The SuperGrafx: That time when NEC made an amazing console with no games...
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- The NEC Super Grafx was a beast of a machine that could put it's rivals to shame in many key respects. But for some reason no one bothered making games for it.
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/ sharopolis
The SuperGrafx 3D demo by yhzmr442 was here:
github.com/yhzmr442/jspce
but it's been deleted, I've no idea why.
Hu-Zero:
Chris Covell
www.chrismcovell.com/creation...
Space Ava 201:
Nicole Express
nicole-express.itch.io/ - Ігри
To anyone who's wondering about that 3D demo I referenced, it seems to have been deleted from GitHub. I've no idea why.
Chris Covells Hu-Zero is still available from his website though and is amazing!
www.chrismcovell.com/creations.html
While it may seem impressive that an early home system could produce any level of 3d graphics... the fact is.. that these low-poly 3d graphics were just plain awful. Especially compared to anything that you might see at the Arcades, of the same Era.. And even poor compared to much older PC hardware (like the Amiga).
Not trying to be a downer.. but merely stating, that just because a system could display 3D graphics, does not mean that they are worthy of a good game experience. Also, Even the most impressive tech demos, are not the same as a fully functional Game... because a tech demo doesnt have as much over-head to deal with. The moment the hardware needs to have complex game logic... and other aspects to worry about... (per each clock cycle)... the slower those already awful 3D graphics will become.
Also, a lot of 3D can be simulated with 2d and some trickery.. and will look FAR superior, than the limits of a systems low spec 3D output. One might bring up the Pre-Rendered examples of Killer Instinct, or even Donkey Kong Country.
Another interesting example, is Sega Master systems Phantasy Star... which used simple tactics to make actual moving First person dungeons... without the need for actual 3d hardware.
My God you missed titled this why didn't you say 8-bit boss, with 8-Bit Grafx!? 😅
You must not be feeling well today.
Hey, speaking of 3D, do you think you'll ever do a video about the 3DS, and its stereoscopic 3D technology? This might also lend itself to covering the idea of holograms, and/or classic video games that use 3D, whether with glasses, whatever gimmick, or a slider switch on the system. You know, a look at tech that pushes the boundaries of reality, and whether the effect is convincing or not, or something like that. 😎
As a side note, I do remember you doing a video about SEGA's hologram games, (didn't you?) and this idea could be a good follow up to it. More of a spiritual successor as opposed to a sequel though.
@@esotericmissionary FYI - The most fantastic Stereoscopic 3D effects that Ive ever seen in a game... came from an Arcade game called "Continental Circus". Its a Racing game.
It had a pair of LCD shutter glasses, mounted in front of the cabinets monitor, that you looked through.
The way that they programmed the game... there is something flying out of the screen, about every 6 to 12 seconds. From tires, to Spoilers, and even 3d smoke trails. All of those effects, seemed to pop out of the screen, maybe 4 to 5 inches... and its Flippin Fantastic.
As a Racing game itself, without the 3d.. its just "Decent". But with the 3d... it takes it to a whole other level of an experience.
The thing about Stereoscopic 3d effects... is that for the best experience, you need a pretty large screen size... OR.. you need to be very close + the game needs to Optimize the effects, with a certain "Scaling". The use of extended screen borders, can also help the illusion of things popping out further (but at the cost of an overall smaller display area).
In the case of that racing game... they used small sized graphics, about 1.5" in diameter... on a 19" monitor. The scaling they used, allowed these objects to pop out about 4 to 5 inches... however, its possible that a dime sized object might be able to pop out about 8 to 11 inches max, on a 19" monitor size.
Imax 3D, allows for images that can pop out of the screen, maybe +50 ft... due to its massive screen size... and proportionately close vertical stadium seating.
Anyway... I agree... that a good video could + should be done on all of the Stereoscopic 3D arcade and console systems + the different tech behind each. There are a handful of rare arcade games, such as "Wyvern F0" that had stereoscopic 3d display methods. And while the Sega Master Systems 3d glasses are fairly well known... there was actually a Japanese NES version of the tech (Ive only experienced the SMS 3d games, and some of them are fantastic.. such as Missile Defense 3D, and Maze Hunter 3D).
There were a few of those Tomy-Tronic handheld LCD based games, that had 3d as well (looked like a pair of binoculars).
And of course, many arcade games used a half-silvered mirror, for various 3d and holographic effects... going all the way back to the 50s electromechanical gun games (like Kasco's Ninja Gun)... but even seen with more modern games like Space Invaders, Asteroids Deluxe, Discs of Tron environmental cabinet.
Even Terminator 2, had screen printed colored explosion graphics, behind its mirror... and if a player got hit... a bright light would flash from behind the mirror, causing the "Explosion" to seem to hover in the middle of the air... seemingly in front of the Display.
