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Post by dshadoff on Oct 13, 2021 22:58:01 GMT
The interesting dynamic to me, is that - because home computers weren't so popular in Japan, and weren't used in business anywhere near as much as in America (even 5 to 10 years ago), the dynamic of whether to program games professionally, or business applications, was very different there until the late 1990s. Industry seemed to wake up to the use of PCs about 10 years later than America. I can't say much about Europe... but it felt like there was some sort of lag there too (or at least a more moderate uptake in the mid-to-late 80s).
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Post by turboxray on Oct 14, 2021 5:31:37 GMT
The interesting dynamic to me, is that - because home computers weren't so popular in Japan, and weren't used in business anywhere near as much as in America (even 5 to 10 years ago), the dynamic of whether to program games professionally, or business applications, was very different there until the late 1990s. Industry seemed to wake up to the use of PCs about 10 years later than America. I can't say much about Europe... but it felt like there was some sort of lag there too (or at least a more moderate uptake in the mid-to-late 80s). For not being popular, they sure had a lot of different home computers in Japan.. and a lot of games for all of them.
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Post by dshadoff on Oct 14, 2021 11:35:23 GMT
They were at best, “Commodore 64” popular, not “a PC in every home” popular.
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Post by spenoza on Oct 14, 2021 13:44:23 GMT
For not being popular, they sure had a lot of different home computers in Japan.. and a lot of games for all of them. I'm finding data suggesting that even in 1993 only about 12% of Japanese households had a PC in them (vs 30 something percent a stand-alone word processor device). Despite the insane variety of PCs they weren't common household items. That may be why most PC game development houses remained small in Japan until they jumped into console development, with a few exceptions.
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pokun
Gun-headed
Posts: 85
Homebrew skills: HuC6280 assembly
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Post by pokun on Oct 14, 2021 13:59:12 GMT
Yeah well the majority of households probably didn't own a computer during the homecomputer boom. But I think this is true for all over the world? There were supposedly electronic stores that had a corner with the latest computers for people to play around for free, and they were always full of people during the boom.
Homecomputers boomed in the late '70s and early '80s while consoles took over in the late '80s after the Famicom boom (about 50% of the households did own a Famicom in Japan, this was also true for the NES in Sweden). But yeah Japan was slow on using computers, I think one reason is because the lack of Japanese support in early computers because of the expensive graphic hardware required to display kanji adequately for business use. The standard was 80 characters/row for a business computer, and you would need a very high video resolution to display that many columns of detailed kanji. IBM-PCs couldn't do it for a long time (at least not until VGA I think), and NEC's PCs (with advanced kanji support for the time) dominated Japan up to the early 2000s when IBM-PCs took over as the new standard. This made NEC PCs pretty good for games as well, despite the lack of sprites.
Europe is kind of hard to compare directly to USA or Japan since it's a continent with many countries with different cultures while USA is a single country (though with still many different cultures) and Japan is of course a single country with a relatively homogeneous culture. I don't think Sweden were exactly slow on adopting computers. IBM-PCs were the norm since the mid '90s like in USA, and I guess it's quite known that fast internet connections was spread at a very fast rate in Sweden in the late '90s and early 2000s. IBM-PC games were also able to compete with console games in Sweden much more than in Japan. Actually I personally think Swedish people are a bit too quick to dive head first into new technologies with little thought of the consequences in many cases (like the anti-cash propaganda in favor of electronic transactions and electronic identification, this hurts elder people not used to using computers or smartphones that are almost required to live in Sweden nowadays).
However, I do think computers and electronics in general were more expensive in Europe than in USA and Japan in the 80s. We got the ZX80 and eventually ZX Spectrum which were very cheaply made computers that never really widely adopted ROM cartridges nor floppy disk drives. MSX and Commodore computers were both also popular in Europe but games on cassette-tape and cartridge dominated as floppy drives were simply too expensive for most people until the mid 90s. This doesn't seem to be the case in USA and Japan which both started favoring floppy drives earlier. Even many cartridge-exclusive MSX games in Japan often got a tape release in Europe. So yeah there was some kind of lag in getting Europeans to adopt computers in the '80s compared to NA and Japan.
