The name, "PC Engine" apparently sounded ridiculous for the western market, but the name itself made sense in Japan and with context. NEC are most famous for the PC-88 and PC-98 series and the founders of Hudson Soft were apparently train enthusiasts. In fact, they named their company after their favorite train line, the Hudson locomotives. Hence why their company is called Hudson Soft.
My buddy had a TG-16. I LOVED Bonk and Bonk 2. He had a racing game as well that was pretty good. I don't recall any other games, including Keith Courage at the time. We mostly played Bonk. I wanted to get one of the mini's, but wasn't able to get one for non-gouged prices, and my desire went away after a while. Thanks for the video!
Did you ever play Bloody Wolf? It was a 2 player Double Dragon style of view, but it was like a realistic Contra (no aliens). I really remember the intro level where you fought these dudes in motorcycles.
I picked one up in the early 90s when it was selling for about $110 and the Genesis was about $125 at the time. I convinced my cousin to get the TurboGrafx instead of the genesis so we could trade games. He kept his for about a week and returned it for a Genesis, kept that for about a month and then returned it and ended up with a SNES. I kept mine though. I really like the unique sound chip that it had. It sounded nothing like any other consoles out at the time.
In videos like this I would always like to see mote technical specs. How many sprites, colors, sound channels? CPU clockspeed, RAM, VRAM, etc. - I cannot exactly say why, but hard facts of these old machines are just very interesting to me. Perhaps brcause I am a child of the big console war... Who knows! Anyway, I like your videos because they have a nice tempo and are short enough to enjoy. Keep it up!
@TheDsgfdssd How do you measure the bitness of the GPU? I mean does the PC-Engine GPU do 16bit arithmetic or does it have 16bit registers? The PC-Engine audio is actually Wavetable Synthesis not FM Synthesis, i think.
CPU: 7.16 MHz 65C02 based CPU RAM: 8 KiB VRAM: 64 KiB Sprites: 64 in total up to 16 per line (depending on the video mode the number can be smaller) Resolution: anywhere from 256x224 to 512x224 BG layers: 1 Colors: 9 bit RGB palette, 16 15+transparency color palettes sprites, 16 15+transparency color palettes BG layer. Audio: 6 audio channels, each containing 32 5-bit samples, or can be used in DAC mode for PCM sample playback
The 8bit cpu was used for synchronization of the graphics and sound, but not used to create graphics and sounds. Like a timing reference to keep everything in sync.
The graphics hardware on the PC Engine was very good, especially the number of color pallets available. It had 16 pallets with 16 colors each. Compare that to the Genesis which had 4 pallets with 16 colors each. TBF the Genesis VDP supported up to 16 pallets but the pins to access external color RAM were not connected to anything on the PCB though this feature would be used on the System C arcade board that used it as well as the System-18 which used it alongside System-16 graphics hardware to add additional background layers and sprites. The PC engine graphics hardware was split between a tile and sprite generator chip and a color encoder and pixel generator chip. The Supergraphix used two PC-Engine tile and sprite generator chips and a new version of the color and pixel generator chip designed to use two tile and sprite generators at once. In this way they doubled the sprites and background layers while maintaining full backwards compatibility with the PC-Engine.
I was one of the few who was familiar with turbo games when it came out, most people didn't care about it at all so I can see why it had a hard time being successful
I bought it because I was impressed with the graphics and I just got sick of the NES's 8-bit graphics. It was either the TG-16 or a Genesis but I was leaning more towards the TG-16. I kept it for over a year but the lack of good games and the impending release of the SNES was enough to get me to trade it in to cover part of the cost of a SNES. NEC screwed up by not releasing so many great Japanese games outside of Japan. The CD add on was a lot of money too and was another example of a great add on with so many great games in Japan that didn't make it to the US. I eventually picked up a used TurboDuo in the late 90s and the region-free CDs was a big reason to start collecting Japanese games. I also picked up a converter to play Japanese HuCards. It's definitely a great console that was just handled poorly outside of Japan. Even the redesign sucked. I would have much preferred the form factor of the PC Engine with the Turbo controllers, of course. It just needed a built-in 2nd controller port which the lack of it was a huge drawback for it.
Yeah, NEC's big mistake was waiting so long to bring the TG-16 in the US. Head-to-head with the Genesis, it had very few advantages aside from a larger color palette. But if they'd released the TG-16 in 1988 rather than '89, the 16-bit Wars might have looked totally different.
Depending on the workload, the TG-16 actually has a faster CPU than the Megadrive. It runs at the same clock, but is based on the 6502 architecture, which needs much fewer cycles to execute many operations.
Gamesack has episodes covering every NA game two console specific featuring games from all markets. It's overall am excellent channel. Joe the host is probably one of the best video editors on TH-cam and is extremely knowledgeable on all things A/V.
Devil's Crush is still, to this day, one of my favorite pinball games. Absolutely bleeds cool. Fantastic soundtrack, awesome 80's wizard aesthetics, and so satisfying to play - win or lose.
Nice video, I hope you will touch on the turbo graphics CD and turbo duo and how the ramped up ram and disc space made developers ramp up these tricks you mentioned to create more frequent parallax scrolling. For example ... Dracula x, ys 4, gate\lords of thunder, spriggan mark 2, star parodia, etc
There was a large cultural problem with the TG16. The PCE had MANY great games, but many of them were quite heavily Anime/Manga style, and that was not what the US video game market was ready for. Part of localization was removing most of the Manga influences, which was part of how we got such masterpieces as the Mega Man box art for the NES. Because of that it was difficult to select games that would be localized, especially since they would want to change the game assets in a number of places as well, which is also an expensive proposition. Also, the PCE has a much better color capability than the Mega Drive, so it had nicer colors, even though the single background layer did hurt it. It was by all means a beefier NES, but with the major exception of the HuCards being too small to really have a bunch of expansion hardware, which is why SF2 and the CDROM cards have a raised chunk on the top of them. Single gameport, but a 5 port multitap peripheral too, always wanted to play Dungeon Explorer (Gauntlet style game) with a bunch of people, never really got to.
I didn't know a single person who owned a TG-16 back then, these things were elusive. Hudson/NEC had a good product, I just don't think they had anyone with the presence of mind like a Minoru Arikawa or Tom Kalinske to reinvent the image of the PC Engine and a lot of those games in a way that western audiences would find more appealing, they definitely weren't as aggressive in their advertising. I mean they tried their best with what they had I guess, it just didn't work on me. Not that I'm being down on it, it's a cool machine with some landmark games if you're of a certain age and Japanese. And I like the sound chip, TG-16 games tend to have a very bouncy and energetic tone.
I bought a TG16 in 1991 at Toys-R-Us with Keith Courage pack and Bonk's for $99. Keith was the pack in and Bonks was a loose as an added bonus but Toy-R-Us was liquidating from lack of sales. You can only buy TG16 at Toys-R-Us in my area so a few years later with not being carried anymore " I was screwed". Babbage's in the mall would have a few used ones but rarely. Another game store opened so a few years later I got the CD Rom and a few CD games but wanted more. I also had the turbo tap, turbo booster, and joystick. Silent Debuggers was my favorite game and Bloody Wolf.
THey had these things on display at kiosks at a store called SERVICE MERCHANDISE. There was always a crowd of kids around the TG-16 and Nintendo/Sega kiosks. These things were HYPE engines. Sides would be taken there. TG-16 or Genesis. All my friends got the TG-16 while i stuck with my Genesis.
I remember the Jack in the box would sometimes have a Tg 16 kiosk to play. I know it sounds weird but I distinctly remember, some Jack in the box locations in southern California had those tg 16 or turbo x press to free play
Fact: Keith Courage is actually based on the anime called "Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru" (Magical God Hero Tales Wataru), in which none of us in America were aware of it at that time, since the anime never has an English dub. And Blazing Lazers is based on the movie called "Gunhed".
