The PC-98DO+ sounds good on paper. It's distinguishing point is that it can run PC-9801 and PC-8801 software from a single computer. The DO purportedly stands for "dual operation" but I just call it "PC-98 do". You know, "do", like the word, "do". I was told this is wrong and was laughed at.

It's one of those big-box PC-9801 style machines with the DO+ labeling on the front of the case and a dedicated keyboard. It's not gorgeous or anything, but it's alright. Probably one of the nicer-looking PC-98 machines. Mine had some scratches, but nothing too bad.

The keyboard was slightly yellowed, but overall pretty clean.

I got mine as part of a moderately large lot. This is not anywhere near all of the stuff it came with, but a lot of the other stuff was cables and doo-dads. This is the stuff I kept (at least for a while), the system itself with the official keyboard, and the external 3.5" dual floppy drives. It has two CPUs, with two modes each, offering clock speeds from 4MHz - 16MHz in 4MHz increments. On the PC-98 side, in addition to the stock 640KB of RAM, if you have the right card, you can add up to 8MB (I think that was the limit). It is also possible to add a SASI hard drive to the machine, though I think the limit was 40MB. If you think of it as a PC-98/PC-88 gaming machine, it seems pretty robust, but the PC world was far higher-spec than this by 1990, when the machine was released.

Mine powered up and booted into ROM BASIC on both the PC-98 and PC-88 sides. And it started to boot games in both modes, too, but then I realized that not quite all was not well. It would play single disk games just fine, but it wouldn't recognize the second floppy drive. I did some very professional "open it up and see" type stuff and determined the problem was most likely that the read/write mechanism of the drive head had been completely ripped off.

I decided the best course of action was to get a PC-98DO (not DO+) and swap one of the floppy drives. But I wasn't necessarily in a hurry, I had a couple of aces up my sleeve. For example, I had those external floppy drives in perfect working order. This was good for loading MS-DOS and a couple of games I had on 3.5". Here's a Castlevania-inspired game called Rusty. This game is dog-slow at 8MHz, but works pretty good at 16MHz.

Not only that, but this thing came with a hidden surprise, it had a Henkan-Bancho Compact Flash to SCSI adapter. It can accept up to 40MB hard drive images on the CF and use it to boot the system. This was great for testing and getting a working environment up and going.

Game compatibility is, believe it or not, not that big an issue for me. Each system can run the games that it can run, and if that rules out some 98 and 88 games, well, I can just as well play them on other systems. I like this machine for its unique points.

But here's where it falls short for me. I thought it was so cool to have the internal hard drive. I was imagining installing some big-name titles on the hard drive and playing them without the hassle of disk swapping, etc. that must be performed on most other systems. But it wasn't to be. Almost all of these titles could not be run from the hard drive. There were no installation option, and I tried a variety of methods of putting the files from the floppy drive onto the hard drive, but they absolutely would not run. Even Rusty, which *does* have a hard drive install option, still required two floppy disks to be inserted in order to run.

The strange thing to me is that with the X68000, the situation was very similar. Almost all games wanted to be run from floppy, but the X68000 community has come up with a great deal of workarounds to get games to load. I don't know if it's 100%, but there is a vast library prepared to be run from the hard drive. I expected similar for the PC-98 system, but I came up with surprisingly little, and what was available had nothing to do with the kind of games I wanted to run.