video chips with increasing capabilities to choose from. We'll never know if IBM would have ponied up a few dollars more for a chip with at least a 256 color palette or a few other niceties but it's always possible.
Strangely, Motorola did eventually decide to get serious about offering more capable graphics in the form of the RMS chipset but not until it was already too little and too late. They announced the RMS chipset in 1984 and tried to drum up interest among system designers but eventually cancelled it before release amidst lukewarm response and bugs in the early prototypes (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10977/fat...). It certainly didn't help that other options like TI's 99x8 VDP chips were now getting cheaper and the pre-Commodore Hi-Toro company was shopping around their Amiga chipset to all the major consumer computer manufacturers in 1984.
jordibunster · 4h ago
I remember trying to install Slackware as a 16 year old living as an exchange student in Japan and not getting anywhere. Turns out PC98 needed a patched kernel.
I totally recommend the Basement Brothers YouTube channel which has a large set of reviews with summarized playthroughs and historical background for PC-88 and 98 games:
PC-98 eroge art is beautiful. These writers—who freely take pot-shots at the “perverted” hikikomori of 30 years ago—wouldn’t dare criticize the hardcore pornography (Bonnie Blue? The OnlyFans Economy!) the world is presently steeped in. It’s like they know which waggle dance lets you in, and which one gets you booted from the hive…
rtpg · 1h ago
Plenty of PC98 games out there that are just pure smut and assault fantasies.
You could make an argument about the production environments of "actual real person" pornography but if you're talking about aesthetics and morality of the end product? I dunno... tough sell to me for a "random" one.
Plenty of "real art" PC98 stuff too ofc (there are also of course people on the record saying "we put stuff in here so we could sell our RPG" and the like... market demands).
SuperNinKenDo · 4h ago
To criticise Bonnie Blue is to criticise female sexuality. To criticise Eroge is to criticise male sexuality.
Like you say, only one of those is acceptable to the hive. In fact one must be loudly cheered, and one must be at least quietly, obligatorily shunned.
yew · 1h ago
Nah. The people writing racist fanfiction on AO3 are equally beardy, and those are mostly women. It's just the standard weirdos/creeps problem.
hello_computer · 1h ago
Hardcore is a multi-billion dollar industry, while PC-98 softcore is dead, and was a cottage industry even in its heyday. Have to please the advertisers.
shuuzo · 2h ago
This comment being downvoted is such a cherry on top.
ngcc_hk · 3h ago
This emulation seems to say pc98 is msdos based and hence can run on dosbox-x
Seeing some yt even more confused as pointed out by wiki it is a 16/32 bit …
charcircuit · 4h ago
>Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time
There was paint software. You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.
mrandish · 4h ago
> You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.
Back in the day I was fortunate to work with some of the best pixel artists in the industry like Jim Sachs (https://spillhistorie.no/2024/09/13/legends-of-the-games-ind...) and they definitely did draw the vast majority of their pixels one at a time in the best paint programs available like Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint. In the linked article Sach's is quoted "I put dots on the screen. One at a time at first. Green dots for grass, blue dots for sky, gray dots for castle blocks. Hour after hour. I was happy if I got one square inch of the screen done in a day."
To create top notch pixel art in those limited resolutions and palettes forces the artist into creating the illusion of colors and detail which aren't actually there in any one pixel. They do this by modifying the colors of individual adjacent pixels to imply shading and highlights. Jim would modify one pixel, zoom out to assess the overall effect on that area of the image, then zoom back in and modify the next pixel. I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images. Most of those pixel patterns aren't uniform enough to be from an 80s paint program and not randomly Bayer-ish enough to be a digitized image.
Jim has discussed his workflow in detail in interviews. The value of Deluxe Paint to an artist like Jim wasn't laying down swathes of pixels, it was mostly fast zooming and panning as well as detailed palette control. Of course, those artists would use whatever capabilities their tools enabled when they could but it wasn't nearly as much or as often as you're assuming.
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
I think that's right. Paint programs might give you the "broad strokes" (so to speak), fill areas — it's clear the dithering on an arm, for example, was done a pixel at a time.
I spent many hours in "fat bits" mode in MacPaint creating B&W game artwork for early shareware games I wrote. Click a pixel to invert it.
msephton · 1h ago
Not in Japan, you can see how the dithering was done in the video I link below, which was taken from promo footage of one of the most famous period Japanese paint apps for PC-98: Multi Paint System (1992, by Woody_RINN). The artist would paint two colours and then use a dither blend tool along the contrasting edge. https://youtu.be/nIdFor2WOnw?t=430
I'm sure some people did it pixel-by-pixel, but not so much in Japan where the software was designed to make dithering like this very easy.
100%. I worked with artists in the 2D era. They were doing sprites a pixel at a time.
charcircuit · 48m ago
>I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images
Even without zooming in you can tell that those images look nothing like what was being made on the pc98. The article was talking about the 80s which was a decade before what we are talking about with the pc98. It is not valid to assume that they were done the same.
spankibalt · 3h ago
> You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.
I always have to laugh when that one comes up. But yeah, many Japanese dot/pixel art graphics packages (e. g. Multi Paint System) have brushes for those characteristic dithering patterns. Fast work! And I don't think they did pixel-blending (as on Western home computers) either; the art was done on machines with computer monitors for customers with pretty much the same systems (e. g. PC-98). Manual corrections, analog/digital "transkriptions" (from raster paper for example), etc. are another story...
ngcc_hk · 3h ago
So far only collect 2 Casio one basic and one, well, lisp (!) calculators … interesting artefacts. Still try to get a national those tube-like display scientific calendars used during my senior secondary school.
