Pc98 Fdi

Many historical image sets of PC98 software store them in 'BKDSK' HDM format, but at the time the FlashFloppy firmware only supported FDI images. A converter was needed to convert them. Most people used the closed-source (AFAIK) Virtual Floppy Image Converter tool, which is excellent. File name: Size: Last updated. PC98 The Black Onyx English v1.0 RC1 (Character Disk).FDD: 214 KB: 05.03.17 13:55:52 PC98 The Black Onyx English v1.0 RC1 (Game Disk).FDD.

Anex86 a NEC - PC98 Emulator on the Windows platform PC98 emulators list. Anex86 is a PC98 emulator for Windows that surprisingly has a GUI that's in English, so you don't have to blow your mind trying to figure out what you're doing.

If you’re new to the world of PC-98 emulation, here are some tips.

First up, a small explanation of the PC-9800 series of personal computers. What you’re emulating is a really old Japanese computer, basically. It comes with floppy disk drives and hard drives, which are the main methods you use to actually load up games and other software.

For the purposes of emulating, you’ll generally need two things. The first is an emulator which we’ll get to later, and the second will be either a set of floppy disk images or a hard disk image. These will come in a variety of formats, though all should work in any of the emulators.

Floppy Disk Images: FDI, HDM, NFD, D88, etc.
Hard Disk Images: HDI, NHD, SLH, etc.

So, now that you know what these extensions mean and what kind of files/disks you’re going to be using, the next step is getting your emulator running.

Option 1: Neko Project II

Neko Project II is a great emulator for PC-98, but you’ll need some tips on optimizing it so that it runs much more smoothly.

First, download np2fmgen.7z. A recent version can be found here with no password. Or for the latest version, head over to this link. You’ll want both the np2fmgen.7z as well as the fmdllset.7z a little further down the page. The first one is the main emulator itself, and the second one is for better sound quality. It takes a little bit of setup but it’s worth it for proper ADPCM output in games like Rusty.

You’ll also want to download a font (trust me) so that NP2 can display Western characters more easily. This one works well. Drop that in the same folder you put NP2 in and then launch np21.exe.

(If you want to know why np21.exe specifically and not any of the other executables in the folder, there’s a good breakdown of what each version emulates here at the Heroes of Legend forum.)

Once you’ve got NP2 open, click Emulate -> Font… and choose the font.rom file you got from here. Next, you’ll want to click Emulate -> Configure… which will take you to a nice new menu with a few options listed. The main one you’ll want to change here is in the CPU section. Try changing the number of cores in the dropdown list to something like 32 is a decent number. The faster the better, generally, but 32 works just fine for most things. The other options here aren’t as important, but I do suggest increasing your Sound‘s Rate to a higher number like 44k or 88k. Hit OK and get out of that menu.

Next up is just a quick click on Device -> Memory -> 13.6MB, because why not? Some games will require more memory so it’s easier to just get the largest available option here set so you don’t have to worry about it too much later.

Last is getting rid of the scanlines. If you want them feel free to ignore this part, but if you want to get rid of them click on Screen -> Screen Option… and put a check in the Use skipline revisions option, and change the Ratio to the max number (255).

If you want to enable the fmgen.dll that you downloaded above as well, this paragraph is for you. Otherwise, skip it and move on. It’s optional but recommended. If you’re still reading, close your emulator and navigate back to the folder where you put it. Inside you should find the files for the emulator as well as the grouping of FMGEN DLL files that you downloaded from the link above. If you didn’t do that, go get those now because this won’t work without them. After that, look for an INI file (probably np21.ini if you’re doing our suggestions.) Open that with Notepad or whatever text editor you like, and add a new line under the [NekoProject21] section that says – FMGenDll=fmgen.dll. Save the INI file and then close it. Restart np21.exe and you should now see be able to go to Devices -> Sound -> fmgen.dll to enable the external sound generator. Once you’ve done that, you’re all set!

Now you’re ready to actually start playing some games!

Generally this entails plugging the first disk (FDI) into FDD1 and the second disk (FDI) into FDD2, or plugging your hard drive (HDI) into Harddisk -> IDE #0 and then hitting Emulate -> Reset. Most games will launch automatically from there.

Common controls are the the numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8 on the numpad, arrow keys, enter, space, ctrl, z and x. Some games require you to use your mouse, so when that happens hit F12 and it’ll force NP2 to accept your mouse’s input properly. (Also, hit F12 again to get out of that mode.) If your keyboard doesn’t have a numpad you might want to look into getting either Joy2Key to get rebind other keys to numpad, or trying out Anex86 which allows you to rebind the keys in its configuration settings.

