NEC PC-88 Series (Emulators + Tools + Lists)



 

NEC PC-88

 

The PC-88 was a line of Z80 based PCs released only in Japan by the NEC Corporation.
The first one of them, the PC-8801, was launched in 1981.
There were a lot of models for this line, a good and extensive summary can be found here.

The main OS for these machines was the BASIC (included with the PC
itself), but a very primitive version of MS-DOS and CP/M (the latter
supplied with the game Zork) were also available for use.

EMULATORS

M88: maybe the most used emulator for the PC-88. It’s open source and it’s the only emulator that supports CD emulation so far.

PC88 WIN: a very old and outdated emulator. However, it can be useful to run some games that M88 won’t run.

QUASI88: a very good, accurate and complete open
source emulator with some great debug functions.It got ported on the PSP
too. Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese only. To make it work, you must
put your BIOS files in the ROM folder and rename them in this way:

FONT.ROM = Font rom

N88.ROM = N88 Basic rom (32k)

N88KNJ1.ROM = Kanji 1 rom (128k)

N88KNJ2.ROM = Kanji 2 rom (128k)

N88SUB.ROM = Disk rom (2k or 8k)

Please note that the emulator is case sensitive.

 

J80: A Java based emulator focused on the 8001 series.It’s still in development, so check out the project’s site
often! The archive contains the emulator plus all the tools listed on
the site and a copy of the site’s page (in japanese). I’ll update the
archive along with the updates on the emulator’s main site.

88VA Eternal Grafx: An emulator for the 88VA model. To be able to save states, just add “Statsave=true” (minus the ” of course) somewhere in the INI file. A new option, named “Stat” will appear between “Replay” and “FDD1″

X88000: An open source emulator focused on the
emulation of the old PC-80xx models. It’s tape emulation is far better
than the one of M88 and it’s required to play some games.

PC88SR: One of the very first PC88 emulators ever
written, with a lot of nifty functions, like the patch function (which
ended up in a M88 unofficial build too). This one runs EXCLUSIVELY on
PC98.

MESS: Standing for “Multiple Emulator Super System”,
this ambitious emulator aims to emulate properly a lot of different
systems and machines, even the NEC PC88. Since it’s in constant
development, i’ll just add the link to the project’s main page.

To run any of these emulator, you’ll need the BIOS files of the machine. I won’t supply them, so don’t ask.

TOOLS

D88 Manager: as the name implies, a manager for D88
images. Among the functions, you can protect/unprotect disk images and
split D88 files that contain multiple disk images.

D88 Slowinfo & D88 Viewer: Two D88 utilities
released by Peter_J. As the name imply, they are tools for analyzing,
extracting and editing data on and from .d88 disk images. Instruction
and help files are inside the archive.

XDISK: another disk images manager. It supports 88VA images too.

COLLECTIONS

Here is a list of my PC-88 collections. I’ve divided it in several
.txt files. Please remember that you will need to be able to read
japanese characters in your text editor in order to read them properly.

By June 17, 2012

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