At the time I obsessed over video game magazines and I remember all the pictures of PC Engine console and games... however by the time the Turbografx came out in the US, it was indeed overshadowed by the Genesis. Technology was advancing quickly back then, and a delay like that was deadly in the video game world of the early 90s.
As a kid I remember the TG 16 coming out but nobody really cared. Seems like it was alot more expensive than the NES and none of the games were well advertised. Also like pojr stated in the video the Sega Genesis came out shortly after and nobody was thinking about TG 16 when that happened.
The PC engine seemed fantastic when brand new. Video game mags in the uk posted screenshots of this fantastic machines games . Of course it never got a euro release and eventually the megadrive and snes rendered it a moot point
@@jsr734 I mean, I have no way to count colors, but every spec sheet online states the TG16 can put 482 colors on screen where the SNES can put 256. Both are still north of the Genesis' 64.
@@Supersayainpikmin I used to take screenshots with emulators and then counting the number of unique colors with Gimp, generally Snes games tend to display an average of 128 colors on screen with some games/screens going up to 256 or even around 386 (Killer Instinct Riptor´s Stage), the most colors on a single screen on a Snes game a found was in the japanese game Bahamut Lagoon, with some screens displaying around 400+ colors. PC Engine games tend to match the Snes 128 colors but many times it looks like developers didn´t care and used less colors. The Genesis tend to display around 32 colors on screen average, with some going up to the 70s and 90s and i think Toy Story´s cutscenes can display up to 128 using shadow and highlight mode.
@@jsr734 Huh, fascinating. Thank you for the detailed response, it was an interesting read! And yeah, I heard of the Toy Story trick on Genesis; pretty cool too.
I was born in '85, so by the time I was conscious enough to be able to play video games, It was about 1988, and I remember we got the NES action set with the light gun, 2 controllers, and the duck hunt / Mario game cartridge. I remember getting the Super Nintendo at launch with Super Mario world, then about a year later I got original model Sega Genesis with Sonic 1 included. By that point I was reading gaming magazines. I vaguely knew of the turbo graphics 16, however Nintendo and Sega were the better bet for me since we mostly rented video games. Rental stores at the time usually just carried Nintendo and Sega games. Plus I don't really recall seeing a lot of marketing for Turbo Graphics 16 outside of gaming magazines. Nintendo and Sega had tons of marketing. I didn't even find out more about the turbo graphics 16 until the PS1. When I was watching a friend play Castlevania symphony of the night and he explained that the previous game was a PC engine game that only came out in Japan at the time. So I'm not surprised the PC engine didn't do well in the US.
I actually thought Keith Courage was a great game. Loved the graphics which outdoes many genesis titles. The sound as I recall was pretty killer. The game was a bit short in runtime length...... 8/10. It was a great system and I do also wonder had they not tried to change it for the American market, brought it out before the Genesis how different things would have been.
Yeah Keith Courage is alright but it was very basic and the graphics were only slightly better than the NES. And yeah, I wonder what would have happened if they kept it as the PC Engine, and came out before the Genesis.
@@pojr The gameplay in Keith Courage is basic, but graphically it is quite a step up from what the NES could do, at least in terms of colors on screen. I would guess it has around 3x the number of colors on display at once from the average NES titles (at least in 1988 or 89), and that's even more noticeable in the game's sprite work. Something like Galaga '88 or Legendary Axe would've probably been a better pack in title, but c'est la via.
@@JoystickVersusMachine Keith Courage looks great in pictures, better than any other game for the console at the time. Maybe it's the reason it was chosen as a pack-in game.
The TurboGrafx16 needed 3rd party support and good sports and fighting games. I used to think NEC wanted the TurboGrafx16 to fail in the United States by releasing bad games. It was the bad contract deal with Hudson Soft that NEC had to keep making add on parts for the system to make a profit.
Nintendo of America of course had that order that none of their third party companies could make the same game for rival systems, so that hurt other consoles for sure. And sports games most definitely. Everybody I knew except for me was obsessed with the latest John Madden NHL hockey etcetera etcetera. Very few sports games even in Japan let alone in the us.
The TurboGrafx-16 was an incredibly unique console next to it's competitors, especially the HuCard cartridges that were introduced in 1989. There was another system also released in 1989 named the Sharp X68000 Expert. Simply Awesome. Keep up the great videos POJR.😊
The requirement to buy new hardware for it just to get up to par with other 16 bit consoles hurt the TG16. You needed something to get Composite Video. A multi tap just to play with two players. You needed to buy another controller just to have more than 2 buttons and most games didn't support that anyway. I don't even know if it had stereo sound. Most of the best games stayed only in Japan
I remember they had at k-mart a tv hooked up to a laserdisc player that advertised the system. And also a demo unit hooked up to another tv. This was probably 1990.
Actually, the second background layer was later added in PCE-CD and PCE-CD was very well worth mentioning since it was probably the only case when console addon worked so well it overshadowed the original console. Unlike, you know, Sega's offerings. It also worth mentioning that PCE actually beat Sega's 16-bit consoles in Japan and was comfortably placed second behind the big N for almost half of the 90s (even briefly outselling Super Famicom). That's a pretty big achievement for an 8-bit console (I personally consider it being 8-bit), no matter how you look at it. So you probably should look at the Japanese part of its story to get the full picture. Especially since you missed so many things that could also be told about this console, like PCE GT (or TurboExpress), probably the first ever portable console that was able to play the same games that stationary one does, long before Sega did it with Nomad.
Some things that weren't mentioned regarding the TurboGrafx 16. For games like the original Street Fighter (the first Street Fighter), you had to buy the Turbo CD accessory which cost about the same amount as the console itself. This made the TurboGrafx 16 the first console to utilize CDs for console games. Another thing that they did and the only console to actually do this. The portable version (Turbo Express) was able to use the same cartridge as the main console, which was about the size of a Gameboy cartridge but thinner. One major factor that kept the console from being successful against Nintendo and Sega was the fact that while the SNES and Genesis kept reducing the price of their consoles. NEC didn't do this and made the same mistake that was made by Betamax in the competition with VHS.
But people like to compare it to the 16bit consoles (Genesis and Snes). And of course it was marketed as 16bit in USA to not fall down behind the competition.
I still have my TG-16 CIB. I only took it out and played it once. Didn’t like the pack in game so i reboxed it and put it in storage and forgot about it until this year. I bought another house and rediscovered it. The box is a little worst for wear, but it still has all of the original paperwork in it and everything is in the bags.
Yeah it was bad for the add on stuff. You had to buy a turbo tap to have 2 players and you had to buy multiple 3 foot cable extensions to get any kind of length on your controller. It didn't seem to effect latency but man all the extra stuff is you had to buy. You had to buy a turbo booster to save games otherwise you wrote down passwords. It had great games but they gouged you on hardware. I owned all that stuff back in the 90s. Eventually I upgraded to a turbo duo when turbo zone direct was around. Not much of a graphic upgrade but wow the CD music was insanely good. My pack in chip was splatterhouse, and the cd was ys 1&2.
I would call it a "8 bit machine with 16-bit capabilities" id love to own one for my collection and the games are great, emulate quite a few, played a few on real hardware. Graphics wise it seems like it has the oomph to compete with the NES in raw graphics capability at-least for a 2D machine.
The Turbo Grafx 16 came out in Japan in 1987, over a year before the Mega Driver over there. The problem with it was the games that NEC decided to bring in North America, their distribution deal with Radio Shack and the lack of a second background layer (however, that would not have been a problem if it had the right game). The Genesis had Super Shinobi, Thunder Force III, Phantasy Star 2, Golden Axe, Strider, Ghouls n' Ghost very early on. This is why it came out on top. Still a great machine, I had one back in the days and Blazing Lazer is probably my favorite shooter of all time (tie with Thunder Force III)... Too bad the Turbo Duo came out too late, it would have been a killer with the CD based games.
I did NOT know the PCE version of Adventure Island was so POSH. I actually like the aesthetic of that over the SNES ‘Super’ releases. I do love the Bonk/PC Genjin 1 & 2 games a TON but I respect tour stance on the style. I can see that the things I like about that look are mostly a matter of taste. We definitely agree on Magical Chase.