Hi thanks for your SGX love.I'am currently developing a Supergrafx shinobi conversion : ua-cam.com/video/9-D9kWQSNfU/v-deo.html
It hurts my soul when a cool system like this goes to waste. Maybe someday a homebrew scene will grow for it. Also, I love Battle Ace. It's underrated if you ask me
The same thing kinda happened to the CPSIII as well. Which sucks as that was the ultimate 2d board shame it only had 6 damn games and was never used again. What a waste of a sick peice of hardware.
Man one can only wish...
As with everything, price is often king.
When you're charging the equivalent of over $700(using inflation) for a console you're unlikely to sell many, especially when you have competitors putting out machines for half the price. It was a victim of the law of diminishing returns; it wasn't twice as good as a SNES or Mega Drive, so why pay double?
@fattomandeibu the ps3 was the exception to this pricing rule
@@axelgear666 Not particularly. It handed MS their biggest sales boost in history, to the point they went from minor player to second major. Sony were just lucky that they had enough cultists who'd buy whatever they put out on day one without question. If any one else tried the same trick it wouldn't've went so well.
By the end, they caught up(Microsoft were outselling them by over double for a long time) thanks to price drops, but without having predisposed cultists they wouldn't've made it that far.
These games look incredible for coming out around 1989. TurboGrafx games were so much more colorful and they'd always catch your eye.
For me the Ghouls and Ghosts didnt really destroy the Genesis version as much as it should have the Genesis actually matches it in some spots
If you call the system SUPER GRAFX you gotta smash the Genesis big time
Excellent video! The SuperGrafx has impressive VRAM and sprite capabilites for its time, and I also wish it gained more popularity. Thank you for mentioning my CPU Benchmark clip, I'm glad you found it interesting.
Hi! Excellent work!
NEC announced an amazing gigantic controller that the console fitted into in their first press release. Dont think it was ever released but it looked amazing with a joystick, throttle and many buttons. It dwarfed the actual console. A bit like that xbox mech game giant controller (steel battalion?) but 20 years earlier.
Yep, that was Steel Battalion.
I do remember that..
Makes me sad that this never took off, it's like the best console that never was.
NEC seems like a company a lot of people forget existed. I'd love a video just on the history of the company, especially through the 80s and 90s
NEC is still in business, doing tons of tech related stuff and constantly acquiring smaller companies. In December 2020, NEC acquired Swiss digital banking solution developer Avaloq for US$2.2 billion. Meanwhile, they have made money also selling off certain things and making tons of profits from that. Meanwhile, as of September 2019, NEC is the largest supplier of AI surveillance technology in the world. Their best period is hands down the 1980's and 1990's when they were creating computers and gaming consoles. Their PCs and Micro-PCs (most of which can play Japanese PC games of that era) and their consoles like the PC Engine / Turbografx-16 would be the main thing to look at if someone made a documentary on them. Granted, taking a quick look at their more current stuff would be very interesting since they develop tons of highly important things for the Japanese military (Advanced Combat Infantry Equipment System, The J/TPS-102 Self-propelled ground-based early warning 3D radar, etc, etc, etc).
They make best PC monitors imo
NEC really weren't the creators or drivers of the PC Engine / TG16. They just manufactured it. It was really Hudson Soft's creation. (Note the "Hu" in "HuCards".)
Here you go! It's pretty good and that's just Part 1
ua-cam.com/video/PFlMZiCZwVc/v-deo.html
NEC still exist today, but i don't think they make anything for home market anymore. They are big on medical stuff now.
"Looking like a Borg Drone's underpants" has to be the best analogy I've heard all month 😂
My wife (the resident Star Trek fan) says those are definitely Borg underpants
I'm glad someone's wife watches my videos, because mine doesn't!
NEC should have released this as the Turbo-Grafx 16 in the US.
Yes, certainly.
I was just thinking the same thing. I was a huge Turbo fan... Still have it in box, with the AV booster... Still have my TurboPlay and TurboZone magazines. My T-Shirt.
If those two things had coincided it might have worked out. But it really does go back to Hudson themselves not wanting to rock the boat as a Nintendo licensee.
NEC went into the US market thinking Hudson would surely support their co-developed system and then they didn't.
@@artemusprine Hudson Soft certainly did support the PC Engine, but only in Japan. We missed out on gems like Panic Bomber
The only problem, is how NEC is going to reduce its price without eating the cost. Since the hardware and games were very expensive to manufacture.
