LGR Oddware - NEC PC-FXGA DOS

Greetings, and welcome to LGR Odd ware, where were taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete. And this time around, it is this thing right here, the NEC PC-FXGA the DOS/V variant. A rather obscure version of an obscure expansion card for rather obscure console. It’s just obscurity all the way down. This one in particular is meant to take PC-FX console games and play them on your personal computer running MS-DOS through an ISA card amongst some other things. Hence the GA part of it. This is a fascinating device. Let’s jump right into it. Alrighty!

So this lovely long beast right here is the NEC PC-FXGA. What is effectively an NEC PC-FX game console from 1994 on an ISA card, with GA standing for game accelerator. And this thing sold for 000 upon its Japan-only launch date in December of 1995, the equivalent of around $450 US at the time. So, not cheap by any means, especially seeing that it didn’t come with everything you needed to get the thing running. You’d need to provide a PC of course, but also a CD-ROM drive to actually run any games. Something already built into the PC-FX console that it was based on. The card did at least cost a few thousand yen less than the full PC-FX, but 46,000 was still a big ask at the time regardless.

Consider that the Sega Saturn released around the same time and costs $399 or ¥44,800 in Japan. And that was a whole dang console with better game support right out of the gate. As you might expect, it didn’t exactly break sales records

and the PC-FXGA remains a somewhat expensive purchase today. So, a huge thanks once again to Brandon Cobb for loaning this fine example to me for this episode of Odd ware. Especially since this particular PC-FXGA is the DOS/V model, a version that came along shortly after the original PC-FXGA card. That model only worked when installed inside the NEC PC-98 series computers, that used a proprietary 100-pin C bus expansion interface. Whereas this even less common DOS/V model works inside any compatible x86 PC with a free 16-bit ISA slot running MS-DOS or DOS/V as the name implies, which was a special version of MS-DOS designed for the Japanese market.

Its intended for use with version 6.2 in particular, with all its nifty Japanese alphabets and characters that’s loading in on startup. Now, the DOS/V card runs just fine without DOS/V itself. So regular old American English MS-DOS does the trick if you need to, but come on, I wasn’t going to skip an opportunity to install DOS/V and the LGR Wood green PC and enjoy its regional quirks. Like how the backslash is replaced by the yen sign when typing commands for changing directories. I don’t know, I just think it’s neat to look at. Although, not a lot of fun to use unless you’ve got a Japanese keyboard. 

Thankfully I do, cause I have a crippling addiction and Yahoo Auctions Japan, send help. But anyway, yeah. DOS/V reliance on the yen sign and the slash keys being in different spots, makes typing on a western keyboard pretty cumbersome. So, DOS/V is nice to have here with the DOS/V card. Go figure. As for what you get inside of the box, first step is an assortment of paperwork, including some NEC product registration and repair service forms, along with a 24 page black and white instruction booklet going over the essentials of setup, usage, and troubleshooting. All in Japanese, of course.

Yeah, pretty much wore out my phones translation app for this one. Then there’s a single three and a half inch floppy disk containing the DOS/V setup software. A pair of PC-FXGA games, and software releases on CD-ROM and a six button PC-FX game controller, complete with A and B turbo switches. And finally, there’s the PC-FXGA DOS/V card itself. A full length 16-bit ISA card, that’s positively packed its PCB with plenty of proprietary pieces of printed circuitry.

And one of the first things you’ll notice, is this little set of switches for choosing the I/O base address, with the default being 0x300. No plug and play silliness here. Suck it up and do it yourself to avoid device conflicts. And at the core of the card is an NEC V810 32-bit RISC-based CPU running at 21.475 megahertz. Same process are used in the original PC effects console, as well as the Nintendo Virtual Boy, amusingly enough.

The memory situation also mirrors that of the PC-FX with two megabytes of main system memory and a one megabyte ROM. Same with the sound chipset providing 6-bit 44.1 kilohertz stereo output, with dual ADPCM channels and six sample channels. But the graphics, well that’s where things start getting interesting. In addition to the PC-FXs one and a quarter megabyte Hu6270 2D graphics chipset. the FXGA also makes use of an HuC6273 with 2.625 megs of RAM, a 3D chip known as the Aurora.

Yeah, this thing renders 3D polygonal graphics on top of the Motion JPEG FMV and 2D sprite work of the original PC-FX console. 