TG16/PCE always looked impressive, especially CD games, but I had Genesis. If they'd made it black but kept the same form as the PCE, people might've been more impressed that such a small system could make 16-bit quality games. I picked up the TG16 Mini and it's debatable if it was worth the price.
The other problem that seems to get swept under the rug alot of the times was NEC's/Hudson's inability to secure shelf space at big box retail stores(like Target and Walmart for example). Most of it had to do with unreasonable demands these retailers would lay out for them, but also the fact these same retail giants found it preferable and easier to simply stick with catering to Nintendo during the 80s and 90s; which Nintendo made up about 15% of their total profits and revenue back then. So in the minds of these big retail stores, why ditch Nintendo for other companies they never even heard of who haven't yet proved themselves the way Nintendo did in the Western world!?
For reference, here's the Bonk parallax demo made fairly recently. If I'm remembering right, he explained it to me that the entire foreground is sprites overlapping the background. At one point, the entire background is covered by the foreground, which is complete madness based on the actual specs! But there's still even more to learn about tricks on the TG. th-cam.com/video/1iq8nQ2Bd80/w-d-xo.htmlsi=fvJU6luUoXdOG9cK
In highschool I went with the Sega Genesis for a few reasons. One three button control, two Sega arcade ports, three people already knew of Sega. I still wanted a TurboGrafx-16 but never got around of getting one.
Got to love how he has the NES competing against the MegaDrive and not the Sega Master System. Also, the PC Engine or Turbografx-16 was never officially released in Europe. Also, I thought the pack-in game was Blazin Lazers. Also, I kind of wish Speedball 2 or Last Ninja were released for the PC Engine.
The PC-Engine graphics hardware is worse in some ways compared to the Megadrive's and better in others. It has fewer sprites 64 vs 80) and only one tile layer, but it has 16 color pallets with 16 colors each so in that regard it's much better. The PC-Engine split it's graphics hardware between two chips. One generated the tile layer and sprites and the other handled color encoding and pixel generation. The Supergraphix used two PC-Engine tile generator chips and a new version of the color encoder chip that could use two tile generators at once. So it had two tile layers, double the sprites, double the number of sprites per scanline while maintaining full backwards compatibility with the PC-Engine. In theory you could even write software that would work with both platforms and have enhanced graphics when run on the Supergraphix though nobody ever did this. The Megadrive was originally supposed to have eight 16 color pallets and sprite scaling but the Master System graphics modes and bus arbiter for managing the Z-80 and 68000 used up too much room on the die so those features had to go to make room. I've always thought that they should have just removed the backwards compatibility features and made a better console instead. Without the Z-80 and it's 64k they could have also added the second bank of VRAM that the VDP supports (it was removed to cut costs) which would have doubled the number of available tiles and the VRAM access speed. With two VRAM banks the VDP interleaves tiles and sprites across the two banks so twice the VRAM width doubles the effective read/write speed for tiles and sprites.
You need to take in account that when the Megadrive was released the typical size available for a game on a cartridge was 512KB. More colors would occupy more space.
I was close to several people back then that were a part of it all, namely, from TTI, TZD, WD, & Icom. The biggest complaint I heard from each of those people & a few others in more recent times is that NEC Japan constantly shot down multitudes of geeat games from coming over for bizarre reasons. The usual excuse was that Americans wouldn't like game X. Fighting games in general were shot down because the Japanese branch said "Americans are tired of fighting games". 😂 When TTI took over, they had the exact same problem. Hudson Soft Japan was the head over them & constantly shot down lots of great games. Though in that regard I don't know of any specific games or genres. Another huge problem was redesigning it which postponed the release by roughly a year. Also ordering too many systems for launch which ate up their budget for advertising. My opinion, another problem was lack of sports game in comparison to the Genesis, & the few it did get, only one i can think of had real people in them(Champions Forever Boxing) versus year after year of John Madden, NHL Hockey, Tommy Lasorda, Joe Montanna, etc. Genesis especially had tons of 'realistic' sports games. Electronic Arts, who made tons of popular sports games, apparently got mad at NEC of America when they asked EA if they're "up to the challenge" of making games for the TurboGrafx. If that really happened, I blame EA for that. It was just an innocent rhetorical question. Though interestingly, later, EA made a deal with Victor Musical Industries to release tons of games on the PC Engine in Japan. The article i found says mostly Amiga ports. Only one specific game was mentioned in development. Some Ferrari Formula One game. I don't know happened to that joint venture though. Also, a problem that went on for several years in Japan was treating the PC Engine like a souped-up Famicom instead of looking at it as its own system with its own specs. While it is to some degree a natural progression from the Famicom, the specs are well beyond it. It wasn't until maybe the last couple years when they really started actually pushing the systems capabilities. To go along with that, it was discovered that NEC did not want people using the higher resolution mode. R-type was allowed to get away with it in Japan because Hudson was behind it. But later when it was merged on one card for the US release they had to lower the resolution which increased the flicker. I'm not clear if developers through the entirety of its life continued to follow that guideline, but NEC was very strict about that. Then later when R-type Complete was released on CD, they unfortunately used the lower resolution US version as the basis instead of the original Japanese version. Even now there's homebrew developers figuring out things that it can do that supposedly it can't do. The recent Bonk parallax demo is a great example of something that could have been done back in the eighties and nineties but never was. You can find that one on TH-cam. People are gradually figuring out all kinds of tricks around its limitations just like the Genesis and SNES and their limitations had tricks around them. Like showing more colors on screen for the Genesis, to some degree or another there's ways around limitations . One thing that many people don't know is that the TG's CPU is just a tad slower than the Genesis(which are both faster than the SNES), but the TG can produce roughly twice as many MIPS (millions of instructions per second) compared to the Genesis. So the specs are not completely clear cut. All systems have their various strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if I'm remembering right, it can't produce as many sprites as the Genesis but can produce larger sprites. Though I believe the SNES can produce more sprites on screen and larger sprites than the TG.
There's also an unusual trend of the least-technically advanced console of each generation usually being the one that sold the most copies; usually because it was cheaper for the consumer. The Game Boy vs Lynx, Atari 2600 vs Intellivision, PlayStation vs Nintendo 64.
@@jsr734 No no, they have a point. The N64 may have been cheaper, but it was a (admittedly underutilized) graphical beast compared to the PlayStation, and of course the latter sold much better despite this.
Don't forget the PS2 outselling the Xbox and Gamecube significantly, despite being the weakest console of its generation, though in that case, it was the ability to play DVDs that really pushed units. Interesting that the Turbografx was unsuccessful in the US despite this trend.
@@Pirateyware In that case, the Ps2 was cheaper than the Xbox but not as cheap as the Gamecube. Only initially the DVD player may have had something the Ps2 success, but then, dedicated DVD players became really cheap, so the Ps2 had to succed throu offering high quality, exclusive games to counter the competition. And it delivered it in that regard.
So refreshing to see someone doing their research, thank you. This guy I was watching “johnriggs” spreads misinformation about his details and this lead me away from retro gaming channels, until I discovered POJR.
Another possible downside to the TurboGraphx-16 was that its games came in cards, which, unlike cartridges, couldn't be modified (at least not as easily) which chips for extra graphical power.
as far as I've explored PCE library for myself, I think one edge NEC took with PCE in Japan as opposed to TGX in US was targeting nieches in japan such as sexually more suggestive title or graphically more violent ones. There is also lots of anime tie in games of passable to great quality, but one anecdote is some companies being thankful for being officially available on PCE while having to resort to dodging copyright and release unofficially on Famicom Disk System before. In west, sega was already pushing the "risque" market of US and trying to push it more with system that had no legs yet would been self destructive for sure. But in japan, aside PC's that NEC also was handling in big way in Japan, PCE was most "adult" gaming platform it feels like to me.
