In the 80s there was a global war between Europe, the US and Japan for the dominance of the PC market. The micro computer as it was known was a race for supremacy between the giants like IBM, Commodore, Sinclair and other companies like Apple, Atari and Fujitsu, Toshiba, Hitachi and NEC.
However if you were looking for intense graphics and gaming, the NEC PC-98 was the top of the line. With incredible colors and graphics it rival any of the other PCs at the time. The surround sound and the color sprites were the envy of many of the gamers on the west and around the world.
NEC also known as Nippon Electrical Corporation, was one of the heavy hitters on the PC market on the 80s. The 98 line was a great addition to the Japanese market which offer very innovative ways to handle the complex Japanese text on to the operating systems at the time. The NEC 98 ran a very modified version of MS DOS, commonly known as the PC-9800 MS DOS or Japanese MS DOS. NEC's version integrated the Standard Kanji Specification deep into the OS kernel and IO.SYS layers from version 1.25/2.0 onward. The display and text was handled by a specialized dual _M_uPD7220 Graphics Display Controllers with dedicated hardware text VRAM for 16-dot Kanji fonts.
The NEC 98 was able to show great color display and wide spectrum of colors on screen. While early Western IBM PCs relied heavily on CGA graphics (which was severely limited to 4 colors at low resolutions or crude 2-color high-res modes) and were primarily designed for text spreadsheets, the PC-98 featured dedicated planar Video RAM (VRAM) capable of crisp 640×400 resolution with 16 simultaneous colors out of a 4,096-color palette. This allowed Japanese developers to produce sharp, detailed character art and text-heavy visual novels long before VGA standards unified Western PCs.
Standard Western PCs of the 1980s were limited to a rudimentary, single-channel PC speaker "beeper" for sound effects. In contrast, the PC-98 ecosystem rapidly adopted powerful C-Bus sound boards featuring Yamaha FM synthesis chips (such as the YM2608 / OPNA). These boards provided multi-channel FM music, programmable sound generators (PSG), and built-in ADPCM hardware channels for digital rhythm and percussion, giving PC-98 games near-arcade-quality soundtracks while Western PCs were still silent or relying on basic PC speaker ticks.
The necessity of handling thousands of Kanji characters meant the PC-98 utilized robust text processing and dedicated hardware routines. This directly influenced the dominance of complex, text-heavy text adventures, complex RPGs, and dating sims/visual novels that required advanced script-handling engines far more sophisticated than what typical Western DOS software utilized at the time.
In general the PC-98 was one of Japan best guarded secrets in the 80s, and their very developed gaming ecosystem is what inspire the gaming culture we know Japan for. Unfortunately the 90s wouldn't be as kind to NEC as the 80s, and they will face a lot of hurdles from their pricing to their development of games and overall dominance on the computer market. While Sony did break into the West on the late 90s with their Vaio computers as well as Sharp and Fujitsu with laptops and others. It was clear the West on the 90s was dominated by companies like DELL, IBM/Lenovo and of course Apple.