@@maroon9273 the TurboGrafx was released 2 years after the PC Engine and was still priced higher than the Genesis at launch. NEC liked Sony in the 90s, had their own manufacturing plants unlike Sega. So they could have lower the price of the hardware. Same with the software. Hucards in Japan was priced less than Famicom carts, this was one of the touted advantages that helped NEC beat the Famicom in Japan and one of the things Sega couldn't do with the mega drive. It just seems like in the US they read the market wrong and charged a higher price and made the system larger without adding anything (like a 2nd controller port and AV ports)
It's always fun to explore the untapped potential of some of these consoles. Atari Jaguar, Sega 32x and the Dreamcast also had relatively short lives. What if? :D
with the dreamcast you actually can have an idea: it may've had a short lifespan at home, but its arcade counterpart, the sega naomi, survived well into the late 2000s. i think the last arcade game running on what's essentially dreamcast hardware came out in like 2009
Dreamcast had amazing games, it was tanked by the Sega President who then went to work for Nintendo after getting his Golden Parachute and killing the console division.
@@yoymate6316 That's actually a good call. It had some great hardware for the time!
Exactly. These systems were always a mystery. What if developers went in all the way and figured out the hardware like Rare did with the N64. What would their late stage games look like. They're like race cars that never got to see what they can do out on the track.
Sega 32x coupled with the mega cd was a pretty competent set up, but expensive to put together. The jaguar should have launched with the CD as standard and piracy was a big problem for the dreamcast.
I own one. The toughest part was getting a Japanese power supply for it. I bought daikumura for it when I was in akihabra Japan. Cost me like 70 bucks and I think it was a great investment.
I have one without the supply. I assumed it was a pretty standard supply!? No??
It is, simple 9v power supply and can be had for $20. Maybe they meant an original power supply to keep the console all original for collector value?
@@EmergencyChannel That's what I was told as well.
@@EmergencyChannel No, it is not standard. It’s 6.3x3.0mm center-negative. That’s a relatively large barrel compared to your standard 5.5mm adapter, and the large 3mm center pin means you’re going to have even more trouble finding one that fits (standard is 2.1mm).
Even if you could find an adapter that fits you would likely damage it with the wrong polarity. Even if you found an NEC-brand adapter in Japan that fits it’s more likely to be for NEC’s Super CD-ROM² System or PC Engine Duo which were center POSITIVE and would likely damage the SuperGrafx (definitely wouldn’t work).
Your best bet is to buy the 6.3x3.0mm plug and hack it onto your own 8~11v power supply, being extremely careful to get the polarity right. My SuperGrafx came with the original adapter but I still made several with the same plug for Turbo Duo, PCE Duo, Super CD-ROM², and the pigtail dongle for powering the SuperGrafx from the Super CD-ROM² (have to be careful not to mix up plugs with that combo otherwise). Console5 has the 6.3x3.0mm plug tips if you ever need to build your own.
@@dennismcdonald2607 See the “NEC PC ENGINE & TURBOGRAFX POWER SUPPLY COMPATIBILITY LIST” from Global Garage. It is definitely not standard. Like most old Japanese electronics, it is reverse polarity but the tip is very uncommon.
Console5 has them if you want to hack together your own PSU with a thrift store 9v unit but you’ll need to make absolutely sure you wire it as center-negative.
Great video. As someone who has been toying around with PC-Engine homebrew development for years now, it's refreshing to see someone finally do their homework on this system before producing a video on it, as opposed to reading off the Wikipedia page. You covered the most important point, which is that in terms of sprites per scanline, the Supergrafx is second only to the Neo-Geo. The only other point I would have brought up is the Supergrafx's high resolution modes (up to 512H.)
I dreamed of owning this console back in the day, such a cool machine.
I love the way it looked and it's so sad it never reached full potential.
Fatal Fury Special ❤️ - I love the SNES port. It's the best 16bit SNK fighting game and an amazing 32megabit port of the 150megabit Neo Geo original...
I remember seeing this system advertised in the import games for sale advertisements in electronic gaming monthly back in 1991 and having no idea what it was.
Something that always stands out to me on the modern internet is calling add-ons consoles. SuperGrafx is a console, TurboCD is an Add-On. For some reason nobody calls the Jaguar CD a console, but they call the Sega CD one. I don't call my Twin Sticks for Saturn and Dreamcast a console. I don't call the SuperFX chip a console. The 32X was an add-on, a peripheral not much different than a Pro Action Replay or Game Genie. I wish the SuperGrafx upgrade was in a HuCard or whatnot, I'd have bought it for a peripheral price.
GAMES THAT PUSHED THE LIMITS OF wait ...
I remember coming across this console many times in EGM magazines but never really hearing about it anywhere else. Never saw it in a store, never knew anyone who owned it, etc.
I wish I had a friend to share and relate with in regards to old games. At least youtube and channels like this exist!
Same. I live in Germany si it is even harder here as a lot of stuff never came out here. Our laws also made arcades impossible.
You have me
Same here, bro
@@napoleonfeanor what is it woth outlawing everything that provokes a smile in Germany?
@@caiusmadison2996 I know right ? They even had a law restricting what went into beer. While German beer might be good It's the definition of *basic*. You look at Belgium and their beer just blows German beer out of the water.