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Post by dshadoff on Oct 14, 2021 16:08:59 GMT
I think one reason is because the lack of Japanese support in early computers because of the expensive graphic hardware required to display kanji adequately for business use. The standard was 80 characters/row for a business computer, and you would need a very high video resolution to display that many columns of detailed kanji. IBM-PCs couldn't do it for a long time (at least not until VGA I think), and NEC's PCs (with advanced kanji support for the time) dominated Japan up to the early 2000s when IBM-PCs took over as the new standard. This made NEC PCs pretty good for games as well, despite the lack of sprites. Well, not exactly. There are a large number of reasons why home computers didn't catch on as quickly in Japan... You might think that kanji was a big part of it, but between JIS and SJIS, this wasn't really as big of an impediment as you might think. They got it standardized pretty early, without the multiple-standards nonsense that China has had over the years. Maybe Chris Covell or DutchDimension or somebody in Japan can add their two cents, but I think that the main reasons included: - Expense. In the 80s was the first time that the yen was really appreciating against the dollar, so in real terms, they were quite expensive until the late 80s... until a few years later, the bubble economy burst. - Thinking that it was for business, and not for home. There are two aspects of this. First, the general consumer (like their American and European counterparts) initially thought that these were business machines and would be of no use in the home, except for some weirdo otaku types. But also, office work stays at the office, and home is for home. Even during the pandemic, Japan was ill-prepared for remote work, because it just isn't the same concept as here. You stay at the office until you're done, and then you go home where none of that equipment exists. Yes, even now (to a large degree). I've been on commuter flights between Tokyo and Osaka full of businessmen who are not carrying laptops. - Resistance to change. Japan is slow to change. Just as the pandemic was starting, was the FIRST time I had been to Japan where I didn't see 80% of transactions put on paper, then stamped with a literal rubber stamp. But of course, FAX is still used, and many offices still insist on sending things via FAX instead of email. So just imagine what it must have been like in the 80's/90's. - Multipurpose items were hard to understand for them. A word processor device ? Sure ! A calculator ? Sure ! A computer that could do both ? "... why not just give me a wapro and a calculator..." ...Odd place sometimes.
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pokun
Gun-headed
Posts: 85
Homebrew skills: HuC6280 assembly
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Post by pokun on Oct 14, 2021 17:40:24 GMT
Yeah I know Japan is reluctant to change. I've been working in Japan for some years myself. They have the technology but the system and bureaucracy tends to be inflexible and make it hard for them to switch to using it. I think this is both good and bad as I've seen many examples in Sweden when changing to new technology or a new system too fast didn't go very well.
I don't get how the SJIS standard would help a computer with a low video resolution though. Text modes on many computers and video game systems uses 8x8 or 8x6 dot characters which are mostly only good for katakana on a composite video CRT. Many machines including teleprinters and receipt printers uses katakana only probably for similar reasons.
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Post by dshadoff on Oct 14, 2021 18:52:03 GMT
I don't think computers had such a low resolution as was described, or that it would have been an issue - which is why I didn't address the comment. The PC-88 and PC-98 series did just fine; SJIS is primarily double-width as I'm sure you know. Computers in that PC/PC-98 timeframe came with monitors which matched the computer outputs too).
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pokun
Gun-headed
Posts: 85
Homebrew skills: HuC6280 assembly
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Post by pokun on Oct 14, 2021 21:36:46 GMT
But that was my point. NEC's PCs had nice video hardware so that they could support a wider resolution for more detailed kanji per line. They also had pleasant colors to look at which made them great for games.
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Post by turboxray on Oct 14, 2021 22:11:12 GMT
But that was my point. NEC's PCs had nice video hardware so that they could support a wider resolution for more detailed kanji per line. They also had pleasant colors to look at which made them great for games. The later models, sure. But even the later model PC98's only have like 16 colors on screen. I guess it's not so bad on later games that used 640x480 res. Dithering always did looks getter on higher res.
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Post by goldenwheels on Oct 22, 2021 15:29:35 GMT
I don't know when it came out....but maybe a good solution would have been a pack-in NEC version of the Hori Twin Commander as the pack in controller.
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Post by elmer on Oct 30, 2021 16:15:17 GMT
The chaining of a lot of stuff to the same port created even more problems. If your games have to support multiple add-ons you need to be very careful otherwise there will be conflicts. I remembered Lemmings had a paper insert warning people that the game was not compatible with MB128 and it wouldn't even work if one was connected, and for Magicoal... well it supported everything, MB128, multi-tap, mouse... but it actually had a bug if the multi-tap and MB128 were used at the same time, that you could save your games to the MB128 but when you load it next time the game would freeze. I think that the blame for this lies not on the hardware design, but on NEC and Hudson's software departments, who obviously didn't distribute sample-code for accessing all of these new peripherals that were introduced so late in the PCE's lifetime. You can tell from the hodge-podge of different mouse-reader code in different games, which tells us that the developers didn't have a good set of how-to-do-it-right sample-code to look at. The MB128 itself was a similar case, where although some low-level code to access the hardware may have been distributed, the high-level "filesystem" code must have been a bit lacking, resulting in Emerald Dragon & Private EyeDol writing incompatible "used sector count" values to the MB128 file directory that confuses other games. I released some joystick code in the homebrew section ages ago that quite-happily detects and reads all of the different joypads and multiple mice, with or without a multi-tap, and without interfering with an MB128. At some point I've got to finish off the UI for TEOS's MB128 backup function so that I can release my optimized MB128 code, too. Now, having said that ... "yes", it's all a bit of an ugly spaghetti of wires if you have everything attached at once!
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