PC Engine CPU
jsgroth.dev78 points by ibobev 4 hours ago
78 points by ibobev 4 hours ago
The PC Engine CPU is highly underrated. People like to go "haha, it was the TurboGrafx-16 but its CPU was 8-bit" like that makes it a joke, but that clock speed boost on top of the 6502 architecture is a big deal. (The S-CPU on the SNES still has an 8-bit data bus too, so the 16-bit advantage isn't as strong as it seems)
The Arcade Card add-on was designed specifically around using the transfer instructions to rapidly transfer graphics into VRAM, something it was very good at. Made some really good Neo Geo ports possible.
>"haha, it was the TurboGrafx-16 but its CPU was 8-bit"
Amusingly, TurboGrafx-16 is a US-specific name, so is the huge shell.
In Japan, the console was called PC Engine and was really compact. Later revised as CoreGrafx and CoreGrafx II, both still the same fundamental hardware.
I own the later variant. Very solid little box that sips power and produces stable a/v output.
NEC made some great looking consoles, in Japan. The PC Engine, the PC Engine Shuttle, the IFU-30 unit "briefcase", and the SuperGrafx. I think console design peaked with the SuperGrafx.
In the back of my mind, I have the idea that US regulations required extra shielding that the Japanese model lacked. Maybe this isn't the case. Maybe some American marketer decided it was just too cute or too small.
I think the redesign of the NES shell for the North American market was largely for vanity reasons, wasn't it? Entertainment system instead of computer, grey plastic instead of beige, front loading instead of top, long cartridges that were supposed to look like VCR tapes instead of toys.
The amazing Street Fighter II' port didn't even need any add-ons! (Well, aside from the 6 button controller)
The article notes that the cartridge had some extra bank switching inside it though, as it went over the address space limit for HuCards.
I didn't grow up with the PC Engine or TurboGrafx, but I did start getting into it after I got the MiSTer.
I find that the unsuccessful [1] consoles are generally pretty bad. The 3DO and the Jaguar and CD-i are mostly pretty crappy, and while it can be fun to play for a novelty and you might even find one or two games that make it worth it, the vast majority of the time there's a reason that people don't seriously revisit these consoles. To be clear, I did grow up with a 3DO and Jaguar (well, I got both when I was thirteen), so I'm not speaking out of my ass here.
So I was actually very surprised that the TurboGrafx games were actually quite good. Like, I kept going through random games, and I was shocked to find that a lot of them were actually very well made; decent graphics, tight controls, and fun gameplay.
There are terrible games on there, but I was kind of shocked to find that they appear to be outliers.
Now I kind of wish I had grown up with the Turbografx.
[1] A relative term, I acknowledge
I always thought the 3DO was good hardware, for 1993, let down by a high price (especially by 1993 standards) and a poor library of games: there just wasn’t a good incentive to buy the thing.
Fast forward a couple of years and the PlayStation and Saturn are both out, more technically capable, cheaper, and with better game libraries.
I really do think the main thing that killed the 3DO was the price - it really was wildly expensive - and the lack of games sort of followed naturally from that because who’s going to develop for a console nobody bought?
The Jaguar catalog was mostly meh, but there were a few gems that I really enjoyed (Aliens vs Predator, Doom, Wolf 3d, Iron Soldier, and Tempest 2000). AvP alone was worth the price of the system.
I was a proud Turbo DUO owner. It had some fantastic multiplayer games, especially 5-player Bomberman. That got a lot of play, including tournaments at work. Dungeon Explorer is another one we played through multiple times.
I have to push back on that a bit.
I played through the campaign for Alien vs Predator for both the Space Marine and the Alien campaigns in BigPEmu, and I really think it's a mediocre-at-best Wolf 3D clone. If it had been released on anything besides the Jag, then I think it would be, at best, relegated to the annals of mediocrity like the dozens of other Wolfenstein 3D knock offs. I wanted to like it because I love the first two Alien movies, but I really do not think it holds up compared to most FPS games, even at the time.
I haven't fully gone through the Turbo CD catalog yet, but I did play through It Came From Outer space and that was a blast in a "so bad it's good" kind of way.
