RETRO LAB / RESEARCH
Old floppies, strange formats, and the art of keeping a game alive.
Notes from an exploratory translation and remaster study involving the 1990 NEC PC-98 evolutionary RPG, its disk images, and historical game data.
Old games are often much more interesting on the inside than their screenshots suggest. A forgotten file extension, a custom graphics format, an unusually stubborn text table—each is a small archaeological site.
I have an exploratory preservation and remaster research project focused on 46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinka Ron, the 1990 NEC PC-98 evolutionary RPG. It is distinct from my original game EPOK, and it is not a claim of ownership over the historical work.
First, identify exactly what is on the disks
The research archive documents five PC-98 floppy images and their structure: a user disk, a launcher disk and chapter/media disks. The catalog distinguishes executable files, maps, graphics resources and other data. That sort of inventory comes before any romantic talk of a remaster.
Then the real detective work begins: file-system inspection, character encodings, text pointers, graphic formats, palette behavior, and the parts of the game whose meaning only becomes obvious when you run them in their original environment.
A translation pipeline is an engineering pipeline
A useful translation workflow is not just swapping Japanese text for English. It needs repeatable extraction, stable identifiers, a verified translation source, reinsertion, font/layout handling, and comparison against the running game.
Existing fan translation work is part of the historical record and deserves credit. My interest is in understanding and improving the preservation tooling and presentation—not pretending someone else’s translation was my invention.
What does “remaster” mean here?
It might mean a cleaner way to experience translated text. It might mean better menus, readable output, robust save handling, or a version that does not require a graduate course in abandoned Japanese computer hardware to understand. The technical possibilities are broad; the public release options are much narrower.
The working notes also include separate SNES ROM analysis and content-authoring experiments. Those should not be conflated with the NEC PC-98 project: different hardware, different file formats, different engineering problems.
The important boundary
This is research in progress, not an announced commercial remake, licensed release or public download. The underlying games and artwork remain owned by their respective rights holders. Any redistribution or public release would require appropriate rights review and permissions.
For now the point of the project is to learn, document, and preserve the technical trail. That is interesting enough for a notebook on its own.
The machine may be obsolete. The engineering ideas inside it are not.
Personal commentary and work-in-progress thinking. Historical workplace material is used only as private research context; this page does not disclose private operational records. Descriptions of planned features are not claims of released software.