The pcengine was actually made by hudson in mind to replace the famicom. They were i believe the 1st 3rd party and made basic for it. They made the pcengine with custom chips and presented it to nintendo who shut it down as they had the super famicom in mind. So they had their basically suped up famicom that used a custom spec and went to nec who agreed and thus the pc engine was born. It was named pc engine due to it being like the heart of a pc and also the owner of hudson loved trains.
I was never able to play one, I only even heard about it later in life (I was really young when it originally came out). I didn't know they released a new mini version of it though!!!
Naw, Bonk doesn’t look like an NES game. Have you seen the NWA version of Bonk? Also the reason Bonk was not the pack in was because it wasn’t out yet (Dec 1989). Legendary Axe may have been a better option though, but I love Keith Courage.
The pc engine / tgfx is a masterful example of what a turbo charged 8 bit console could do and in reality, is more of a super Nintendo than what the snes ended up being. A lot of the imaginary retro systems that are released these days owe it a huge debt.. I always admired it back in the day
I actually owned a TurboGrafx-16. Definitely an underrated system, and there's some great games on it. The original Splatterhouse, Dungeon Explorer is basically five-player(!) Gauntlet with a bit more RPG feel, even stuff like Final Lap Twin, which may well be the only hybrid racing game and RPG I've ever seen besides Racing Lagoon on PS1. Bonk's Adventure was actually also released on Amiga and - ironically - NES, funnily enough, but only multiple years later (1993/1994): th-cam.com/video/DEpeEInxVBI/w-d-xo.html
Regarding "early Hudson games being simplistic", NES hardware can do only horizontal OR vertical scrolling. Not both in the same game. BUT if you add some extra chips to the cartridge, you can do much more. Obviously there was no such choice for any early games.
Have you played the game "Challenger" on the Famicom? by Hudson Soft. It has horizontally and four-way scrolling levels. Very impressive for a 1985 Nes game.
I get why you placed the Tg16 next to the NES in general, but when the copyright of games show 1992 or even 1993 its a bit odd to do NES comparisons as the SNES would have been an established competitor by that point.
In all fairness, while Bonk's Adventure certainly would have made for a much better pack-in title, it wasn't released until a few months after the Turbografx-16's North American launch date.
Legendary axe should have been the pack in game. The problem is all the games you liked weren’t launch titles, and other launch games like vigilante were even worth than Keith courage.
There's a decent handful of TG16 games that are still great. R-Type off top of my head, but 20 or so other good TG16 games I have in my roms collection.
I hate when companies lie about their products, and in the case of video game consoles, lie about their power. And by renaming the PCEngine TurboGrafx-16 in western markets, they lied. Just like Atari did with their supposed "64-bit" console. The "bits" of a console refers to the CPU--not the graphics processor. In reality it is a step above the NES, but it is still an 8-bit console.
The problem was NEC had to approve every game that was published in the West, and NEC felt like they knew the Western gaming market better than Turbo Technologies, and would often make poor decisions like bundling together Keith Courage (a Reskin of Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru) together with the TG-16 instead of something that Western gamers were more interested in. They made some mind-blowingly stupid decisions like not allowing Turbo Technologies to release Street Fighter 2 on the TG-16, despite fighting games being the thing at the time, all because one of their self-proclaimed "game gurus" said that American gamers were "getting disinterested in fighting games", and rejected the opportunity to put Mortal Kombat on the TG-16 as well. There was a lot of games that were going to come to the West, but got shafted due to NEC's incompetence regarding the system. They even insulted EA at a board meeting. Quite a chunk of why the TurboGrafx-16 failed in America was because and NEC, and it's rumored that it was to get back at Hudson Soft, but it failed, as the PC Engine was extremely successful in Japan, unlike America.
The PC Engine had a pretty sizable library to pick from during the US launch, similar to Nintendo when they first came over and instead launched with a handful of fairly mediocre games.
Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu... IS NOT BETTER on the PC-Engine... it looks nicer, and that's it, everything else from the level design, progression, and music is better on the NES, in fact most PC-Engine games suffer from the same problem, bland flat levels
The PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 wasn't really a thing in the UK, other than a few shops that did imports. A company called "Mention" did make the "PC-Engine Plus" an UNAUTHORISED import. I certainly never knew ANYONE in my area that had one. Most people in the UK gamed on Home Computers* until about 1987 when the NES came out. (4 years after Japan, 2 years after US) *ZX Spectrum/BBC Micro or C64 if you were rich, not PC's like now.
I'm convinced that the watch us release screwed up NEC had for any other regions. Telegames apparently did offer a PAL TurboGrafx, but in very small numbers. There was definitely importing of the PC engine itself in europe, but I believe France it had the most success as far as being imported.
I remember wanting a turbo graphix 16 bad when I was a kid. Arguably the only system seller was the Bonk series. I think the downfall of this system was a lack of good software.
![F.HERO Ft. JSPKK x ลำไย ไหทองคำ x M-PEE - ไม่สนิทบิดหมด (Thai Riders Anthem) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kPJZ0UihBfk/mqdefault.jpg)
Bonk's Adventure wasn't released until early 1990, that's why it wasn't ever considered for the TG16 pack-in game.
Too bad. It’s a great game. Even on NES and Gameboy
@@MaxOakland Also a great port to the Amiga as well as BC Kid.
A more likely scenario would be a pack in with Legendary Axe perhaps. I forget if that was a launch title or not.
They lost huge points for having a super short controller cable and the system was only one player out of the box
I didn't cover this, but very good point
The best accessory I have for my TG-16 is an extension cord for the controller.
Abolutely this plus you couldn't use RCA audio output jacks without buying the TurboTap. The NES has them built-in.
The name, "PC Engine" apparently sounded ridiculous for the western market, but the name itself made sense in Japan and with context. NEC are most famous for the PC-88 and PC-98 series and the founders of Hudson Soft were apparently train enthusiasts. In fact, they named their company after their favorite train line, the Hudson locomotives. Hence why their company is called Hudson Soft.
The nec pc series (and the sharp x series) are often seen in Japan as “hardcore” gaming systems.
My buddy had a TG-16. I LOVED Bonk and Bonk 2. He had a racing game as well that was pretty good. I don't recall any other games, including Keith Courage at the time. We mostly played Bonk. I wanted to get one of the mini's, but wasn't able to get one for non-gouged prices, and my desire went away after a while. Thanks for the video!
Did you ever play Bloody Wolf? It was a 2 player Double Dragon style of view, but it was like a realistic Contra (no aliens). I really remember the intro level where you fought these dudes in motorcycles.
I saved up $100 when I was a kid to buy a TG-16. When I told the kids at school about it they made fun of me. I still had fun with it.
shouldve told them macaulay culkin said it was better than the genesis and snes
I was in the dark with a majority of TurboGrafx games until the Wii Virtual Console put a bunch on the service.
virtual console introduced me to the Turbografx.
I picked one up in the early 90s when it was selling for about $110 and the Genesis was about $125 at the time. I convinced my cousin to get the TurboGrafx instead of the genesis so we could trade games.
He kept his for about a week and returned it for a Genesis, kept that for about a month and then returned it and ended up with a SNES.
I kept mine though. I really like the unique sound chip that it had. It sounded nothing like any other consoles out at the time.
Good choice. Now this console is a big collectors item
In videos like this I would always like to see mote technical specs. How many sprites, colors, sound channels? CPU clockspeed, RAM, VRAM, etc. - I cannot exactly say why, but hard facts of these old machines are just very interesting to me. Perhaps brcause I am a child of the big console war... Who knows! Anyway, I like your videos because they have a nice tempo and are short enough to enjoy. Keep it up!
Heartily agreed!
I agree! Those technical specs are very interesting
th-cam.com/video/hyuefYCbFc0/w-d-xo.htmlsi=rKMknq-NOdvktzbh
@TheDsgfdssd How do you measure the bitness of the GPU? I mean does the PC-Engine GPU do 16bit arithmetic or does it have 16bit registers? The PC-Engine audio is actually Wavetable Synthesis not FM Synthesis, i think.