Tons of the games were simple shmups, so I can understand people who might have the wrong idea about the library. Also, the library in Japan was way more impressive than what made it to the west. Gekisha Boy in particular still stands out as a fun and unique game (though you can play a translated version on your Mister). Fire Pro 3 is an incredible wrestling game that I still play today (no japanese required). There was another game, Zero4 Champ, which had unique drag racing gameplay (it was all about timing your gear shifts). It was hard to play without japanese knowledge, except for the 2 player head to head races. For CD games, of course, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is well known.
I restored a PC Engine a year or two ago and I also became fascinated by the hardware. The HuC6270 VDC/HuC6260 VCE graphics system is actually very flexible for the kinds of games the system was designed to play. If I remember correctly, it has background tilemaps, sprites, scrolling, 64kb video RAM, and a 512 colour palette. The hardware sprites/scrolling is what makes it feel more arcadey a lot of the time.
Given the 8-bit CPU it feels a lot more like a 16-bit system to me. The dedicated sprites/scrolling hardware instead of a more bitmap/framebuffer focused design meant things like shooters and platform games played amazingly well.
Soldier Blade, R-Type, Air Zonk, Bonk, etc felt amazing. Given the formfactor and the cool card cartridge format I can see why it was so popular in Japan.
These sorts of things - sprites and scrolling tilemaps - were pretty standard for consoles of the time. C.f. the NES, Master System, Game Boy...
OTOH if you're European, my impression is that micros were more popular in the 80s and early 90s than dedicated game consoles, and I guess those tended to lack robust sprite/scrolling support, and tended to be more frame buffer-y.
The PC Engine's CPU is probably its strongest aspect, Hudson did a great job here. Going with a really fast 8-bit CPU makes much more sense than Nintendo's choice of going with a slow 16-bit CPU, especially when the screen is 256 pixels wide so most of the calculations a game would be doing are only 8 bits anyway. Even when you have to do 16-bit calculations, the SNES CPU still has an 8-bit data bus so it doesn't have much of an advantage over the PC Engine (all 16-bit operations take extra cycles compared to their 8-bit counterparts). In practice, fast action games like shooters play a lot more smoothly on the PC Engine than on the SNES. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the SNES CPU provides the option of running at ~3/4 speed if the publisher didn't want to pay for faster ROMs, so a lot of games have unnecessary slowdown because the publisher wanted to save 50 cents per cartridge.
Where the PC Engine ends up weaker is in the video processor. That generation of consoles was able to do more with the video hardware than previous generations (like the NES and Master System) due to faster RAM becoming available. The PC Engine used the additional bandwidth to make it possible for the CPU to access video memory while the screen is being drawn, while the SNES kept the restriction that you can only access video memory during vblank and instead used the additional bandwidth for more background layers. Being able to access video memory all the time is definitely a useful feature, but the result is that PC Engine games often look more flat than SNES games.
Remember that the PC Engine came out in 1987, over three years before the SFC did. That makes Nintendo's CPU decisions even more questionable, but also explains the huge gap in graphics hardware - not just more background layers, but also effects like transparency, scaling and rotation, and richer colours.
As someone who owns a SNES and a TG-16, I think I disagree. The TG-16 graphics really pop compared to the SNES.
The SNES can only render 256 simultaneous colours. The TG-16 could do twice that at 512. Its video processor was also full 16-bit.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that the video was the weakness of the TG-16. At the time, that was the Turbografx’s whole claim to fame in that it was superior graphically to the SNES.
Source: Old enough to remember the commercials and bought both consoles to compare like nerds did back then
The PC Engine could theoretically do more colours on screen (though things like colour math and mid-screen palette changes do complicate that a bit...), but only had 9-bit wide palette entries compared to the SFC's 15-bit colour depth, which allowed for a lot more subtlety and richness.
There's a youtube channel that is documenting the entire japanese PC Engine game library: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1sb8k4ZPagYwRxx-s3mr...
They previously did the entire famicon library.
Still own multiple TG-16’s. The CD-ROM attachment plus Ys: Book I & II was a modern technical marvel at the time.
Hearing full hi-fi stereo anime rock and roll instead of chip tunes blew my mind back in the day.
Many TG CD-Games had their code in track one, and the other tracks were just redbook audio. So you pop the CD into a regular player, skip the first one or two tracks so your speakers don't blow out with static, and then enjoy the game soundtrack.
Actually, I think most had the code in track 2. Track 1 was an audio track warning you that the disc is only designed to a play on the system. More details at https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27518/did...