WW2 and the aftermath of it like Germany being split into two probably played a HUGE part of why they had so many laws like that.
Strider for Supergrafx is the stuff of legends.
It never came out on the supergrafx and the pc engine version was rubbish.
@@brendanroberts1310 Yes but there are many rumors about the Supergrafx version. I have an EGM where they say they tried a prototype of the game in Japan (with 8 megs) and even put pictures...
@@honved_77 ah that makes sense now. Thanks
I've always felt that the SuperGrafx was what the PCE/TG16 should have been released as from the start in Oct 87. Sadly things did not work out that way but if it had I'm sure the console would have had a lot more success outside of Japan. Don't forget that the PCE was the only 4th gen console available for an entire year before Sega released the Mega Drive in Japan in Oct 88. The PCE also had 3 years on the market before the SNES was released in Japan in Nov 1990.
Another reason why the SuperGrafx failed was the console was rushed to market in December 1989, months ahead of the original release date in 1990. This did not give devs the time to even try to release software for it. Similar to how the Sega Saturn landed with a thud in the US when it was launched months ahead of time years later with almost no software available.
I also think NEC realized that fracturing their market by pushing the SuperGrafx after it's initial response was very lackluster was a long term bad idea.
I think PCE sold better than MD in JP
@Napoléon Fëanor The PCE did outsell the Mega Drive in Japan for most of its life. In the 80s and into the 90s, NEC was a massive company in the market in Japan. While they didn't develop the PCE hardware itself (Hudson did), NEC did manufacture, distribute, and advertise heavily for it in Japan.
The sound synth in the HuC6280 is no slouch either! I forget, either six or eight arbitrary waveform oscillators plus noise.
6, and the supergrafx actually makes some tweaks that allow you to play samples at a higher sample rate with lower cpu load
Yeah, I'd say the SNES' limit of 512 sprite tiles in VRAM and the lower horizontal resolution (which also goes to relative sprites per scanline limits ultimately) are actually far bigger bottlenecks than the "slow" CPU in terms of what's holding it back compared to the competition when that's the case. It's why systems like the Genesis and PC Engine can even remotely compete with it when all is said and done imo. Their faster CPU's would mean almost nothing if it weren't for the other less talked about limitations of the SNES that hold it back from honestly demolishing the competition, because great programming can almost always work wonders with the CPU speed available on whatever system. But, given these real limitations of the SNES, it's why you often see its game with black borders at the top and bottom of the screen, why it can't practically show as many characters on-screen in the likes of beat 'em ups as the Genesis, and why its visuals typically look slightly stretched when viewed on an old CRT TV for example. So, it sounds like the SuperGrafx has some nice specs that really would help it compete with and even surpass the SNES [and Genesis too] in many circumstances. Of course, if you play to each system's actual strengths, you can usually do stuff that simply isn't possible on the competition for the most part either way, so I guess maybe that's the thing to take away from this that applies equally to all of the consoles from that generation: I'm sure the SuperGrafx could better the SNES [and Genesis] in many ways, just as I'm sure the SNES can better the SuperGrafx and [Genesis] in many ways. Horses for courses.
It'd crazy how people swear the snes blows the genesis out the water when it has so many limitations that somewhat even out the advantages
The SNES can beat the SGX in the following = mode 7, 5 hw background layers vs SGX 2 layers, bigger color pallete (albeit less colors onscreen at once), transparency effects, sound? and that's it....., beyond that, the SGX trumps the SNES, I would say without a doubt that the SGX is far superior.
@@laumpolumpioActually, the SNES can [presumably] put far more colours on-screen than SGX, at well over 2000 as standard using Modes 3 and 4 in direct colour mode (2048 on BG1 alone). It's just that almost no developers ever used it for whatever reason. Probably because over 2000 colours from a much smaller master palette (which it is in direct colour mode. I think it's like 9-bit vs the normal 15-bit or something like that) ends up looking worse than the 256 colours from the normal 32,768 master palette. That's how big a difference that huge master palette makes.
The SNES also has stuff like window/shape masks, the ability to play Dolby Surround sound, better column scrolling than Genesis (so who knows how it compares to SGX), and possibly one or two other little things like that. It's nothing major, but it still adds up.
It's clear the SGX still has many advantages of it's own though.
As someone who doesn't know hardware, what were the reasons for the SNES drawbacks wrt resolution and sprites in one line? Was it something that could have been solved if they threw more money around (and increased the price), or was it a sacrifice they made in order to gain something else?
@@inceptional I see. It sounds to me like this is more an issue for us, the end-users, rather than for what I imagine where Nintendo's priorities at the time. So if you were somehow to invent a time-machine and use it only to try and convince Nintendo to make these changes you'd have a hard time, as it seems like at the time their choices did not prevent them from doing the kind of games they wanted, or the kind of games that sold well, and enabled them to save money and also somewhat lessen the price of the SNES, which could have driven even more sales netting them even more money etc etc.
