Console of the Month (May 2022) - Turbografx/PC Engine

[JoeAwesome]

The soundtrack needs a mastering pass.

Have you seen this before?

[marurun]

The soundtrack needs a mastering pass.

Have you seen this before?

I have, but I don’t like that he’s charging money for it (feels the same as charging for translation patches), and some of his off-hand social media posts have me cringing a bit. All this despite the fact I suspect I’m the one who put the soundtrack on his radar.

[Syndicate]

...the TurboGrafx-16 is a system that I've always wanted to check out, especially the TurboDuo. Back during Christmas of '89 my parents asked me if I wanted a Genesis or TG16, I chose the Genesis b/c well I'd heard of Sega and no familiarity with NEC and the TG16. It's a decision I still think that perhaps I should have gone the other way. During the early days the TG16 always had a bunch of games that just looked awesome, and I wanted to try out. Stuff like Blazing Lazers, Splatterhouse, Legendary Axe, R-Type, Bonk, Ninja Spirit, and Bloody Wolf were early games that got my attention. Later games like Gate of Thunder, Ys, Lords of Thunder, Air Zonk, Dracula X, and the Solider series made me wish that I could the TG16 sitting right next to my Genesis. Always intended to pick up a Duo once I was in college but got caught up in the Saturn and Dreamcast, sort of a shame considering what TG16 game prices look like now.

...thankfully the Wii's Virtual Console gave me another chance to play some of classics found on the TG16, unfortunately I didn't pick up as many as I probably should have but I'll be rounding that out with some additions on the Wii U as well. I was also to get my hands on the TG16 Mini so I can get my Turbo fix that way and I'm giving some thought to trying to pick up an Analogue Duo so I can get into physical collecting for the system as well. I wish that the TurboGrafx didn't do better in the States, the library was pretty solid imo.

[drewsquire]

I got into the PC Engine through my interest in collecting shooters (shmups, but I won't use the word). The pantry of shooters in the PC Engine library is overflowing, and I made it a quest to collect and play them all. After 10 years, I have reached the odd point of having all the good ones, and the few remaining are not appealing in today's market. I'm not sure if I have it in me to finish, with Everdrives, ODEs, and such making game availability a non issue. I wrote up a ranking of the games I had a few years ago, and since then I have acquired a few more. It is not as detailed as the one here on Racketboy, but it was a labor of love and took quite a while to play and write.
https://www.retrogamerrandomness.com/20 ... m-ups.html
Anyway, the PC Engine hovers in and out of my top three favorite consoles, depending on the day. Genesis, Saturn, and NES are all in the discussion.
Based on my preference for shooters, I gravitated towards the PC Engine instead of the Turbo Grafx. As a result I do not own a single American Turbo game. This has never bothered me, with the one exception being the superior version of R-Type for American release.
Someday I may have the stomach to fork over the asking price for Toilet Kids, but I'm not there yet.

[marurun]

Based on my preference for shooters, I gravitated towards the PC Engine instead of the Turbo Grafx. As a result I do not own a single American Turbo game. This has never bothered me, with the one exception being the superior version of R-Type for American release.

There is one way in which the Japanese split release of R-Type is better. It used a video mode that allowed more sprites on a scan line than the later US release. Shortly after R-Type 1 and 2 were published NEC issued developer guidance to not use that video mode, perhaps for fear that some units might be shipped with internals that might not fully be able to keep up with the demands of that video mode. There's no evidence I've seen, however, that indicates any systems had trouble with either Japanese R-Type release. The later R-Type Deluxe Super CD released in Japan used the slightly less capable video mode we saw in the US release.

[marurun]

So I was going to write up a quick little blurb to help provide some context for this console that's so important to my early gaming years. And so I started writing and couldn't figure out how to stop. After much editing and rewriting, here is my "quick little blurb." So sorry... *spoilered the bulk of it so it doesn't visually kill the thread*

So, we have a few pretty solid articles here on Racketboy about the TG-16/PC Engine, but I'd like to toss in some historical and technological context here.

