I have only seen one NEC PC-98 in my life, and naturally it was in Japan.. Wiki has a great article, (naturally), basically it was an intel powered IBM incompatible system, that ran an adapted version of MS-DOS localized to Japanese. It wasn’t until the introduction of Windows 95, did these machines die out, as 95 could be localized pretty well..
Anyways, after googling around to see who linked my builds of Qemu, I found this site, by Takeda Toshiya that includes patches and binaries for PC-98 emulation via Qemu!
I understand the PC-98 had quite a following for all kinds of games as people shifted away from the Sharp X68000.. Who also announced last week that they would exit the PC market all together.
Any idea why don't they merge it into the main qemu branch? A conflicting license?
I have no idea… I'd suspect that part of it is using a real BIOS that probably isn't GPL'd or LGPL'd..
But I'm only speculating.
The BIOS can be a problem. But if it were just BIOS they wouldn't need their own git tree.