PC-98

The NEC PC-9800 series are 16/32-bit computers from NEC Corporation. It marked a shift away from the Z80-based PC-88 to the x86 architecture. Just like their predecessor series, they were known for their unique sound hardware by YAMAHA, and games kept the systems popular. They were likely never released outside Japan in the series lifespan, except for the APC III.

Status

ReactOS is not ported to PC-9800 series yet and here are some rough estimations if you want to port it.

You can run ReactOS only on i586 class CPUs and above, so that means you can run it on any of the models with a Pentium CPU. Keep in mind ReactOS requires at least 64 MB of RAM. It's recommended to use NEC PC-9821Ra43 with a Celeron CPU @ 433 MHz which is the last model in the series.

Hardware

The PC-9800 series use a custom hardware C-bus (later models do use PCI) and a firmware that is completely different from a Standard PC BIOS, so a new HAL should be created.

In Windows 2000 there are four known HALs for this platform:

File Name	HAL Name
hal98up.dll	PC-9800 System Clock 10MHz
hal98tmr.dll	PC-9800 System Clock 10MHz (support 2nd Timer)
hal98mp.dll	NEC PC-9800 MPS HAL
hal98apc.dll	NEC PC-9800 APIC HAL

PC-9800 series hard disks are usually formatted with FAT12, but they use 1024 bytes per sector as opposed to the PC's 512.

Emulation

• Neko Project 21/W is a NEC PC-9821 series emulator which can run Windows 2000. It potentially can be used for ReactOS PC-98 port development and testing.
• SL9821 is a NEC PC-9821 series emulator with partial compatibility with Windows 2000 (no sound, no network, IDE issues). ROM image files are required to run SL9821.
• QEMU/9821 also exists, but it seems not maintained anymore, and does not run Windows 2000.

See Also

• Windows 2000 booting on NEC Lavie PC-9821 Nr15 (Pentium, 96 MB RAM)
• Windows 2000 booting on NEC PC-9821 RvII26 (SSD, 640 MB RAM)
• Linux/98 (Plamo Linux) on NEC PC-9821 V12 (96 MB RAM)
• Neko Project 21/W (in Japanese)
• Neko Project 21/W - Windows 2000 installation guide (in Japanese)
• SL9821 (in Japanese)
• QEMU/9821 for Windows (2012/08/20)
• ROMs for QEMU/9821
• Overview of PC-98 hardware and BIOS architecture
• Example output of the lspci command
• FreeDOS(98) kernel source code
• Discussion on BetaArchive
• Video: Installing Windows 2000 in Neko Project 21 (PC-98) (Better quality video can be found there.)