From what I’ve read, it’s thought to be on par with other 32-bit consoles and graphical capabilities, rendering around 100,000 polygons per second, with full texture mapping flat and gouraud shading, and displaying up to 512 colors at 320 by 224 resolution. Not bad. And of course around here, we’ve got the I/O section consisting of a single connector for hooking up an external breakout box. Speaking of which, here it is. It’s a white plastic box that plugs into the back of the card to provide two controller ports three and a half millimeter audio in and out jacks, as well as connection for composite and S-video output and the cables to go along with it.

Yeah the PC-FXGA, an expansion card for playing games on a PC, doesn’t actually display games on your PCs monitor. It requires a separate display to view anything. As with the standalone PC-FX, the GA card is intended for use with analog NTSC TV sets with no digital RGB option. So, I’m gonna use this little Sony CRT here. And with the control box dangling out the back like some kind of DOS gaming fetish plug, it’s time to hook everything in. Power it all on and try out some odd old games on the equally odd PC-FXGA DOS/V. 

All right. So, everything is all set up and are ready to go here. And let me just go ahead and get the TV powered on so we can see the card doing its thing. And once that gets warm, I’ll just go ahead and turn on the LGR Wood grain PC. And you’ll see here immediately powers on the NEC card without needing any software to tell it to do so. It’s just on. If it gets power, the card is on. And in fact, yeah. You can interact with it.

And the computer hasn’t even booted into DOS yet. So, I wasn’t expecting that. This whole thing works a little differently than I thought it would. It’s kind of just a parasite that leeches power and some resources from the computer to do its thing. But yeah, With DOS/V booted here, were now ready to play some games and software and such. It’s not able to do that yet, cause I don’t have a CD in there. But let me just go over the software installation part really quick, because I mean, this is actually pretty darn straightforward. 

All that the FXGA needs is a couple of files off the floppy disk for DOS to know it’s there, which is installed by selecting a destination drive and directory and selecting the cards I/O address. And that’s pretty much it. Once its complete, you can run the PC-FX program within DOS/V at any time. And it’ll ask you to write a backup file for save games. And by default, it actually tries to put this on a floppy disk in the A: drive. But if you’d rather not bother with that, then all you got to do is go into edit and edit the backup INI file in the PC-FX directory and change it from A to C.

And with that out of the way, were ready to go here. So, I don’t need this anymore. All we need to do is go over into the PC-FX directory and run PCFX. And you’ll see it sort of reboots the card there. Puts up a little message. And yeah, we are ready to run it from the TV. Its apparently a very pleasant message in Japanese there. Something like, Oh, please enjoy the game on your TV. Something like that. And yeah, that’s it. Like, this monitor is now doing nothing. So, really we can turn it off or just leave it there, and it’s just going to display that message. That’s all it does on the PC side of things, at least for just running games and such. So, let’s go ahead and run a game. I’ve got a selection of things that Brandon included. And forgive me, these are all in Japanese. So, the title of this one is...that, at the bottom of your screen.

There’s this and that, that’s a thing. All of these are worth like a lot of money too, from what I gather. There’s this. So, yeah. Kind of a beat em up there. And this right here. So yeah, those are the four titles that I could try out. I don’t know if I’m gonna try all four. I may as well, right?

Yeah, let’s just go ahead and try the shooter one because I love all the different shooters that were on the PC Engine, but for the PC-FX there’s like this one and I think that’s it. Which is rather disappointing. But hey, at least it’s got one.

Once that reads to the D drive, is how I have it set up and we can just go and...Okay, this controller it’s pretty much never been used. So, the thing is all like springy. Anyway, just hit run. Actually, before you do that. it did need to write something to this little memory area the backup RAM or whatever it is. And so, yeah, I just have it configured to go to the C drive. But I have the file there, it’s ready to go. So, that just acts as like you’re save cart of sorts. And now, yeah, now we can just run the game itself and it will access the CD and the save memory area on the C: drive of our computer.

And I think that’s pretty much all its doing with the PC side of things. Now it’s just running stuff straight off of the PC-FX card, which of course means lots of FMV. I mean, as far as FMV goes on a console of this generation, it’s really good. And it’s a shame that that’s pretty much the focus of this console. Yeah. Not cuz I don’t like FMV. there were more games, more gameplay. It seems like all of these that I’ve tried, it’s like 80% FMV like 20% gameplay. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just selection bias going on, but whatever. Yeah, let’s check this out. More FMV, man. Like seriously, just full on anime.