CPU: 7.16 MHz 65C02 based CPU
RAM: 8 KiB
VRAM: 64 KiB
Sprites: 64 in total up to 16 per line (depending on the video mode the number can be smaller)
Resolution: anywhere from 256x224 to 512x224
BG layers: 1
Colors: 9 bit RGB palette, 16 15+transparency color palettes sprites, 16 15+transparency color palettes BG layer.
Audio: 6 audio channels, each containing 32 5-bit samples, or can be used in DAC mode for PCM sample playback
The 8bit cpu was used for synchronization of the graphics and sound, but not used to create graphics and sounds. Like a timing reference to keep everything in sync.
The graphics hardware on the PC Engine was very good, especially the number of color pallets available. It had 16 pallets with 16 colors each. Compare that to the Genesis which had 4 pallets with 16 colors each.
TBF the Genesis VDP supported up to 16 pallets but the pins to access external color RAM were not connected to anything on the PCB though this feature would be used on the System C arcade board that used it as well as the System-18 which used it alongside System-16 graphics hardware to add additional background layers and sprites.
The PC engine graphics hardware was split between a tile and sprite generator chip and a color encoder and pixel generator chip. The Supergraphix used two PC-Engine tile and sprite generator chips and a new version of the color and pixel generator chip designed to use two tile and sprite generators at once. In this way they doubled the sprites and background layers while maintaining full backwards compatibility with the PC-Engine.
I really enjoy the PC-Engine! It's one of my favorite cores on the MiSTer.
Yup, that's where 100% of the footage from this video came from lol.
I was one of the few who was familiar with turbo games when it came out, most people didn't care about it at all so I can see why it had a hard time being successful
Very true
I bought it because I was impressed with the graphics and I just got sick of the NES's 8-bit graphics. It was either the TG-16 or a Genesis but I was leaning more towards the TG-16. I kept it for over a year but the lack of good games and the impending release of the SNES was enough to get me to trade it in to cover part of the cost of a SNES. NEC screwed up by not releasing so many great Japanese games outside of Japan. The CD add on was a lot of money too and was another example of a great add on with so many great games in Japan that didn't make it to the US. I eventually picked up a used TurboDuo in the late 90s and the region-free CDs was a big reason to start collecting Japanese games. I also picked up a converter to play Japanese HuCards. It's definitely a great console that was just handled poorly outside of Japan. Even the redesign sucked. I would have much preferred the form factor of the PC Engine with the Turbo controllers, of course. It just needed a built-in 2nd controller port which the lack of it was a huge drawback for it.
Yeah, NEC's big mistake was waiting so long to bring the TG-16 in the US. Head-to-head with the Genesis, it had very few advantages aside from a larger color palette. But if they'd released the TG-16 in 1988 rather than '89, the 16-bit Wars might have looked totally different.
Depending on the workload, the TG-16 actually has a faster CPU than the Megadrive. It runs at the same clock, but is based on the 6502 architecture, which needs much fewer cycles to execute many operations.
I didn't have any exposure to the Tg-16 as a kid unless you count ads in magazines. I would like to see some more content on its games.
That's a cool idea. I'll have to do this at some point
Gamesack has episodes covering every NA game two console specific featuring games from all markets. It's overall am excellent channel. Joe the host is probably one of the best video editors on TH-cam and is extremely knowledgeable on all things A/V.
@@dacatindahat8275 I miss Dave! 🙁
Get a raspberry pi, and download the emulator and games.
@@marcellachine5718 I have an Anbernic loaded with the roms. I just really like POJRs spin on things 🤣
Devil's Crush is still, to this day, one of my favorite pinball games. Absolutely bleeds cool. Fantastic soundtrack, awesome 80's wizard aesthetics, and so satisfying to play - win or lose.
You ought to check out Demon's Tilt. A few years old and the Devil's Crush inspiration is so strong.
Nice video, I hope you will touch on the turbo graphics CD and turbo duo and how the ramped up ram and disc space made developers ramp up these tricks you mentioned to create more frequent parallax scrolling. For example ... Dracula x, ys 4, gate\lords of thunder, spriggan mark 2, star parodia, etc
There was a large cultural problem with the TG16. The PCE had MANY great games, but many of them were quite heavily Anime/Manga style, and that was not what the US video game market was ready for. Part of localization was removing most of the Manga influences, which was part of how we got such masterpieces as the Mega Man box art for the NES. Because of that it was difficult to select games that would be localized, especially since they would want to change the game assets in a number of places as well, which is also an expensive proposition. Also, the PCE has a much better color capability than the Mega Drive, so it had nicer colors, even though the single background layer did hurt it. It was by all means a beefier NES, but with the major exception of the HuCards being too small to really have a bunch of expansion hardware, which is why SF2 and the CDROM cards have a raised chunk on the top of them. Single gameport, but a 5 port multitap peripheral too, always wanted to play Dungeon Explorer (Gauntlet style game) with a bunch of people, never really got to.
I didn't know a single person who owned a TG-16 back then, these things were elusive. Hudson/NEC had a good product, I just don't think they had anyone with the presence of mind like a Minoru Arikawa or Tom Kalinske to reinvent the image of the PC Engine and a lot of those games in a way that western audiences would find more appealing, they definitely weren't as aggressive in their advertising. I mean they tried their best with what they had I guess, it just didn't work on me. Not that I'm being down on it, it's a cool machine with some landmark games if you're of a certain age and Japanese. And I like the sound chip, TG-16 games tend to have a very bouncy and energetic tone.
I bought a TG16 in 1991 at Toys-R-Us with Keith Courage pack and Bonk's for $99. Keith was the pack in and Bonks was a loose as an added bonus but Toy-R-Us was liquidating from lack of sales. You can only buy TG16 at Toys-R-Us in my area so a few years later with not being carried anymore " I was screwed". Babbage's in the mall would have a few used ones but rarely. Another game store opened so a few years later I got the CD Rom and a few CD games but wanted more. I also had the turbo tap, turbo booster, and joystick. Silent Debuggers was my favorite game and Bloody Wolf.
THey had these things on display at kiosks at a store called SERVICE MERCHANDISE. There was always a crowd of kids around the TG-16 and Nintendo/Sega kiosks. These things were HYPE engines. Sides would be taken there. TG-16 or Genesis. All my friends got the TG-16 while i stuck with my Genesis.
I miss Service Merchandise. I remember buying Contra 3 at Pharmor!
I remember the Jack in the box would sometimes have a Tg 16 kiosk to play. I know it sounds weird but I distinctly remember, some Jack in the box locations in southern California had those tg 16 or turbo x press to free play
Fact: Keith Courage is actually based on the anime called "Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru" (Magical God Hero Tales Wataru), in which none of us in America were aware of it at that time, since the anime never has an English dub.
And Blazing Lazers is based on the movie called "Gunhed".
Mashin is probably just a pun for "machine".
@@kekeke8988 It's actually not in this case. It's 魔神, which is normally read "majin."
@@latedep31
It actually is exactly the case. Otherwise it would be read normally.
The PC Engine and TG16 are such interesting systems, great video Pojr!
Thank you!
Just as an FYI Keith Courage is actual a game based upon the anime Mashin Eiyūden Wataru.
Ohya, this is my wheelhouse! So many great underrrated games here.
Indeed, and welcome!
Yep. Timing killed it. Releasing it post Sega Genesis without Sega's arcade pedigree was just dumb.
At the time I obsessed over video game magazines and I remember all the pictures of PC Engine console and games... however by the time the Turbografx came out in the US, it was indeed overshadowed by the Genesis. Technology was advancing quickly back then, and a delay like that was deadly in the video game world of the early 90s.
As a kid I remember the TG 16 coming out but nobody really cared. Seems like it was alot more expensive than the NES and none of the games were well advertised. Also like pojr stated in the video the Sega Genesis came out shortly after and nobody was thinking about TG 16 when that happened.
