NP2kai

NP2kai (Neko Project II kai) is a PC-9800 series emulator maintained by AZO. It is a modified version of Yui’s Neko Project II that regularly merges the improvements from Neko Project 21/W, so it offers much of the same emulation outside Windows.

It emulates the PC-9801 and PC-9821 families, including the i386 CPU core with FPU, CD-ROM, IDE hard disks, the common sound boards such as the PC-9801-86 and Sound Blaster 16, and MIDI output. It can run MS-DOS and Windows 9x and NT guests.

NP2kai is best known as the PC-98 core for RetroArch, which runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS and is built automatically by the libretro buildbot. It can also be built as a standalone SDL or X11 program on Linux, macOS and other systems. The project is still maintained, with its latest update in January 2026, and its source code is on GitHub under the MIT licence, with some GPL parts.

The easiest way to get NP2kai is through RetroArch’s online updater. There are no official standalone downloads that can be tracked automatically, so this page has no download archive yet. See the NP2kai GitHub repository for the source code and build instructions.