The Famicom originally released in 1983 with a couple critical strengths over the competition: smooth motion for sprites and scrolling and the ability to have sprites with more than 2 colors. Sega released the SG-1000 the same year the Famicom dropped, but the hardware was much more basic. Scrolling was choppy and sprites were 2-color (appearing single color). It wasn't until 1985 that Sega's Mark III (known as the Master System in the West) was finally up to the challenge of the Famicom, but by then Nintendo's Disk System hardware and early mapper chips were starting to paper over the Famicom's inherent flaws and allow greater focus on those areas where the Famicom excelled.

Meanwhile, Hudson, which had originally been a radio and computer shop, was making a name for itself as a developer of games for early Japanese PCs. They leaned into Nintendo's Famicom, using their inroads in PC development to become Nintendo's first 3rd party Famicom developer. They even had the first 3rd party hit with a port of Lode Runner to the Famicom, released in 1984. Perhaps due to their history with radios and computer hardware, Hudson also dabbled in hardware development. There were always rumors that Hudson had offered their hardware to Nintendo but that seems to be apocryphal. In reality, despite mapper chips extending the capabilities of the Famicom dramatically, Hudson seemed to feel there wasn't a lot of continuing hardware potential left in the Famicom (circa 1986 or so) and they wanted to develop on fancier hardware. Given the Famicom's dominance, there wasn't really any fancier home console hardware to develop for, so they shopped a little trio of chips they had developed around and NEC quickly expressed interest.

The Famicom had 4 full years to achieve market dominance before it had any real competition. Sega tried but didn't have the partnerships to compete. When the PC Engine hit the market in 1987 it was backed by the corporate coffers of NEC, the software development expertise of Hudson, and the technolocial savvy of both. But the PC Engine also came out just over a year before any later competition, which presented Hudson and NEC with some great opportunities and great challenges.

Hudson started with the Famicom as a design template. How could they take this familiar console design and make it better all the way around? And that's basically what the base PC Engine is. What if the Famicom had a much faster, more capable, but still fundamentally similar CPU, a graphics chip that could display many more colors and objects and was much more flexible in handling those colors and objects while preserving that smooth movement the Famicom was known for, and sound capabilities that were similar to the Famicom Disk System's waveform channels but on steroids? The PC Engine was supposed to be able to represent arcade titles well at home but ultimately be developed for in a manner familiar to existing Famicom devs. The PC Engine did have a critical weakness, however, and that was the cost of memory. NEC paired their CPU with more expensive, higher-speed RAM. The Hu6280 can take advantage of fast memory to keep access cycles down and improve overall speed and efficiency, moreso than many of its competitors. There are indications the PC Engine was intended to launch with more RAM rather than its eventual meager 8KiB, but with high-speed memory being very expensive Hudson and NEC chose to focus their memory budget on VRAM: 64KiB.

By contrast, Sega's Mega Drive, which was released just a little over a year later, was derived from Sega's arcade hardware development. RAM prices were starting to slide, allowing Sega to be a little more liberal with memory, and Sega wasn't targeting the more expensive RAM NEC and Hudson were buying for CPU work RAM. Not too liberal, however. The Mega Drive's limited number of color palettes in play is a result of a miniscule CRAM cache (just 72 bytes to store color palettes). NEC's approach could be seen as taking familiar and successful console technology and improving it, whereas Sega's approach was to take one of their arcade hardware platforms and strip it back.

Hudson's approach for the PC Engine made it easy for developers to transition from the Famicom, resulting in rapid library development despite Nintendo's previous dominance in the market. PC Engine system sales rapidly eclipsed Famicom system sales, however, unseating the giant. Despite this, the Famicom continued to have healthy game sales, in part due to the existing userbase. Hudson even continued to develop for the Famicom. Even though the two were now competitors, Hudson saw the Famicom as an important part of their software business and Nintendo saw them not as defectors and traitors but as a respected (and profitable) licensee and peer. The PC Engine sold briskly until the Super Famicom was released in 1990, 3 years after the launch of the PC Engine.