Like I know they’re happy about their robots that are on fire and animation, but I’m ready to shoot some things out of the sky. And I’m gonna engage the turbo switches on the controller cause shooter. And yeah. It’s a shooter on the PC-FX running and the FXGA on a DOS PC. Neat. I like vertically scrolling shooters, but this one just it hasn’t really impressed me so far. That’s fine. I’m not here to review the games. 

I’m just here to show off that this card does things on a computer and its fascinating the way it does it. Or more accurately, doesn’t do certain things. So, you cannot do anything on the PC side when you’ve got this doing its thing over here. As long as this program is loaded, nothing happens. And if you were to escape like leave the program here and go back into DOS or Windows 3.1 or something, It just quits and he goes right back to this. If you try to run it here, it’ll start and then it stops. Now start, and then it’ll stop. Like, that’s it. Like it’ll try to access it but it’s like, Ah, I cant.

And so yeah, it really is relying on the software side to communicate with the CD drive and then some of the memory, I guess. And that’s just how it is. It looks a little suspect if you ask me. So this console the PC-FX, it’s kind of known for having a lot of dating Sims and rather adult games. I don’t know why, but a lot of them made its way onto the system. And there’s only 62 games for the entire PC-FX platform. 

Oops, I don’t have PCFX running, I need that...But yeah, for whatever reason of the 62 game library for the PC-FX, of which this can play all of them. A whole bunch of them are rather adult in nature, at least for YouTube standards. Now, I wouldn’t call this one of those adult games necessarily, but even this one goes a little overboard with the up skirts, in my opinion. So, probably gonna skip this cut scene. And you select your character and then you get to another bit of anime, because of course.

Yeah! CD audio music. And yes, it does pipe the CD audio from your CD drive through your PC sound card, and then the sound card goes out to that breakout box or really into the breakout box and then it goes out from the box to the TV. So yeah, it’s just sort of snaking all the way through things and just passing it through externally instead of internally, like some other cards might. Hey. And there you go. Well, I just died. But yeah, pretty simple little arcade platform or a puzzler thing. For some reason, the CD audio is much louder here than like anything else I’ve played. 

I guess this particular track is just loud. And I’ve turned down the volume in DOS and everything, so I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a fun enough little arcade game I guess. But its colorful. So there you go, PC-FX games. All righty. Well, let’s try this one: Zinky. Isn’t that neat? I got this donated to me recently. Nakamichi five disc CD-ROM changer. It’s a SCSI drive, it’s pretty awesome. I like it. 16 speed for each of them.

Unfortunately, it addresses each of the trays in there as a separate drive. It doesn’t have a way to combine them, to my knowledge. And that’s a little bit of an annoyance, but still, cool CD changer. And another thing is whatever kind of CD-ROM drive you’re using like whatever speed it is, it’ll read it at that speed. So, you can actually get much faster loading with this than you would on a standard PC-FX, because obviously PC drives were in general a lot faster at this point than what was available on consoles. So much anime. 

That is what the system is for. Apparently, they designed it really around like 20-something male anime people. That was in the marketing and the design docs. They were like, Yeah, we want to appeal to the anime guys in Japan. So, here we are, Zinky FX. And yeah, you can select two characters here. Hers is relatively useless from what I found. It just has a really slow gun attack, but he doesn’t. He can beat people up, and that’s a lot more fun.

Look, there’s already people getting beat up. You know, that’s just what this is about. Story things. My apologies for not knowing anything about this. I’m sure some of you will, many maybe. I don’t know. It seems to be a relatively popular thing. All right. Yeah, take that. Take your eyeball from the floor. So, that’s this. Pretty much just seem to fight a bunch of weird looking things one after another, like in rooms. Pretty basic beat em up. But apparently this game is worth like $1,000 or something?

I don’t get it. But hey, I’m sure somebody does. And there are an awful lot of JRPGs on here, but unfortunately most of them don’t seem to be translated from what I’ve seen. Um, perhaps I’ve just don’t know where to look, but I haven’t seen a whole ton of translations. Which for me, that’s kind of a barrier to entry cuz text and talking to people is rather important. See, like you already lost me. All right. Oh, I got choices. Let’s just go with that one. Let’s go with that one. 

