Where is the enable?Ĭonsidering the sparse and even a bit contradictory documentation I have I appreciate any inputs or corrections on the emulation as it progresses and it might help to playtest as many PC-98 games as possible.
Even, surprisingly, Touhou Project (though you need a cycles count of at least 30000 to avoid flickering sprites, and the scoreboard on the right doesn't show for some reason). I've done a lot of work on the video emulation lately that some games are even playable. Contrary to what I've heard about 3.5" 3-mode it takes the IBM 1.44MB format just fine. I will be able to help with emulation as I have just recently acquired an old NEC PC-98 Lt2 486DX laptop which I will be able to poke at now from the DOSLIB project. Patches are welcome, though they will be applied to branches off of master to keep master stable, then eventually merged into master.
That's what I'll be doing with DOSBox-X in the coming months.
One thing I will want to do on my end to keep the code working is add test cases and self-testing code to make sure things work properly despite these modifications, in order not to break anything as we proceed. The D88 format's representation of the physical tracks and sectors would also help emulate MS-DOS games that use intentional bad sectors or funny sectors as a form of copy protection. I could do my part if I were to add support for the D88 disk image format that the PC-98 world seems to like to use. I don't expect DOSBox-X to run something like Touhou Project for a long while, but you do have to take steps to get there. I know DOS/V is Microsoft MS-DOS for IBM PC, the point is that would be one way to add, test, and develop SHIFT-JIS console rendering at the start. but in the meantime it might help to add minor things like DOS/V emulation, a SHIFT-JIS font and rendering, and modifications to the DOS kernel to emulate more PC-98-ish things if machine=pc98. In the long run PC-98 emulation will have to affect the BIOS interrupt vectors, PIC mapping, I/O ports, etc. If that weren't true, I would not have been able to run PKUNZIP on an old PC-98 last night to transfer files over floppy. From what I understand, it's MS-DOS with modifications for the PC-98 BIOS, a proprietary PC-98 partition table, and support for SHIFT-JIS, with all text in Japanese.