Option 2: Anex86

Anex86 is another acceptable PC98 emulator, but it’s older and less powerful. It might be a better option if you don’t have a numpad and want to rebind your keys without messing with Joy2Key. Download it here, and download the Japanese font on the same page, extract it and place that in the same directory. Now open up the emulator, hit Config -> Font, and select the anex86.bmp font you just downloaded. Now close it and you can start playing.

Load floppy disks into the FDD1 and FDD2 fields, or hard disks into the HDD1 and HDD2 fields, and check the box HDD -> FDD if you’re using hard disks.

Anex86 runs fine pretty much out of the box, but there are still some improvements to be made. (TODO: Configurations for emulator speed.)

GitHub

Contents

Download

Changelog

– Pachy98 can now generate config json files. Syntax: ./pachy98 -generate Disk1.fdi Disk2.fdi Disk1Patched.fdi Disk2Patched.fdi
– First release also for Mac OS X.
– Add support for FDD and SLF disk images.
– schema.json is now bundled into the application, rather than a loose file.
– Fix a false complaint about invalid translation versions.

– HDD images can now be auto-detected even when the floppy version contians a unique file not found on the HDD.
– Fixes a crash that involved a missing DLL on some systems.
– Significant code refactoring and improvements by @meunierd, leading toward future Mac/Linux support.
– Pachy98 .json configs are checked against an included json schema.

– Pachy98 will now properly find and patch game files located in separate disk directories.
– Pachy98 can now detect disk volumes.
– Added support for XDF and DUP images, allowing users to patch Sharp X68000 disk images.
– A “mixed” type disk is no longer required in the image with id 0.
– The “options” array is no longer required.
– Pachy98 now skips malformed .json config files, instead of crashing when it accesses them.

Overview

Pachy98 is a tool to help automate patching floppy/hard disk images for end-users in a more efficient manner than simply utilizing xDelta or IPS alone.

Using a standard xDelta or IPS patch to target a specific disk image is a pretty error-prone way to modify PC games. These games usually store save files on a disk, which means saving the game will change the disk’s checksum, preventing a patch from recognizing it. Users either have to hope they find the specific disk images that is being targeted by the patch, or the creator of the patch will have to make patches for every version of the specific disk image floating around the internet. Not fun for either party.

With Pachy98, a patch creator may target specific files to be patched from a given disk. The files on the disk are less likely to be different and more easy to patch, making it so that an end-user could have one of many dumps, or even make their own dump of a disk, and Pachy98 could still target and patch the necessary files correctly while ignoring any differences on the rest of the disk (save files, for example).

How’s it Work?

First, the patch creator figures out what files they need to modify to achieve their goal with the game or software. In our case, that’s translating the game into English. Once done with the modifications to these files, the patch creator will then create xDelta patch files for each of the files that they modified and create a config file to tell Pachy98 what files need to be patched on which disks and distribute this config file and the patch files to the end-user. The end-user will take these and put them in their Pachy98 directory with their own personal images of the game/software, then run Pachy98.

Pachy98 will check its root directory for any disk images or bare files as instructed by the config file and ascertain which of the images contain the files that need to be patched. It will ask the user if the images are correct, and if so, it will start the patching process.

At this point, Pachy98 operates like a batch file and runs a bunch of command line instructions using two separate programs. The first is NDC, a Japanese command line utility which we use to look inside of images and extract/delete/import files from and into the specified images. The second is xDelta itself, which applies the patches for each of the files as specified in the config file from the patch creator. Once it has applied the proper patch to each of the files the patch creator specified in their respective disk images, the end-user will now have a freshly patched disk image.

It is worth it to note that backups are made in the Pachy98/backup directory in case the patching process fails or you want to use the pre-patched images again.

Pachy98 for Patch Creators

If you want to use Pachy98 to distribute a translation or modification to end-users, then this section is for you! If you just want to apply patches to your games, you don’t really need to read any further.

Does Pachy98 support the disk formats you’ll be targeting? All common PC-98 disk formats are supported, along with many used in other retro Japanese PC games.

If so, first you’ll need to generate an individual xdelta3 patch for each of the files you’ll want to patch. Syntax for creating a patch with xdelta3.exe is as follows:

Gather all the patches and put them in Pachy98’s “patch” directory.

Next you’ll want to write a Pachy98 config file.

We’ve prepared a commented sample config file here: Pachy98-sample.json. Alternatively you can look at the concrete examples of the config files we’ve used before:

If you take a look at the sample config file, you’ll see that first you’ll need to include information about the patch itself in the info object. The required variables here are “game”, “language”, “version”, and “author”. These will be displayed to the user when they start up Pachy98 using the config file and help the user to know exactly what it is your patch is going to be doing. Pretty self explanatory.