Okay. Yeah, this feels like one that would be translated somewhere but I don’t have a translated copy. And in lieu of that, I’m not going to go any further because I’ve got other things to show here like the two games, or well. I guess a game and a program. These are what came in the box or at least this particular one.

Yeah, Same Game FX. This is a PC-FXGA game. So that’s a separate thing that I think takes advantage of some of the chips that are in here. And then, there’s also this right here, project team DoGA. I think it’s called Amateur Teikyou. Take-ee-yo? I don’t know how to pronounce it!

That’s okay. I think this is some kind of an art program. So, these are sealed. Not gonna use those. Were just gonna get some burned versions from archive.org. And I’m going to start with Same Game FX. So yeah, this is one of the only games that was released for this specific platform, the GA platform. Apparently, there were more planned but I think there were only two games that were released officially. Like there were other things, but well get to that. Same Game.

It is indeed a same game. Played a lot of these over the years. Interesting. Yeah look at those, like, 3D character. Well, not characters, just little 3D objects. Little cubes and spinning thingies. I’m assuming that using the GAs 3D chip. I don’t know. But sure, why not?

Probably. Yay, Same Game. I actually do like these. There’s one that I played quite a bit on a PC back in the day. Flux, I think is what it’s called. Just straight up Flux. Well anyway, that’s Same Game. Neat little puzzle game. You can just try to eliminate all the blocks or the objects that happened to be on screen. What a pleasant little game, even if samey. So, that was that. But let’s check out this other one here that it came with. 

The interesting thing about this one compared to the others we’ve tried so far, is that this is a PC-FXGA DOS/V program, and not a game. So, if you try to run it in the PC-FX portion itself, it won’t do anything. Which is why I have to turn it off. So yeah, let’s just go into the D: drive here, and we should be able to get a directory reading. So, its saying that FXGA driver is not installed. We are on I/O address... that one. Yeah, add things. Just giving it a restart and see if it loads whatever it needs to.

Look like it did open up some different things. So, okay. And this is where I start whipping out the translation app. Okay, we’ve got to animation to play here. Oh, I hear music. Ah, time to move the camera around. Oh, I see a weird 3D person. So, this is like a demonstration of its 3D capabilities on the FXGA card. I got a floating box and a human of sorts. Oh, look the shading. So impressive. Flashing imagery warning, I suppose. Oh yeah, this is brilliant. It does just seem to be like a pre-rendered video. So, still it’s pretty awesome. 

Oh man, the capabilities. Yeah, I believe that is kind of what this program is supposed to let you do. It’s like a 3D animation suite where you can design these things and render them out to video. Look at that! PC-FXGA. Again though, that’s just as just like a pre-rendered thingy. So let’s see if maybe on, over here, I know you can’t see it now. But let’s go down to the one that says CGA Dragonfly. It seems to be just another, yeah, *.MIX file. So, this is just pre-rendered. Is there anything you can actually do on here?

Maybe this is just a demonstration CD because I was reading that there is software that it lets you do this on this card. I just don’t know if it’s actually on here. Either way though, this is pretty darn cool. Too Much Information. A Dragonfly. Oh, yes. This is my jam right here. This kind of music, these kind of visuals. What? What a twist! Oh, dinosaurs. You know how long it would take to do this back in the day?

Holy crap, those key frames. You can count them. It’s perfect. Wouldn’t change a thing. Its repetitive sound effects are just the best. Oh, no. Wile E. Coyote moment. Oh, yeah. Rotate em. Just rotate that object. Oh man, what the, Okay. This is the best thing I’ve ever seen on Odd ware. It’s so great. And... that is just art, pure art. Shout out to all of the folks. Oh, that’s wonderful.

All right, so I’m assuming CGA in the context of what is said on the menu stands for computer generated animation, perhaps computer graphics animatic. Seems to only be a collection of like demos to watch. I really thought that this would be a thing where you could interact with it. Everything else just seems to be a... Well, no, that’s an executable. This is actually pulling off some code now. So, now that looks more pixely. This might be a real-time demo. 

