This has always made me curious ever since I saw this option in Mystic Square's first start-up screen. Like why? The PC-9801-86 sound card (which uses OPNA aka the Yamaha YM2608) was introduced in 1993, which means the soundcard is already about 5 years old by the time Lotus Land Story was released. If Wikipedia is correct, the 86 was included onboard starting way back in the PC-9821, and the PC-9801s before that would be too old for even the second game (only HRtP was able to run decently on a PC-9801 with a 386 CPU).
Now I don't know if the PC-9801 allowed for CPU upgrades like the IBM PC did. But even if it did (and the upgrades possible were extensive all the way up to the 486 clocked @ 66 MHz, necessary for running LLS and MS smoothly) and there are cases of PC-98 computers not having 86 soundcards onboard and only the PC-9801-26K (OPN/YM2203), I still don't know why having the option is necessary. I tried running SoEW in Neko Project II with the sound card set to emulate only the PC-9801-26K, and it ran perfectly fine. There was no option whether to use 26 or 86 sound; the music transparently made itself compatible with the 26K. So why would someone playing LLS and MS at the time want to intentionally run an objectively inferior version of the music tracks..?
I might never know the answer to this question. But at least somebody has asked it, as it seems nobody else did...
