NEC Corp and its NEC Home Electronics unit have introduced enhanced products for the PC-9801 line of personal computers. NEC has announced a new version of Microsoft Corp’s Windows based on Windows 3.1, which includes some NEC specials such as its own FontAvenue as well as TrueType Japanese outline fonts, and incorporates Microsoft Windows Sound System with pulse code modulation sound synthesis for speech. NEC is promoting its 98Mate lines as the most suitable for Windows, providing it factory-installed on this machine, which also incorporates a Windows accelerator board as standard. The retail price of the 98Mate models, which come in versions with 25MHz 80486SX up to a 66MHz 80486DX2 range from $4,055 to $7,960, and NEC hopes to sell a total of 400,000 units of these 9800 series models over the next year. NEC also reported that in the two days since the release of its new version of Windows 3.1 a couple of weeks ago, it sold 65,000 copies, almost matching the total shipment of 85,000 copies of the previous version for the whole 1992 fiscal year. The Japanese Windows 3.0 was buggy and inadequate, and 3.1 is seen overall as a much better bet.