Granted, I suppose that the prospect of "you will be able to convert some of the finest arcade games with more fidelity" could have interested the technology-oriented people at the company... but the money-men could have probably countered with "but the arcades are fading as the consoles are rising, we don't NEED them to look as impressive to create a selling product" and I would have a hard time arguing that point. And telling them that people in the future, long after the console isn't even selling or making them anymore, have a harder time home-brewing games for the SNES is... probably not gonna be a homerun. But yeah- it's a shame from our perspective, but also a hard sell to convince them to make the change from the sound of it.
Though I am curious now- how come the resolution is making it difficult to make more homebrew now? Is it just easier to work in Genesis resolution for modern devices, or is it just that more people have experience working in Genesis resolution because the Genesis homebrew scene became more prominent, and now people just have a hard time resetting themselves to work with SNES because there's more documentation / experience working with Genesis resolutions, etc?
Great video ,on a system in the uk we knew very little about
I love your comprehensive break down of system specs and capabilities, especially comparing it to other systems of the time.
people who just mention the bit count of the systems and then maybe 1 or 2 other things leave me wanting more lol
Its a very cool concept for a system basicly 2 times the graphics power from 2 chips, and compatible with PC Engine. Too bad about the games only being 5
Fighting games on cartridge consoles were first and foremost constrained by the ROM size, which was expensive. The need for smaller character was driven by this. And then, it was constrained by the ability of the console to update enough sprites each frame, and then by the maximum number of sprites on screen / in a line. You can think of CD to solve the ROM size issue, but you lose the ability to stream animations from the CD.
Now, you have to put everything in RAM, and consoles did not have a ton of RAM. SEGA-CD has ports of SamSho and FF Special that retained full size of the sprites, so the MegaDrive could push big characters. But it was constrained by the RAM of the SEGA-CD.
So now, you have to solve the issue with the RAM, which is why there was the Arcade card on PCE. All of this eventually takes care of the initial issue, which was rom size. But even then, you need to have quite a lot of RAM. That's a lot of additional hardware to simply reach out the next limitation, which is the speed at which you can update data and the number of sprites on screen.
These 16 bits were never well suited for fighting games in the end. Neo-Geo used cartridges and they were expensive. Mega-Drive is currently getting a port of Real Bout that will most probably use the full rom size the console can actually see. It will get much closer to what the Neo Geo did, but it could have never existed back then because the price would have been way too high.
Appreciate the quality of your videos
I'd be so upset if I'd bought that when it was new and it only got a handful of games
I remember seeing this being sold by Tronix back in the day for around $600. It looked damn amazing, but all 14 year old me could do at the time was look at it.
NEC wanted to use Namco's plans for a 16 bit system, but Hudson Soft struck down the idea. Also, the original plan for NEC and Hudson's system was to be 16 bit, but it would have arrived in mid/late 1990, so they rushed SuperGrafx with the 8-bit CPU instead.
This why I own a Core Grafx 2 with a 3 controller add, an arcade pro and a cd drive.
Even at that time I think the machine looked awesome and wanted so bad to make it to the United States and other countries.
Yeah i wanted one so bad.
Imagine an alternate universe where this beat the Sega Genesis and later even the SNES….
The cpu in the PC engine consoles was faster than the one in the SNES, just like the Genesis.
I suspect the pricetag would have killed it in any case. The problem, I'd say, is that it was twice as expensive as the competition, without being twice as good. It seems like it didn't bring enough to the table to justify its high costs.
The SuperGrafx really confuse me as to what they where thinking releasing a new system two years after their previous one. If one want to be optimistic you could look at it as the first mid-gen upgrade similar to how we got the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X today. There where some games that worked on both system but had enhanced graphics when played on the supergrafx. Maybe NEC should've leaned more into that feature and it would have made more sense as a more enhanced version of the PC Engine rather then it's own dedicated system. Of course the CD-Rom add-on kinda served this purpose.
This console and it's potential is the reason I got into pc engine homebrew last year. Just imagine what you could do with the Supergrafx + the arcade cd card's 2MB as a huge graphics buffer. I started out with the HuC toolkit and when pushing lots of sprites and streaming animation in, you can actually start to get close to a CPU limit. You can see that in a couple of my tests/demos on my channel here. But that's when using a very old school C compiler that's only been tweaked a little over the years. I've switched over to assembly now and have some cool stuff working already. Not sure I'll ever make a full size game or anything like that, but maybe a cool demo or two to see what it can really do.
Don't feel bad. I'm a 90s kid and barely knew TG16 existed until much later in life lol. I was a SEGA kid.(born 86)
@@stephenschenider4007 same. sega was all I knew. barely had an experience with snes and playstation 1 somehow.
