Touhou Project 5: Mystic Square: Mima (PC-98; Real Hardware)

Played on my Epson PC-486GR (with 75MHz 486 DX4 upgrade and PC-9801-86 sound card). I played pretty well until the stage 5 boss. Used two continues on Yumeko. Then I beat the rest of the game relatively easily. Yumeko is (for me) MUCH harder than Shinki - I think Shinki's fight is really fun. Yumeko just makes me mad but I'll figure her out eventually.
Also, just trying this: ko-fi.com/wyat... - I need to pay rent, and can't find work right now in my field. Any help is greatly appreciated... but I don't want you to feel obligated. I have no expectations of this working. Just something I thought I'd try.

[@wyatt8740]

Did another recording for my latest Lotus Land Story high score (1CC), too, since people seem to be really liking this video. If that sounds fun to you, it's here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oqHMYqWEoLx9jpI Might do the other touhou PC98 games, too, but I'd really like to finish my joystick adapter to make it act like a keyboard so I can use it for TH01 and TH02 first... and I need a job to make some money so i can justify buying parts I need. So that may have to wait except for TH03.

[@mikegoutokujiii]

An actual real-hardware video of a PC-98 game??? Sick!

[@nate567987]

well the Epson made clone of the real thing but yea

[@wyatt8740]

@@nate567987 There's really no difference that I've noticed to date other than the font ROM and it not going "Pi-Poh" (beeping) at startup. I have a friend a couple states away with four 9821's (three Ce2's and a Cs2) and even when i spot a bug in a game she's able to make her Ce2's and Cs2 show the same bugs. It looks like it uses an actual NEC EGC chip, too. And the 86 sound card I'm using is "genuine" NEC. It is a super good clone. I have a writeup on my blog about it

[@YuutaTogashi0707]

The best 98 touhou game

[@3RDplayer]

I LOVE stage4. hate me all ya want. Its epic! It's also great to see the "realistic" slowdown when too many bullets are on screen with real hardware.

[@wyatt8740]

Probably wouldn't get as much slowdown with a 100MHz+ pentium PC98, but the later PC-98 models (pentium era onward and some 486es) have trouble playing the earlier PC98 non-touhou games (and DOS stuff in general) due to their non-removable window accelerator boards. My machine strikes a decent balance and has no accelerator built in... I might be able to boost the bus clock to 33MHz by replacing an oscillator though and increase CPU speed to ~99MHz. Not tried it. System requirements are a 66MHz 486 or better in the readme's.

[@YuutaTogashi0707]

On emultors or on more powerful machines the touhou games have a slowmode option to slow down the game with many bullets on screen when your pc is fully able to play at full speed

[@jacobdelacruz558]

25:45 that micrododge lmao

[@wyatt8740]

WOW! really good eye. I'm amazed that worked myself, looking back at it now. Had to go frame by frame to realize what happened.

[@wyatt8740]

Sorry, meant to have comments turned on. :p

[@spaghettiking7312]

My second favourite character in my favourite game in the series.

[@NarffetWerlz]

It's 1992 and you really want a Super Nintendo with the new Super TouHou but your folks are only mid-middle class so you get to rent the "same" TouHou that simultaneously released on the NES (that actually came out 3 years prior in Japan).

[@nate567987]

this is 98

[@wyatt8740]

@@nate567987 I think and hope this person knows this - because there were never nes/snes touhou games. Assuming not a bot, it's hard to tell these days

[@NarffetWerlz]

​@@wyatt8740 More or less, just riffing on the graphics and making a joke based on nostalgia :P

[@alexghost7276]

seeing this make me wish i could play castlevania rondo of blood on an actual pc engine or maybe touhou HRTP

[@marisakirisame867]

I need someone to port classic windows era touhous for PC-98

[@wyatt8740]

If I could play EoSD on my 98 you bet I would. :(

[@YuutaTogashi0707]

Color would be hell to manage

[@giuseppepepe4404]

real hardware gameplay is crazy

[@wyatt8740]

Financially I agree, but in what way is it crazy to you? It feels really nice - no latency, and I can use my (modified for two buttons) atari style joysticks easily enough. Also the music tempo seems much more stable/consistent than in the emulator I was trying.

[@giuseppepepe4404]

@@wyatt8740 it seems faster and smoother than any emulator i tried it on,even if my PC is a lot more powerful than a pc98(obviusly) for the music yeah,it seems a bit more in tune,even compared with the T98 emulator(which is usually regarded as the best emulator for touhou music)

[@wyatt8740]

@@giuseppepepe4404 maybe it is - but my capture USB is at about half the framerate of the real thing still because I can't afford a better one :p

[@giuseppepepe4404]

@@wyatt8740 oh so you're saying it 's even better

[@vedrisnightmare]

Why does it look so crisp for actual hardware?

[@marisakirisame867]

The EGC privileges over emulator

[@JanxZ]

the color of this video is slightly more saturated.

[@wyatt8740]

I'm using a VGA distribution amplifier with two custom-wired adapters to go from and to the PC-98 analogue RGB pinout, and feeding the split signal into an OSSC (Open Source Scan Converter) v1.6 which is doing the scaling for me; that gets fed into an HDMI capture USB (unfortunately it's a cheap one and only good for 30FPS). The OSSC is set up so that its timings match up very closely with the pixel clock of the PC-98's video output, using junkerhq wiki's suggestions with slight tweaks.

[@wyatt8740]

@JanxZ Is it? - I didn't realize, but it's pretty hard to get the levels all looking right on my OSSC for these captures. At first it was severely 'under-exposed' (crushed black). Also the gamut of my CRT (which is actually from a PC-8801mkIISR) is slightly undersaturated imo

[@wyatt8740]

P.S. I did a video talking about my hardware, too kzbin.info/www/bejne/rXTXi5hpi8qigqs