Yeah it's like the price is right when someone bids $100, but then the next contestant bids $101. The Genesis was better in every way
The PC engine seemed fantastic when brand new. Video game mags in the uk posted screenshots of this fantastic machines games . Of course it never got a euro release and eventually the megadrive and snes rendered it a moot point
Absolutely. I wonder what would have happened if they didn't try to Americanize the console
Fun Fact: This console can put more colors on screen at once than the Super Nintendo which came out three years later.
Weird, i haven´t seen a single game that do it tough.
@@jsr734 I mean, I have no way to count colors, but every spec sheet online states the TG16 can put 482 colors on screen where the SNES can put 256. Both are still north of the Genesis' 64.
@@Supersayainpikmin I used to take screenshots with emulators and then counting the number of unique colors with Gimp, generally Snes games tend to display an average of 128 colors on screen with some games/screens going up to 256 or even around 386 (Killer Instinct Riptor´s Stage), the most colors on a single screen on a Snes game a found was in the japanese game Bahamut Lagoon, with some screens displaying around 400+ colors. PC Engine games tend to match the Snes 128 colors but many times it looks like developers didn´t care and used less colors. The Genesis tend to display around 32 colors on screen average, with some going up to the 70s and 90s and i think Toy Story´s cutscenes can display up to 128 using shadow and highlight mode.
@@jsr734 Huh, fascinating. Thank you for the detailed response, it was an interesting read! And yeah, I heard of the Toy Story trick on Genesis; pretty cool too.
Analogue has the Duo coming that will play TG-16 games (and more) through FPGA. It's available for pre-order now.
Will be nice when that's in stock. There's not many ways to play the Turbografx outside of emulation or spending a lot of money on the real hardware.
I wanted a tg-16 when it first came out but it wasn’t in the cards. I ended up with one a couple years back and I really like it. Bonk is my jam!!
I was born in '85, so by the time I was conscious enough to be able to play video games, It was about 1988, and I remember we got the NES action set with the light gun, 2 controllers, and the duck hunt / Mario game cartridge. I remember getting the Super Nintendo at launch with Super Mario world, then about a year later I got original model Sega Genesis with Sonic 1 included. By that point I was reading gaming magazines. I vaguely knew of the turbo graphics 16, however Nintendo and Sega were the better bet for me since we mostly rented video games. Rental stores at the time usually just carried Nintendo and Sega games. Plus I don't really recall seeing a lot of marketing for Turbo Graphics 16 outside of gaming magazines. Nintendo and Sega had tons of marketing. I didn't even find out more about the turbo graphics 16 until the PS1. When I was watching a friend play Castlevania symphony of the night and he explained that the previous game was a PC engine game that only came out in Japan at the time. So I'm not surprised the PC engine didn't do well in the US.
I actually thought Keith Courage was a great game. Loved the graphics which outdoes many genesis titles. The sound as I recall was pretty killer. The game was a bit short in runtime length...... 8/10.
It was a great system and I do also wonder had they not tried to change it for the American market, brought it out before the Genesis how different things would have been.
Yeah Keith Courage is alright but it was very basic and the graphics were only slightly better than the NES. And yeah, I wonder what would have happened if they kept it as the PC Engine, and came out before the Genesis.
I agree Keith courage was not as bad as some say.
@@pojr : The thing is, Keith Courage was very close to being a great game. Agree it was a bit basic. It just needed a few tweaks.
@@pojr The gameplay in Keith Courage is basic, but graphically it is quite a step up from what the NES could do, at least in terms of colors on screen. I would guess it has around 3x the number of colors on display at once from the average NES titles (at least in 1988 or 89), and that's even more noticeable in the game's sprite work. Something like Galaga '88 or Legendary Axe would've probably been a better pack in title, but c'est la via.
@@JoystickVersusMachine
Keith Courage looks great in pictures, better than any other game for the console at the time. Maybe it's the reason it was chosen as a pack-in game.
My cousin had a TG-16 back in the day...man, I was so jealous, even after I got a SNES. That system had some incredible games
The TurboGrafx16 needed 3rd party support and good sports and fighting games. I used to think NEC wanted the TurboGrafx16 to fail in the United States by releasing bad games. It was the bad contract deal with Hudson Soft that NEC had to keep making add on parts for the system to make a profit.
Nintendo of America of course had that order that none of their third party companies could make the same game for rival systems, so that hurt other consoles for sure. And sports games most definitely. Everybody I knew except for me was obsessed with the latest John Madden NHL hockey etcetera etcetera. Very few sports games even in Japan let alone in the us.
The TurboGrafx-16 was an incredibly unique console next to it's competitors, especially the HuCard cartridges that were introduced in 1989. There was another system also released in 1989 named the Sharp X68000 Expert. Simply Awesome. Keep up the great videos POJR.😊
Technically the TG16 has 2 8bit CPU’s on top of each other, and as we all know 8 + 8 = 16, so yes it is a 16bit system.
The requirement to buy new hardware for it just to get up to par with other 16 bit consoles hurt the TG16. You needed something to get Composite Video. A multi tap just to play with two players. You needed to buy another controller just to have more than 2 buttons and most games didn't support that anyway. I don't even know if it had stereo sound. Most of the best games stayed only in Japan
They may have had an edge if they had sold the games for cheap, instead of matching the prices of Genesis games.
I remember they had at k-mart a tv hooked up to a laserdisc player that advertised the system. And also a demo unit hooked up to another tv. This was probably 1990.
The TG16 looked like a joke launching after the Genesis.
Actually, the second background layer was later added in PCE-CD and PCE-CD was very well worth mentioning since it was probably the only case when console addon worked so well it overshadowed the original console. Unlike, you know, Sega's offerings. It also worth mentioning that PCE actually beat Sega's 16-bit consoles in Japan and was comfortably placed second behind the big N for almost half of the 90s (even briefly outselling Super Famicom). That's a pretty big achievement for an 8-bit console (I personally consider it being 8-bit), no matter how you look at it. So you probably should look at the Japanese part of its story to get the full picture. Especially since you missed so many things that could also be told about this console, like PCE GT (or TurboExpress), probably the first ever portable console that was able to play the same games that stationary one does, long before Sega did it with Nomad.
Some things that weren't mentioned regarding the TurboGrafx 16. For games like the original Street Fighter (the first Street Fighter), you had to buy the Turbo CD accessory which cost about the same amount as the console itself. This made the TurboGrafx 16 the first console to utilize CDs for console games. Another thing that they did and the only console to actually do this. The portable version (Turbo Express) was able to use the same cartridge as the main console, which was about the size of a Gameboy cartridge but thinner. One major factor that kept the console from being successful against Nintendo and Sega was the fact that while the SNES and Genesis kept reducing the price of their consoles. NEC didn't do this and made the same mistake that was made by Betamax in the competition with VHS.
The PC Engine / TG-16 is not 16 bit. The CPU is 8 bit.
But people like to compare it to the 16bit consoles (Genesis and Snes). And of course it was marketed as 16bit in USA to not fall down behind the competition.
I still have my TG-16 CIB. I only took it out and played it once. Didn’t like the pack in game so i reboxed it and put it in storage and forgot about it until this year. I bought another house and rediscovered it. The box is a little worst for wear, but it still has all of the original paperwork in it and everything is in the bags.
TG 16 is my favorite console. I’m not going to pretend it was the best, but this was the system my brothers and I grew up with.
As a TG16 owner as a kid I can say the reason it didn’t take off in the US was its pathetically short 4’ controller cord.
The console where you knew a guy who had a cousin who had one....
You're such an underrated content creator who deserves more respect since it's obvious that you put a lot of effort and passion into your videos
To me, it looks more like a cut back snes rather than a beefed up nes. Great video!
Yeah it was bad for the add on stuff. You had to buy a turbo tap to have 2 players and you had to buy multiple 3 foot cable extensions to get any kind of length on your controller. It didn't seem to effect latency but man all the extra stuff is you had to buy. You had to buy a turbo booster to save games otherwise you wrote down passwords. It had great games but they gouged you on hardware. I owned all that stuff back in the 90s. Eventually I upgraded to a turbo duo when turbo zone direct was around. Not much of a graphic upgrade but wow the CD music was insanely good. My pack in chip was splatterhouse, and the cd was ys 1&2.