The other optional variables in the info object are “authorsite”, “versionurl”, and “downloadurl”. “versionurl” is used internally by Pachy98 to check to see if the user is using the latest version of your patch. Pachy98 will check the first line of the file at that URL for a string of numbers, and then compare that to the patch version that you specified above. If the file’s version is lower than the version at that URL, the user will be notified that there’s a newer version available at “downloadurl.” This user can continue applying the older patch they have if they wish.

Here’s an example of an info object that you’d normally see at the top of the JSON config:

The next thing you’ll want to do is tell Pachy98 which files to patch, and where those files should be. We’ll use E.V.O. again for this example, since we needed to maintain support for users that had 4 floppy disk images, as well as users that had one hard disk image.

First, you’ll need to create an images array. Our array for E.V.O. will contain 4 objects. Since we want our patch to target either one HDD image or four floppy disk images, we’ll use the “mixed” media type for the first element. This tells Pachy98 that if it can find a hard disk image containing all of the files listed for it in this particular element, then ignore the floppy disks in the config. Otherwise, try the floppy disks.

Here’s an abbreviated example of a “mixed” type object inside of an images array, and 3 extra blank floppy disks.

As you can see, there are four elements in the array, one for each of the disks with the mixed media type including both a disk and a hard drive type. This tells Pachy98 all it needs to know about the disk types to expect from end-users. The last step here is filling out that “files” array and telling Pachy98 what files to expect. This can generally be a simple array of files with the names of the xdelta patches you created above, or you can use a number of options to allow for a much more customizable patch.

To continue with our E.V.O. example, one of the things we ran into was that the game had to be hacked to run from a hard disk image. This created two different 46.EXE files with different checksums, and we wanted to make sure that if a user was patching a hard disk image of the game, they need to have their 46.EXE patched to the HDD-compatible version if necessary. To accomplish this, we added a failsafelist patch type that will try to patch 46.EXE first to the hacked hard disk version necessary to play on a hard disk, and then patch that resulting file with our English text. This is good because if that first patch fails it doesn’t really matter, as the user could have a proper hard disk image with that particular hack already applied. The final patch has to succeed though, otherwise we know the user isn’t using any version of the game we’re expecting, and patching fails.

Here’s an example of that inside of the files array, as well as a standard file patch.

You’ll need to create an entry in files for every file you want to patch and include the corresponding patch or option, like this. It can get rather long, so you may want to try to generate the list with a script, depending on how your toolset works. Not necessary, and you can make these by hand of course.

That’s the basic information you’ll need to create these JSON config files, but there are still a few more options that you’ll want to know about! We’ve included a method of asking end-users to choose certain customizable aspects of your patch.

Say you’ve done a cool thing but it only works on one set of emulators, but you still want to support other emulators and also include a version that doesn’t do that one thing. Luckily, we’ve got a good example in this, since we had to do just that for Rusty. You’d first need to add an element into the options array at the bottom of the config file. The “id” can be anything you want, but the “type” will have to be one of a couple of options here. The main one we’re concerned with for this is “boolean”. The element in the options array will look like this, and the “description” will be the question that the end-user is prompted with.

In the above example, the user would see this question before patching and be given the option to choose yes or no. The next thing you’ll need to do is find the specific files that need to be one way or the other and modify their entries in the proper files arrays to look something more like this.

Notice that the “id” variable is the same as the “id” variable in the options array. This tells Pachy98 that the way the user answers the yes or no question affects which of the two patches are applied here. You can use as many options as you want and customize things as much as you want, but only with yes or no questions at present.

There’s also a more obscure hard-coded option that helps if you’re patching something that just barely fits on the disks. If you have an option with “id”: “delete_all_first” and “type”: “silent”, the patcher will delete and insert the files in batches, rather than deleting and inserting one after another. Strange, but necessary for patching Rusty floppy disks, as it turns out.

(These are just the options we’ve needed to implement for our projects. Let us know if there’s any other options or functionality that would be helpful to you!)

Pc98 Dead Of The Brain

As is, that’s really all you need to know to make a config file. One useful tool that we recommend if you’re doing this by hand is the JSON Validator over at jsonlint.com. Your config file will have to work when pasted in there in order for it to work with Pachy98.

You can always grab any of our patches or config files and just modify them to work for your patches as well, just make sure you pay attention to the formatting and it’ll all be fine!

Pc98 Fdi Hdi 変換

A Note on the Name

Pachy98 is named for E.V.O.‘s Pachycephalosaurus. Someone pointed out to us that Windows activates UAC whenever a program has “patch” in the name, so we wanted something that would almost have “patch” in it.

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