@@stephenschenider4007 Don't feel bad either. I was an Atari kid with a 2600!
But in some ways, it was more impressive than any system that came after it. Before it there was nothing except pong. We went from playing Candyland and Chutes and Ladders to playing a game on the TV set!!!
I had a Hit N Missile machine and my brother had a Digital Derby machine, both by Tomy.
For you, the SNES was just a better NES. There was nothing new in your life. One day games were played with a board and pieces and the next day you could play on TV. That was quite the upgrade.
@dogen: How about programming some Pacman clone games for the TurboGrafx-16 and put them on Turbo Blaster. You can have Atari's Pac-Man, Odyssey 2 KC Munchkin,Baby Pacman, Pacman Jr, and Ms Pacman 2
@@orlandoturbo6431 idk man... pac man isn't my thing 😂
the turbo blaster is cool, but CDs are much more economical for the end user, and the storage is nice. i'm undecided.
I saw a preview for the supergrafx in a game magazine around 1989. They referred to it as a "souped-up 8-bit system." Lost me on the first sentence, as I really wanted a 16-bit Sega Genesis. 30+ years ago, marketing was key in driving the point home that 16-bit >>> 8-bit no matter what.
NEC didn't help themselves when naming these things. Core grafx, turbo grafx, super grafx (not obvious which one is best), super system, super system squared... It's more confusing than Nvidia graphics cards.
One of my favourite consoles that I used to own was a turbo express, but even now I have no idea whether it was a "bog standard" pc engine or one of the upgraded ones.
I do know that I could play through all of r-type on one cartridge, whereas my mate had to buy both "halves" of the game on separate cartridges for his white pc engine. Whether that was due to the systems or cartridges I dont know, but I vividly remember how chuffed I was when level 5 appeared, fully expecting the game to end after level 4 😂
turboexpress was just a pce/tg16 inside. coregrafx, shuttle, etc were also just plain pc engines (except for very small details only programmers may or may not even care about). the supergrafx was the failed successor, the cd was really what succeeded it and you could run it with a regular cd system card, a super system card with 256KB ram, or an arcade card with a ridiculous 2MB ram.
I am a amazing supporter of you I’ll always watch YOU.
I’m sure there was a reason they made this thing look like a facehugger
Great video! Looks like you used the original palette for the system here also, as opposed to the RGB palette often seen in these videos. Cheers!
9:40 that guys projection? Reminds me a lot of the head Captain from bleach
They did it again with the pc-fx. AMAZING machine with only a handful of games. Great games, granted, but far too few.
Yeah that sucked that it didn't do numbers even in Japan.. We didn't have a chance getting it in the states. If I remember, it wasn't built for polygons and 3D games but I bet it would do 2D sprites extremely well
@@fakeshemp9599 it's a 2d monster! The games that it did get look amazing. Imagine if it kept support and devs got to use it to its fullest. It's a real shame.
@@fakeshemp9599 It's essentially like a supergrafx with a cd rom, but with another doubling of vram(256KB), an extra 4 backgrounds with rotation and scaling and another 1MB vram, and a much faster 32-bit cpu with 2MB wram.
@@jc_dogenit could've been used greatly with a arcade board and nec pc-98 model as well.
Great video! Such a bummer this never took off. Would have been super cool to see what could have been done with it. It would be fantastic if the home-brew scene exploded for this console. I'm wondering if a Mister core exists for this.
Watching the debug of tiles in memory storage is very satisfying. More of that if you could?
What baffles me about the SGX is they did already have the CD add-on out by this point. Most of these games could have worked as CD titles, and no PCE-CD Strider is not a good example of that.
I know this will sound crazy, but they really should have made the SGX as an add-on for the TG16. Like a much earlier 32X, it possibly would have cut cost much less compared to its original price tag.
To be fair, if that were the case it would have probably still remained in Japan. Would have been amazing to see an official SGX-CD, and what that could have entailed.
Still, NEC’s problem was always the lack of 3rd party devs, especially in the west. It’s an interesting what if though.
It's easy to forget just how difficult it was to make CD content at that point in time, CD-R drives did not yet exist and 100MB was considered an extremely large hard drive. When we look back having seen fast CD-RW drives, software like Nero come and go, and now we can throw entire .iso files about in seconds, we think "why didn't they just...", yet back then Windows 3.0 was only just releasing. :-)
Most Japanese Game Devs were not using Windows based PCs to make games. They used something like the FM-Towns / X68000, which was FAR superior in capabilities. You can see an example, by looking at Thunderforce II for the X68000 vs the Sega Genesis version. More parallax scrolling layers. More graphical details. Better voices. More levels...etc. Yet, it was likely the PC used to create the Megadrive version of the game.
The thing is... Game companies have access to custom hardware, and software... and cost is rarely a consideration. Many game companies also provided access to special hardware and software, to help program their console systems with. These were likely costly.. but again, that would have been part of the process to get your game into production.