Oh, it is. We’ve got Ron and Geo. Oh, look at this. I can change their skin. Yeah, I can select a man. But that’s it, it looked great though. I want to do something with them. I don’t know if I can. And unfortunately, this is the only controller I have. So, I don’t know if you need a second control over there plugged into to get the other guy selected. Let me see if I can just swap ports. Yeah, I can. Okay. Okay. Look at this. I got a Virtua Fighter looking thing going on here.

It does have. Look at that. It’s like Tekken or any of the number of other ones that we’re doing the same thing around them. Yeah, still look at that, 3D characters real time. So, this is definitely an example of what the PC-FXGA could have done. That is more than I bargained for. That’s really cool. Yeah, take that evil clone. 

I mean, for a little tech demo for free, that’s pretty cool. I like how there’s like an explosion for the uppercut. All right, so that’s a real time 3D demo. I was hoping to find at least one on here. Okay, so I think I’ve got one more interactive demo that we can try on this CD. Oh, okay. There’s something slowly loading in here, line by line. You can move around this world of weirdness. Okay, that’s pretty cool. You know, considering it is terrible and janky and broken, but uh hey, 3D interactive world!

I approve. So, that’s the shoot. There’s like no sound or anything. Yeah, that is not a particularly great demo. Still, 3D! That’s not quite what I expected from this disc, but I approve nonetheless, man. That dragonfly dinosaur fantasy animation with the fantastic soundtrack, pure Odd ware magic right there. All right. Well, I suppose that is it for what I’m gonna show in this particular video. Anyway, there is more stuff out there. Some of it, I was hoping to track down and show off here but that’s not been working out over many days of trying now. 

One of them being the other game that was released for the PC-FXGA in particular. The other of two games it’s called Nnyuu. I’m just gonna say its pronounced that way. Yeah, it wasn’t a game that was actually sold on its own or anything. It was included with a programming guide. The footage you’re seeing here was uploaded by Sabre 470, which by the way, definitely check out their blog  YouTube channel. There’s some links in the video description.

The stuff they’ve posted has been extremely helpful in putting together what you’ve seen. And they’ve got lots of videos of direct gameplay captures of the other games and some home brew, as well as a blog full of all kinds of interesting information. And we’ve been in touch and Sabre actually got some of the homebrew over to me. I was gonna try installing it, and I did try installing it. But unfortunately, what happens is this. 

It seems to be that it is relying on this FXDB program, which I did track down a version of and put in here and like, read the batch file and everything to make sure that it was in there. It seems to be a Windows thing. So, Japanese version of Windows 95 or 98 is required it seems. And I don’t have a setup that would allow both the card and that and everything altogether right now. So anyway, check out Sabre 470s channel if you’d like to see those homebrew games in action. I think it’s worth a look. It’s just fascinating to see that there was indeed a scene for this kind of stuff in Japan If nothing else, I’m glad we got to see a dinosaur flying on a dragon fly.

Well, I suppose that is it for the NEC PC-FXGA DOS/V, a very easy to say name and a rather easy to use as well. Easier than I thought it would be. In fact, easier to set up even. I was expecting more along the lines of something like the Creative 3DO Blaster that I covered which was just all sorts of things connected internally to video cards and sound and other things that this just doesn’t bother with. You pretty much just plug it in there. It sucks the life out of your computer while it’s doing its thing, and that’s about it, right?

And you can play PC-FX stuff, as well as the GA stuff. That’s the more interesting things that I wish I had more to show. Like some of the things that are mentioned back here you got DoGa Genie and the PC-FX Game Maker stuff.

Gmaker has all sorts of SDKs and things. It’s just things that I don’t have access to when I was making this video. So, I know there’s more out there. I don’t know how many people bought it. Can’t have been many, because the PC-FX itself was somewhat of a failure. The 98 version of this wasn’t extremely popular either.

And then this one, yeah. It just keeps going down and down and down the list in terms of success, popularity, and potential reached. So, I think that makes a very fascinating piece of Odd ware. And if you’ve got any experience with it at all or some programs maybe that could try out a follow up video of sorts, let me know.  And if you enjoyed this episode of LGR Odd ware, then great. I’ve got plenty more where this came from and more to come in the future, with a new video on all kinds of different topics each week here on LGR. And once again, thank you very much for watching.

Modding a consumer TV to use RGB