As RAM prices dropped NEC capitalized, releasing the premature and short-lived SuperGrafx and the PC Engine CD-ROM2. The SuperGrafx was an over-reach that came WAY too soon and included a whopping 128KiB of VRAM and 32KiB of RAM. Memory prices were falling, but not fast enough to make the system affordable and it quickly cratered. The PC Engine CD-ROM2, however, was a different story. Despite also being expensive, it had the advantage of providing consumers the ability to play music CDs and CD+G titles and developers the advantage of a much cheaper to manufacture software format. The CD-ROM2 unit included a 64KiB RAM data cache, allowing the system to load the equivalent of a half megabit cartridge from the CD at a time. Paired with an additional 64KiB of RAM dedicated just to ADPCM audio samples and the ability to play CD audio tracks, CD-ROM2 games could begin to generate much more expansive experiences than those found on the more readily available 2, 3, and 4 MiB HuCards, provided you were willing to suffer the loading breaks. The 64 KiB ADPCM cache was used not just for digitized sound effects, but also for low-quality voices, allowing for extended narration and voice work, far beyond the ~60 minute limit for Redbook CD audio. As RAM prices continued to fall and the Super Famicom stole away market share, NEC responded with the Super CD-ROM2 System, which expanded the CD-ROM RAM cache by 192 KiB to 256 KiB total, allowing Super CD titles to load the equivalent of a 2 megabit cartridge in a single go, allowing some well-developed titles to match the visual splendor of the Super Famicom.

Due to the failure of NEC to coordinate a timely and effective US release of the TurboGrafx-16, the details of which I will not get into here, the TurboGrafx-16 remains clouded in a variety of myths in the West. One persistent myth is that the 16 in the TurboGrafx-16 refers to the system having 2 8-bit CPUs. This is incorrect. The system has a single 8-bit CPU. There is also a perception that the 8-bit CPU was much weaker and less capable than it's 16-bit competition. While 16-bit CPUs definitely have some advantages, most game logic doesn't require 16-bit calculations at all, and the PC Engine's 8-bit CPU was just as fast as the competition at processing most game logic, including collision calculations, something which caused massive slowdown on early Super Famicom titles like Gradius III and Super R-Type. In fact, for some calculations the PC Engine's CPU could actually out-perform the system's competition. This isn't to say that the PC Engine doesn't have technical and technological shortcomings from being developed and released 1 and 3 years earlier than its respective competition, but in Japan the Mega Drive never made up lost ground against the PC Engine and was a distant 3rd place contender for that generation of consoles. Other rumors included that the CD-ROM expansions included additional processing capabilities. How else would Lords of Thunder be possible? While this was true for the Sega CD it was not so for the Turbo CD. The most impressive CD and Super CD ROM2 titles were simply the product of increased memory availability and keen programming techniques.

Though we in the West see the TurboGrafx-16 as a failure, the PC Engine was anything but. It was designed to beat the Famicom, but through careful design compromises and marketing it also trounced Sega's Mega Drive, and the design of Nintendo's Super Famicom makes it clear that Nintendo was taking notes from Hudson's success. The PC Engine platform ultimately survived a healthy 7 years, not being discontinued until December of 1994.

[marurun]

If anyone is interested in a particular genre on the TG-16 I'd be happy to make recommendations. Many people get distracted by the shooters and don't see some of the other great titles.

[alienjesus]

I've been crazy busy at work so not had as much time to contribute to this thread as I'd like so far this month, but I enjoyed reading your long post Marurun!

I'm curious to see what you'd recommend too, please do share!

[marurun]

I'm curious to see what you'd recommend too, please do share!

What's a genre of interest that you'd like some recommendations for?

[alienjesus]

I'm curious to see what you'd recommend too, please do share!

What's a genre of interest that you'd like some recommendations for?

Platformers are always a favourite, and I'm curious about some of the run n guns on the system too. I know there's a few but they always kind of blend into 1 game in my mind.