I would call it a "8 bit machine with 16-bit capabilities" id love to own one for my collection and the games are great, emulate quite a few, played a few on real hardware.
Graphics wise it seems like it has the oomph to compete with the NES in raw graphics capability at-least for a 2D machine.
The Turbo Grafx 16 came out in Japan in 1987, over a year before the Mega Driver over there. The problem with it was the games that NEC decided to bring in North America, their distribution deal with Radio Shack and the lack of a second background layer (however, that would not have been a problem if it had the right game).
The Genesis had Super Shinobi, Thunder Force III, Phantasy Star 2, Golden Axe, Strider, Ghouls n' Ghost very early on. This is why it came out on top.
Still a great machine, I had one back in the days and Blazing Lazer is probably my favorite shooter of all time (tie with Thunder Force III)... Too bad the Turbo Duo came out too late, it would have been a killer with the CD based games.
Fantastic and very informative video...specially the fake parallax scrolling section..thanks 😊
Bonk looks like it could be an NES game.
Looks at the actual NES version of Bonk
Yeah no, I don’t think so bud.
It really looks very similar to the Nes game with sligtly more colors.
I did NOT know the PCE version of Adventure Island was so POSH. I actually like the aesthetic of that over the SNES ‘Super’ releases. I do love the Bonk/PC Genjin 1 & 2 games a TON but I respect tour stance on the style. I can see that the things I like about that look are mostly a matter of taste. We definitely agree on Magical Chase.
TG16/PCE always looked impressive, especially CD games, but I had Genesis. If they'd made it black but kept the same form as the PCE, people might've been more impressed that such a small system could make 16-bit quality games. I picked up the TG16 Mini and it's debatable if it was worth the price.
Bonk wasn't the pack in game because Bonk didn't exist yet.
The other problem that seems to get swept under the rug alot of the times was NEC's/Hudson's inability to secure shelf space at big box retail stores(like Target and Walmart for example). Most of it had to do with unreasonable demands these retailers would lay out for them, but also the fact these same retail giants found it preferable and easier to simply stick with catering to Nintendo during the 80s and 90s; which Nintendo made up about 15% of their total profits and revenue back then. So in the minds of these big retail stores, why ditch Nintendo for other companies they never even heard of who haven't yet proved themselves the way Nintendo did in the Western world!?
For reference, here's the Bonk parallax demo made fairly recently. If I'm remembering right, he explained it to me that the entire foreground is sprites overlapping the background. At one point, the entire background is covered by the foreground, which is complete madness based on the actual specs! But there's still even more to learn about tricks on the TG.
th-cam.com/video/1iq8nQ2Bd80/w-d-xo.htmlsi=fvJU6luUoXdOG9cK
In highschool I went with the Sega Genesis for a few reasons. One three button control, two Sega arcade ports, three people already knew of Sega.
I still wanted a TurboGrafx-16 but never got around of getting one.
Only three people new of Sega? You should've gone with the TurboGrafx-16 - you'd turn out like Kanye West.
I always thought the turbo traffic really had like 12.5 bits instead of 16 lolz
Got to love how he has the NES competing against the MegaDrive and not the Sega Master System.
Also, the PC Engine or Turbografx-16 was never officially released in Europe. Also, I thought the pack-in game was Blazin Lazers.
Also, I kind of wish Speedball 2 or Last Ninja were released for the PC Engine.
The PC-Engine graphics hardware is worse in some ways compared to the Megadrive's and better in others. It has fewer sprites 64 vs 80) and only one tile layer, but it has 16 color pallets with 16 colors each so in that regard it's much better. The PC-Engine split it's graphics hardware between two chips. One generated the tile layer and sprites and the other handled color encoding and pixel generation.
The Supergraphix used two PC-Engine tile generator chips and a new version of the color encoder chip that could use two tile generators at once. So it had two tile layers, double the sprites, double the number of sprites per scanline while maintaining full backwards compatibility with the PC-Engine. In theory you could even write software that would work with both platforms and have enhanced graphics when run on the Supergraphix though nobody ever did this.
The Megadrive was originally supposed to have eight 16 color pallets and sprite scaling but the Master System graphics modes and bus arbiter for managing the Z-80 and 68000 used up too much room on the die so those features had to go to make room. I've always thought that they should have just removed the backwards compatibility features and made a better console instead. Without the Z-80 and it's 64k they could have also added the second bank of VRAM that the VDP supports (it was removed to cut costs) which would have doubled the number of available tiles and the VRAM access speed. With two VRAM banks the VDP interleaves tiles and sprites across the two banks so twice the VRAM width doubles the effective read/write speed for tiles and sprites.
You need to take in account that when the Megadrive was released the typical size available for a game on a cartridge was 512KB. More colors would occupy more space.
they should have included Legendary Axe as the pack-in game
The PCEngine was as much 16bit as the Jaguar was 64bit. The sound chip was also very weak and tinny.
Then you obv haven't heard air zonk
@@ajsingh4545 Nice PCM drum samples... Aside from, that, weak and tinny.
Puny sounding.
I was close to several people back then that were a part of it all, namely, from TTI, TZD, WD, & Icom. The biggest complaint I heard from each of those people & a few others in more recent times is that NEC Japan constantly shot down multitudes of geeat games from coming over for bizarre reasons. The usual excuse was that Americans wouldn't like game X. Fighting games in general were shot down because the Japanese branch said "Americans are tired of fighting games". 😂
When TTI took over, they had the exact same problem. Hudson Soft Japan was the head over them & constantly shot down lots of great games. Though in that regard I don't know of any specific games or genres.
Another huge problem was redesigning it which postponed the release by roughly a year. Also ordering too many systems for launch which ate up their budget for advertising.
My opinion, another problem was lack of sports game in comparison to the Genesis, & the few it did get, only one i can think of had real people in them(Champions Forever Boxing) versus year after year of John Madden, NHL Hockey, Tommy Lasorda, Joe Montanna, etc. Genesis especially had tons of 'realistic' sports games.
Electronic Arts, who made tons of popular sports games, apparently got mad at NEC of America when they asked EA if they're "up to the challenge" of making games for the TurboGrafx. If that really happened, I blame EA for that. It was just an innocent rhetorical question.
Though interestingly, later, EA made a deal with Victor Musical Industries to release tons of games on the PC Engine in Japan. The article i found says mostly Amiga ports. Only one specific game was mentioned in development. Some Ferrari Formula One game. I don't know happened to that joint venture though.
Also, a problem that went on for several years in Japan was treating the PC Engine like a souped-up Famicom instead of looking at it as its own system with its own specs. While it is to some degree a natural progression from the Famicom, the specs are well beyond it. It wasn't until maybe the last couple years when they really started actually pushing the systems capabilities.
To go along with that, it was discovered that NEC did not want people using the higher resolution mode. R-type was allowed to get away with it in Japan because Hudson was behind it. But later when it was merged on one card for the US release they had to lower the resolution which increased the flicker. I'm not clear if developers through the entirety of its life continued to follow that guideline, but NEC was very strict about that. Then later when R-type Complete was released on CD, they unfortunately used the lower resolution US version as the basis instead of the original Japanese version.
Even now there's homebrew developers figuring out things that it can do that supposedly it can't do. The recent Bonk parallax demo is a great example of something that could have been done back in the eighties and nineties but never was. You can find that one on TH-cam. People are gradually figuring out all kinds of tricks around its limitations just like the Genesis and SNES and their limitations had tricks around them. Like showing more colors on screen for the Genesis, to some degree or another there's ways around limitations .
One thing that many people don't know is that the TG's CPU is just a tad slower than the Genesis(which are both faster than the SNES), but the TG can produce roughly twice as many MIPS (millions of instructions per second) compared to the Genesis. So the specs are not completely clear cut. All systems have their various strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if I'm remembering right, it can't produce as many sprites as the Genesis but can produce larger sprites. Though I believe the SNES can produce more sprites on screen and larger sprites than the TG.