Also realize, that computers like the Amiga 500, were doing things that no windows based PC were doing, even much later in their lifespan. For example.. the Amiga came with its own sound / synth chip. Typical IBM PCs in their beginnings, didnt even come with a sound-card. Certain Amigas were used in conjunction with a "Video Toaster", to create realtime 3d rendered scenes (used to create a lot of the Babylon 5 CGI scenes, I believe).
And well before that.. Disney had Cray Workstations... which were used to create the 3D rendering for the movie Tron.
There were also other Media creation pcs / workstations, by "Spark" ? I forget if that was the company name... but those PCs actually came with 3D shutter-glasses... and could do things that no home based PC, were able to do, at that time period.
I believe that Early windows pcs, were not the preferred creation environment, until much much later in its timespan.
@@johndough8115 You are absolutely correct on all of this. To be clear, my point wasn't about Windows based PCs in development, I was using that to give context in a way that most people reading my comment could readily relate to. My point was that making content for CD was not easy and the bar for entry was high; that things have changed so much now, we can sit back in our armchairs and suggest that things might have been different if only company X or Y had only done some 'simple thing'.
@@johndough8115 BTW It was Sun Microsystems that made the SPARC based workstations, I had the pleasure to come across one being used for creation of a Geographical Information System but wasn't allowed to play much with it. :-( Because of the nature of the work it had a wicked big display too. The first of those machines had only just come to market in 1989 though. For that matter the Video Toaster and first version of Lightwave 3D only dropped in 1990. When the Amiga CD32 came along several years later in 1993, Commodore were assisting smaller developers with CD creation, you had to mail over a DAT tape and cross your fingers you hadn't messed up the disc layout.
I feel like ports of Sega's System 16/18 games would work extremely well on Supergrafx
I picked one up via eBay about 15 years ago. Another example that the best selling hardware is not always the best, but better advertised, for this little beast had potential.
Honestly, just watching this video makes me wish they would restore the PC Engine as a community-focused dev console, cause it just looks like a fun sandbox, just imagine community made ports of popular modern titles for the system being distributed.
Paraphrasing Captain Beard Jr. "El poder Total esta en sus manos"
Apparently nec was bigger than Sony in the 90’s in Japan
As a teen who owned a turbografx 16, it was so sad how underappreciated and undervalued this system really was..
Oh British Upspeak we meet again. The valley girls would be proud.
First hybrid console, first CD-Rom console and the first console PRO. Thank you NEC/Hudson. 😂
One big issue with consoles in the USA is foreign developers had this thing about 'Consoles need to be big.' Well Atari proved this wrong with the 5200, MS later on with the XBOX. I believe if Americans had seen the power of the PC Engine in its tiny package, they would have been impressed with the consoles capabilities. It would also been much cheaper to produce over them creating new case, PCB etc.
TG16 was doing fairly modest in America early on when it was going head-to-head with the Sega Genesis, but then the SNES launched and left the TG16 as the very first casualty in the console war in North America more or less. As a kid, I never saw the system or games in person until way later in the late 90s going into 2000 when it was long discontinued.
Seems like a great system, ghosts and goblins looks awesome.
When you make a console, you have to balance price and power. Sega and Nintendo did that usually.
I can't believe people assumed the dual Video Chip design in the Super Grafx would somehow clog the performance of the CPU. We still use this approach with SLI and Crossfire today. Any benchmark configured that way with comparative video cards shows vast improvement over single GPU usage.
If SuperGrafx CD had been brought to North America and Europe for $299 (instead of the PC Engine), NEC might've cleaned up the high end market for the early 90s.
It's called the TurboDuo all they had to do is add the Supergrafx chips in it and it might have sold better.
@@orlandoturbo6431 That's what I'm saying. NEC had already built the $300 Supergrafx for the Japanese market in 1989. Had they bit the bullet and added in the CD-ROM at no cost, that machine would've found that sweet spot that we now know exists at the top of the game console market. More important, the Supergrafx CD would've been relevant until the mid 90s, just like the Genesis. If anything, it might've attracted more game developers with its better color setup, increased sprite handling, faster GPU, and cheaper-to-produce CDs.
@@MaxAbramson3 The TurboGrafx 16 needed more familiar games to compete against the Sega Genesis. When I was younger I thought what is wrong with NEC and Hudson Soft releasing shareware on the TurboGrafx16.
@@orlandoturbo6431 And they had over 1,000 titles in Japan. Developers didn't want to bring them over because only 300k of the first 750k were bought. "Do the math" is right. $50 million that could've been spent translating, porting, and developing kick ass titles, marketing, or even creating a Kieth Courage cartoon to get kids buying it for the pack in title. NEC and HudsonSoft seem to have done everything wrong, even refusing to bring the price down when sales had dropped off to almost nothing.
