my PC-9801RA2
by quirble, last updated january 16 2025
my first PC-98,,, oh god, my wallet may never forgive me
this machine was my first PC-98 as well as my first time ordering something big from Yahoo Auctions. i specifically picked an RA-class because i thought the dual CPU would be cool, and the big 5.25 floppy drives are cool (i had only ever used 3.5s with my old macs before this). what, you've never bought something simply because it looked cool? don't judge! (*￣▽￣) besides, it seemed to be in somewhat decent condition. like pretty much everything else i buy, it was being sold as "junk" (on Yahoo Auctions, "junk" can mean ANYTHING from completely not working to working completely fine), but that didn't concern me too much.
it arrived with a thin sheen of black dirt all over it. this machine was filthy. i tried to see if it would boot... nothing. hm. i was getting voltage but there was no sign of life. to rule out a total failure, i opened it up, but there was nothing immediately jumping out at me. i probed the HDD power connector pins on the side of the PSU (on RA5 models, this would have had a hard drive plug into it) and got... absolutely nothing. the PSU must be toast.
after a short hiatus (wherein i bought the RA51 "to really make sure the psu and motherboard were okay", yeah sure...), i came back to the PSU of this computer, the Tokin PU463. i decided a full recap was in order just to be safe, and after re-learning how to solder again (it had been a little while, okay?), i was back in business and the PSU was fixed.
pi-po! it worked! well that's good. initially the floppy drives left crud on my disks but that also went away after a while.
my plans for this machine are mainly just as a backup for the much sillier PC-9801RA51 i ALSO have, as well as a machine i can run experiments on (like throwing a PC-9801-55 SCSI card in and seeing if I can make a GBSCSI work with it!) since it's kind of a plain machine.
My 9801RA2 ｜ My 9801RA51 ｜ My 9821CX2 ｜ My 9821V166 ｜ other stuff