There's also an unusual trend of the least-technically advanced console of each generation usually being the one that sold the most copies; usually because it was cheaper for the consumer.
The Game Boy vs Lynx, Atari 2600 vs Intellivision, PlayStation vs Nintendo 64.
Not necessarily, Nintendo 64 was about $250 at release and Play Station was about $300-350.
@@jsr734 No no, they have a point. The N64 may have been cheaper, but it was a (admittedly underutilized) graphical beast compared to the PlayStation, and of course the latter sold much better despite this.
Don't forget the PS2 outselling the Xbox and Gamecube significantly, despite being the weakest console of its generation, though in that case, it was the ability to play DVDs that really pushed units. Interesting that the Turbografx was unsuccessful in the US despite this trend.
@@Pirateyware In that case, the Ps2 was cheaper than the Xbox but not as cheap as the Gamecube. Only initially the DVD player may have had something the Ps2 success, but then, dedicated DVD players became really cheap, so the Ps2 had to succed throu offering high quality, exclusive games to counter the competition. And it delivered it in that regard.
@@Pirateyware What hurt most Nintendo with the N64 was the lost of the japanese market. The N64 did ok in Europe and USA markets.
So refreshing to see someone doing their research, thank you. This guy I was watching “johnriggs” spreads misinformation about his details and this lead me away from retro gaming channels, until I discovered POJR.
Another possible downside to the TurboGraphx-16 was that its games came in cards, which, unlike cartridges, couldn't be modified (at least not as easily) which chips for extra graphical power.
as far as I've explored PCE library for myself, I think one edge NEC took with PCE in Japan as opposed to TGX in US was targeting nieches in japan such as sexually more suggestive title or graphically more violent ones. There is also lots of anime tie in games of passable to great quality, but one anecdote is some companies being thankful for being officially available on PCE while having to resort to dodging copyright and release unofficially on Famicom Disk System before. In west, sega was already pushing the "risque" market of US and trying to push it more with system that had no legs yet would been self destructive for sure. But in japan, aside PC's that NEC also was handling in big way in Japan, PCE was most "adult" gaming platform it feels like to me.
They didn't do themselves any favors by waiting 2 years for a very limited North American release.
The pcengine was actually made by hudson in mind to replace the famicom. They were i believe the 1st 3rd party and made basic for it.
They made the pcengine with custom chips and presented it to nintendo who shut it down as they had the super famicom in mind.
So they had their basically suped up famicom that used a custom spec and went to nec who agreed and thus the pc engine was born. It was named pc engine due to it being like the heart of a pc and also the owner of hudson loved trains.
I always liked Cave-baby Krillin.
I was never able to play one, I only even heard about it later in life (I was really young when it originally came out). I didn't know they released a new mini version of it though!!!
Naw, Bonk doesn’t look like an NES game. Have you seen the NWA version of Bonk? Also the reason Bonk was not the pack in was because it wasn’t out yet (Dec 1989). Legendary Axe may have been a better option though, but I love Keith Courage.
The pc engine / tgfx is a masterful example of what a turbo charged 8 bit console could do and in reality, is more of a super Nintendo than what the snes ended up being. A lot of the imaginary retro systems that are released these days owe it a huge debt.. I always admired it back in the day
I spent a long time categorizing each and every ROM from this console into genre.
I actually owned a TurboGrafx-16. Definitely an underrated system, and there's some great games on it. The original Splatterhouse, Dungeon Explorer is basically five-player(!) Gauntlet with a bit more RPG feel, even stuff like Final Lap Twin, which may well be the only hybrid racing game and RPG I've ever seen besides Racing Lagoon on PS1.
Bonk's Adventure was actually also released on Amiga and - ironically - NES, funnily enough, but only multiple years later (1993/1994): th-cam.com/video/DEpeEInxVBI/w-d-xo.html
Regarding "early Hudson games being simplistic", NES hardware can do only horizontal OR vertical scrolling. Not both in the same game.
BUT if you add some extra chips to the cartridge, you can do much more. Obviously there was no such choice for any early games.
Have you played the game "Challenger" on the Famicom? by Hudson Soft. It has horizontally and four-way scrolling levels. Very impressive for a 1985 Nes game.
I get why you placed the Tg16 next to the NES in general, but when the copyright of games show 1992 or even 1993 its a bit odd to do NES comparisons as the SNES would have been an established competitor by that point.
In all fairness, while Bonk's Adventure certainly would have made for a much better pack-in title, it wasn't released until a few months after the Turbografx-16's North American launch date.
7:50 Also known as Super Bros. 10 Kung Fu Mari
Lol also super mario 16
If only if Rondo of Blood was localized. That would have helped the console sell more.
You're chroma keying isn't working that great. Maybe there's an easy solution? Great video!
Legendary axe should have been the pack in game. The problem is all the games you liked weren’t launch titles, and other launch games like vigilante were even worth than Keith courage.
There's a decent handful of TG16 games that are still great. R-Type off top of my head, but 20 or so other good TG16 games I have in my roms collection.
The T16 alias PC Engine was extremely well received and was a huge commercial success... in Japan.
I really hope t hey make more PC engine/ TG 16 minis.
I hate when companies lie about their products, and in the case of video game consoles, lie about their power. And by renaming the PCEngine TurboGrafx-16 in western markets, they lied. Just like Atari did with their supposed "64-bit" console. The "bits" of a console refers to the CPU--not the graphics processor. In reality it is a step above the NES, but it is still an 8-bit console.
The problem was NEC had to approve every game that was published in the West, and NEC felt like they knew the Western gaming market better than Turbo Technologies, and would often make poor decisions like bundling together Keith Courage (a Reskin of Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru) together with the TG-16 instead of something that Western gamers were more interested in.
They made some mind-blowingly stupid decisions like not allowing Turbo Technologies to release Street Fighter 2 on the TG-16, despite fighting games being the thing at the time, all because one of their self-proclaimed "game gurus" said that American gamers were "getting disinterested in fighting games", and rejected the opportunity to put Mortal Kombat on the TG-16 as well. There was a lot of games that were going to come to the West, but got shafted due to NEC's incompetence regarding the system.
They even insulted EA at a board meeting.
Quite a chunk of why the TurboGrafx-16 failed in America was because and NEC, and it's rumored that it was to get back at Hudson Soft, but it failed, as the PC Engine was extremely successful in Japan, unlike America.
The PC Engine had a pretty sizable library to pick from during the US launch, similar to Nintendo when they first came over and instead launched with a handful of fairly mediocre games.
Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu... IS NOT BETTER on the PC-Engine... it looks nicer, and that's it, everything else from the level design, progression, and music is better on the NES, in fact most PC-Engine games suffer from the same problem, bland flat levels
The PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 wasn't really a thing in the UK, other than a few shops that did imports. A company called "Mention" did make the "PC-Engine Plus" an UNAUTHORISED import.
I certainly never knew ANYONE in my area that had one. Most people in the UK gamed on Home Computers* until about 1987 when the NES came out. (4 years after Japan, 2 years after US)
*ZX Spectrum/BBC Micro or C64 if you were rich, not PC's like now.
I'm convinced that the watch us release screwed up NEC had for any other regions. Telegames apparently did offer a PAL TurboGrafx, but in very small numbers. There was definitely importing of the PC engine itself in europe, but I believe France it had the most success as far as being imported.
Every time I sit and mess with my TG16 I always forget how cool it actually is
I remember wanting a turbo graphix 16 bad when I was a kid. Arguably the only system seller was the Bonk series. I think the downfall of this system was a lack of good software.
These limitations are a result of a 16 bit gpu being hamstrung by a 8 bit CPU.
Pc engine had good software rendering programming. However it came out too early.
I played a drinking game where I utilized a shot every time he says 'utilize', and I died and my ghost got alcohol poisoning.
What’s your outro music?
I always thought New Adventure Island should have been the pack in game. I still fire my TG16 up to play this game.