This is a total different genre. So hard level …. In 1980s just thought it was a j model to be … wonder any simulation would see as collecting one just have a look is impossible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250523210148/https://strangeco...
Note: the link contains some slightly NSFW images
[0] https://16bitsensation-al.com/
I'm really into retro computing having collected over a hundred 80s 'home' computers (all non-PC/Mac), including at least a dozen Japanese models, but have never heard the term "PC-98" to describe a particular style of pixel art, probably because I don't speak Japanese and haven't lived there. However, I do see some traits in how the examples shown were constructed which strike me as unique beyond just the obvious Japanese aesthetic of the content.
While the article highlights that Japanese computers had greater memory and graphics capabilities earlier due to the need to represent more complex fonts, there's another factor I suspect is behind the differences I'm seeing in those images. Japanese business computers tended to have analog RGB output and displays earlier and more commonly than those in the U.S. Of course, analog RGB was available in the U.S. around the same time but it wasn't usually considered worth the increased cost for mainstream desktop use in the early 80s. Monochrome or 4 colors were generally considered sufficient for 80-column capable text displays (~640 pixels wide).
Some of the dot patterns I'm seeing in those examples work well on RGB displays but wouldn't work as well on composite video displays or TVs. In the US, early home computer pixel art targeted resolutions like 256 x 192 and 320 x 200 in 4 or 16 colors but generally assumed the pixels would be displayed on a TV or composite monitor and so leveraged the pixel blending and additional artifact colors composite video can uniquely create to enhance their artwork. These composite-exploiting blends and colors are lost when those images are displayed in RGB, leaving only the original pixel patterns which aren't what the original pixel artist saw or intended when they created the image (which is why original composite-targeted pixel art is best viewed on a composite CRT or CRT emulation). I think these Japanese artists being able to target analog RGB output is behind some of the subtle (but cool) uniqueness I'm seeing in the "PC-98" pixel patterns.
Strangely, Motorola did eventually decide to get serious about offering more capable graphics in the form of the RMS chipset but not until it was already too little and too late. They announced the RMS chipset in 1984 and tried to drum up interest among system designers but eventually cancelled it before release amidst lukewarm response and bugs in the early prototypes (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10977/fat...). It certainly didn't help that other options like TI's 99x8 VDP chips were now getting cheaper and the pre-Commodore Hi-Toro company was shopping around their Amiga chipset to all the major consumer computer manufacturers in 1984.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96tLZTtNcZA&list=PL_W1EM66_B...
You could make an argument about the production environments of "actual real person" pornography but if you're talking about aesthetics and morality of the end product? I dunno... tough sell to me for a "random" one.
Plenty of "real art" PC98 stuff too ofc (there are also of course people on the record saying "we put stuff in here so we could sell our RPG" and the like... market demands).
Like you say, only one of those is acceptable to the hive. In fact one must be loudly cheered, and one must be at least quietly, obligatorily shunned.
https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3APC%E2%80%9098-emulation-in...
Seeing some yt even more confused as pointed out by wiki it is a 16/32 bit …
There was paint software. You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.
Back in the day I was fortunate to work with some of the best pixel artists in the industry like Jim Sachs (https://spillhistorie.no/2024/09/13/legends-of-the-games-ind...) and they definitely did draw the vast majority of their pixels one at a time in the best paint programs available like Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint. In the linked article Sach's is quoted "I put dots on the screen. One at a time at first. Green dots for grass, blue dots for sky, gray dots for castle blocks. Hour after hour. I was happy if I got one square inch of the screen done in a day."
To create top notch pixel art in those limited resolutions and palettes forces the artist into creating the illusion of colors and detail which aren't actually there in any one pixel. They do this by modifying the colors of individual adjacent pixels to imply shading and highlights. Jim would modify one pixel, zoom out to assess the overall effect on that area of the image, then zoom back in and modify the next pixel. I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images. Most of those pixel patterns aren't uniform enough to be from an 80s paint program and not randomly Bayer-ish enough to be a digitized image.
Jim has discussed his workflow in detail in interviews. The value of Deluxe Paint to an artist like Jim wasn't laying down swathes of pixels, it was mostly fast zooming and panning as well as detailed palette control. Of course, those artists would use whatever capabilities their tools enabled when they could but it wasn't nearly as much or as often as you're assuming.
I spent many hours in "fat bits" mode in MacPaint creating B&W game artwork for early shareware games I wrote. Click a pixel to invert it.
I'm sure some people did it pixel-by-pixel, but not so much in Japan where the software was designed to make dithering like this very easy.
You can find my big list of Japanese pixel art apps at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136905
Even without zooming in you can tell that those images look nothing like what was being made on the pc98. The article was talking about the 80s which was a decade before what we are talking about with the pc98. It is not valid to assume that they were done the same.
I always have to laugh when that one comes up. But yeah, many Japanese dot/pixel art graphics packages (e. g. Multi Paint System) have brushes for those characteristic dithering patterns. Fast work! And I don't think they did pixel-blending (as on Western home computers) either; the art was done on machines with computer monitors for customers with pretty much the same systems (e. g. PC-98). Manual corrections, analog/digital "transkriptions" (from raster paper for example), etc. are another story...
This is a total different genre. So hard level …. In 1980s just thought it was a j model to be … wonder any simulation would see as collecting one just have a look is impossible.