/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7359106
MSX. Also, a lot of software was incompatible for some bizzare reason.

>>7359106
because the japanese computer market was already saturated with machines, dominated by japanese manufacturers. commodore could not get a foothold in the country at all. they tried to by releasing the Commodore MAX/Ultimax but it failed miserably. commodore also tried selling the amiga there too but it was shit on from a great height by the x68000.

Their electionics were superior to foreign ones and they were better suited to Japanese needs, like word processing for kanji. Also nationalism.

>>7359127
The MSX was pretty expensive and not as fast even as the ZX spectrum.

>>7359129
The X68000 was retailed for ¥369,000 ($3000) 2 years after the Amiga ($1200 at launch). At the same year, Amiga 500 was sold for $700/£500. Atari ST and STE were even cheaper than those. I'm not sure how the Amiga and ST wouldn't be competitive or have its own demographic.

The fact that western companies could not get around the Yakuza is a most regrettable accident.

>>7359152
>I'm not sure how the Amiga and ST wouldn't be competitive or have its own demographic.
the japanese, being renowned for being insane racists and nationalists that would make hitler blush, didn't want to support american or european companies. not much has changed in 40 years.

>>7359152
>I'm not sure how the Amiga and ST wouldn't be competitive or have its own demographic.
the japanese, renowned for being insane racists and nationalists that would make hitler blush, didn't want to support american or european companies. not much has changed in 40 years.

>>7359106
Eventually, the Japanese branches of IBM and Microsoft figured it out leading to rise of IBM PC clones in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/V

>>7359106
>why did machines where you couldn't input or display japanese not take off in japan
We may never know

>>7359182
But that OP image proves the otherwise.

Better question. Why did JPCs not sell outside Japan? Until the Internet/emulation no Westerners had ever heard of a Sharp X68000 or NEC PC series.

I think there were some claims of having inferior japanese character encodings but don't quote me on that.

>>7360009
They were expensive. You could buy 4 Atari STs or 3 Amigas with addons for the price of one X68000. NEC PCs would lose to Tandy Colour PCs which were 100% IBM compatible.

>>7359202
>but my post proves i'm retarded
Indeed it does. The machine in that pic can only handle with a tiny portion of the Japanese language and can't run most C64 software. It's also, clearly, not a American or European computer.

>>7359173
>not much has changed in 40 years.

>even though they all run Windows computers

The Japanese domestic PCs are required by market to have fast hardware-based Kanji display acceleration at that time, and most western developers at that time don't even know there is a necessity for processing complex characters encoded with 2 bytes at all.

>>7359106
> MSX
Ironically the M stands for Microsoft, even though the MSX standard never took off in America.

The Shift-JIS charset is defined in early '80s and contains more than 7,000 characters. Every 16-bit Japanese computers at that time had a Kanji font in their firmware, and the typical 16x16 Shift-JIS bitmap font used in 640x400/640x480 screens need more than 256KB.

The character renderer must recognize whether a character is full width (2-byte) or half-width(1-byte) when processing every string (byte buffer). When one tries to delete a character from string, incorrectly detecting full-width character might cause the whole string to be garbled (the half-Kanji problem).

Most western applications at that time, without special consideration, choke on this when running under Japanese/Chinese systems.

In Shift-JIS there are some code points that conflicts with common ASCII, such as full-width characters beginning with a 0x5f '\' or 0x7f '|'. Such characters will choke C standard library or UNIX-based systems without special consideration.

Software-based Kanji display could only catch up with hardware-based systems in speed since early '90s.

>>7359148
>Also nationalism.
Maybe it didn't help that IBM sent foreign corporate suits with interpreters who tried to kill the emerging Japanese computer industry with corporate espionage lawsuits and lobbying for laws that would have killed it. They even got the US government involved to try and pressure Japan into a favorable outcome.

On the other hand, the Japanese had a local industry that was willing to support Japanese character encoding, and more receptive to changes such as the shift-jis standard which was a living document back then (as opposed to the then-standard american way of forcing subpar standards on other countries. For example, how European characters were a dirty hack appended to the ASCII standard that wasn't nearly enough for ALL european characters, so they had to make multiple standards for eastern and western europe, and they were all incompatible.)

It wasn't a hard choice to make.

The Amiga was imported in limited quantities, but it was too expensive, and not compatible with existing software standards.

>>7364796
To elaborate -
I don't remember the specifics, but at the time IBM was trying to kill competition everywhere. One of the major legal precedents in the USA regarding the legality of reverse engineering came from a lawsuit they lost against another American company. Japan was part of these efforts.

There was a push from the Japanese government to encourage the emergence of a computer and software industry in Japan, instead of being beholden to variations of Chinese encoding standards (EUC and the like) they'd use a standard that the Japanese government and industry created to suit their needs (it supports Japanese, Russian, Greek, measurement units, JP-specific postal symbols, has support for English characters and even Western characters through combining characters though this wasn't widely used, etc).

IBM was trying to enter the Japanese market but didn't do too well, so they tried a sting operation against 7 major local companies. A controlled leak, then they sue. Got American intelligence services to spy on their competitors and give them information to try and gain the edge. At the very least, a minister and a few CEOs took the fall, but the desired outcome (everything crumbling, these companies being no longer allowed to operate, licensing fees/monopoly for IBM) didn't happen, and it was allowed to flourish.
The MSX was licensed from Microsoft, and ASCII Corp/Konami turned it into a success. Microsoft actually got involved to try and shut it down in 1990 in Japan, to make room for IBM's ventures with DOS V, or their gimped versions of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 meant for the PC-98 (yes) which ran poorly compared to PC x86 architecture. After that, Microsoft successfully ensnared the Japanese computer market in their ecosystem.

There's a LOT of fuckery going on. Microsoft also tried to make the Sega DreamCast too run on a Windows OS variant. Like ravens, US companies were hounding nip devs who used the LZ77 compression variant even on the SNES.

>>7364796
>Maybe it didn't help that IBM sent foreign corporate suits with interpreters who tried to kill the emerging Japanese computer industry with corporate espionage lawsuits and lobbying for laws that would have killed it.
IBM did that to every computer manufacturer that tried to make IBM compatibles. Look up what happened between IBM and many other computer manufacturers in the late 70s and early 80s. Look up the history of Compaq. People tried to copy IBM's BIOS because of the software compatibility. Hitachi made IBM clones too. Its not exclusive to the Japanese computer industry.

Japanese computer manufacturers were pioneers of high resolution displays so they could show kanji. This was why they'd have, like, 640x400 graphics in the early 80s when most Western computers were 320x200 or less.

>>7362208
The only MSX machines ever sold in the US were a short-lived Spectravideo and a Yamaha unit.

Japanese language requires a high resolution that many western micros didn't have.

>>7362201
>Microsoft manufactures every PC

>>7359148
>word processing for kanji.
This is a huge deal, and part of the reason why Japs still use fax machines even today.

>>7365852
Why don't they just learn english? Alphabets are much more efficient.

>>7365875
kys gaijin piggu

>>7365909
>*stagnates and shrinks your own economy*

>>7365921
>lets jews run your government and economy.

Not enough porn?

>>7366078
>if we have no money the jews wont get a penny from us
Great idea.

>>7359106
Too western

>>7359106
A lot of them just fucking sucked and had little graphics or sound capability

>>7359106
Import taxes