[oddly laid-back tunes] - Greetings, and welcome to LGR Oddware, where we're 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 ¥46,000 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 Oddware. 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. It's 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 Woodgreen 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 phone's 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-FX's
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 PC's 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 kinda 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. [music softly fades] 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 Woodgrain 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. [explosive PC-FX startup sound] 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, we're 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
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 card's I/O address. And that's pretty much it. Once it's 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, we're 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. It's apparently a very pleasant
message in Japanese there. Something like, "Oh, please
enjoy the game on your TV." Something like that. [PC-FX logo explodes again] 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 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 sproingy. 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
your 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 it's 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. I do, but at the same time I kind of wish 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. [intense music] [ships exploding] And yeah. [laughs] 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 it's
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. [keyboard clicks] 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 can't." 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. All right, so let's go
ahead and try this one. 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
upskirts, in my opinion. So, probably gonna skip this cut scene. [energetic anime tunes] Yep. And you select your character and then you get to another bit
of anime, because of course. [playful music] 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. [playful music] 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. [music, arcade-y sounds] Yeah, it's a fun enough
little arcade game I guess. But it's 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. [dramatic music] 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. [laughs in ignorance] I'm sure some of you will,
many maybe. I don't know. It seems to be a relatively
popular thing. All right. [dramatic music, fight noises] 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. Nope 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. We're 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 we'll get to that. Same Game. [playful music] Okay. [playful music] It is indeed a "same game." [laughs] 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 that's
using the GA's 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. [samey chuckling] 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, it's 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. [laughs] So, this is like a demonstration
of its 3D capabilities on the FXGA card. [soft music] I got a floating box and a human of sorts. [laughs] 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. [soft music] 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. [laughs] 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. [laughs] Oh, yeah. Rotate 'em. Just rotate that object. Oh man, what the, Okay. [synthy dragonfly music] This is the best thing
I've ever seen on Oddware. [chuckle of disbelief] This one animation right here. [laughs] [LGR slowly loses it] [continued dinosaur dragonfly laughter] 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 realtime 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. Does it have a... It does have. Look at that. It's like Tekken or any of the number of other ones that were 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. [chuckles] 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. [random explosions] 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. Oh. Whoa. 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 Oddware 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 it's
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 470's 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 for a few short years in the late 90s. 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 Oddware. 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. Either way though, thank
you very much for watching. [jazz music] And if you enjoyed this episode
of LGR Oddware, 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.