Now this is a crying shame. This was a console capable of producing arcade-quality graphics, and it came out in the _80's!_ It should have been a rousing success!
A video like this comparing the 6th gen consoles would be cool
I 2nd this request
I would love to see some custom modern games made for the Super Graphx. What people have done with modern code on the Genesis and even Neo Geo, this would be amazing to see something homebrew.
I sold all my megadrive games for a SGX in 1994 because I saw a pic preview of Strider.
2 months later : "NEC stops dev on SGX"
I WAS SO HAPPY.
HOLY SHIT.
NEC failed so hard because it was not an entertainment company. It's even on their name: Not an Entertainment Company.
NEC only produced it. HudsonSoft designed and owned it, and they were an entertainment company. They were even the first licensed third party with Nintendo, and did some Nintendo MSX ports.
NEC Software is responsible for porting many MSX/PC88-98 games to PC-Engine and later on the Super Famicom. They had some idea of what they were doing, but I used the Japanese console names for a reason since barely any of them made it state-side to my knowledge. Still falls squarely on Hudson Soft not taking advantage of their brief window of opportunity when they were gaining ground against the Sega Genesis prior to the SNES 1991 release.
I was riveted by the Super Grafx back in the day as im sure most of us were. I am always frustrated that when people compare the G&G ports they neglect to mention we are talking 5megs vs 8, so the SG game is almost twice the size, of course its going to be more detailed.
Yeah I remember reading about this in video game magazines way back in the day and drooling over it for a while. But then I worked some corn fields for a couple of years to buy a NEO GEO home system, and everything in life was good 😁
The color palette and textured from SuperGrafx seems way better then the Mega Drive
It was called the PC engine in the UK, that other name is the yank name.
I had the handheld version when I was a kid. My parents kept calling it the "Game Boy." 😅
@@elhazthorn918 Handheld PC Engine? I vaguely recall it, did you import it?
If THIS was the system that came to the west, rather than the TG16, and still maintained it's backwards compatibility, AND had properly invested in more game titles from 3rd parties... A lot of "ifs" here, but the history of gaming would have likely been much different.
On a side note, I seem to recall having an EGM magazine in late 1988 that had showed thumbs from different upcoming games on any given console. One of those thumbnails was Strider on SuperGrafx. If memory serves me, that port was a last second change to the Super CD-ROM so they could add Redbook audio. I would have loved to see that one on SuperGrafx, especially if it had been also available on Super CD.
Next to a Sega Mark III the original PC Engine is one of my top, I must get eventually consoles.
Always fun to see something rare :)
Good stuff
Truly one of the ugliest consoles ever made, but I do love it. The NEC Power Base has always been my holy grail. It exists somewhere, there's picture proof!
In fact as seeing from the coregrafx mini it has a lot of great games, especially for the time, at the time these things were difficult to get a hold on and very expensive because dedicated to the japanese market, at least in my country.
I loved the TurboGrafx growing up. And I only realized recently that SuperGrafx and TurboGrafx CD even existed.
Not that I'm knowledgeable about tech and stuff, but it seems like whenever a game company tries to make an add-on for a console, it never goes well? Like Nintendo 64's DD, Sega 32x... You not only have to convince your core audience who already has the console to shell out for a new device, but new customers, you somehow have to convince them to buy TWO consoles just to play your game.
i do have about 3 turbo grafx 16 systems & a friend gave me he's turbo grafx 16 cd. but no ac adaptor with it. one day i was in a thrift store & i found a turbo duo for $2 no hook ups. just the system & a controller
Excellent.
I own the NEC TurboExpress (PC Engine GT) handheld and once read that it was SuperGrafx compatible, but I never put it to the test to see if that was correct or not.
Amazing video! Gosh, it seems like NEC made just way to many expansions/versions of the PCE..... enough that not all of them got software support... like this. What a missed opportunity!
I'm sorry, I just had to point this out though... The megadrive was clocked at 7.68 mhz... 7.61 in PAL regions.
I love my Supergrafx! It has bolts.
The problem with the PCE was it was made to be upgradable but that made it really confusing and expensive. There was the PC engine / Turbo but then you got into the cd system and that had various system cards and later a super system card. Then of course you have the Super Grafx, Turbo Duo, and they also released an arcade card. The other issue was the controller since it only had 2 buttons but they did release a 6 button with Street Fighter II. The biggest problem was obviously price but beyond that there was no way you could understand all of it back then when information was communicated through magazines.
Exactly how I feel. We had a Turbografx-16, and I knew the PC Engine was the Japanese version, but had no idea what the Coregrafx was or the Supergrafx or the TurboDou and which was better. It was confusing and there was no internet back then.
@@catsaregovernmentspies I first found out about the SuperGrafx by reading EGM magazine. I eventually picked one up in the late 90s when I was collecting Japanese games. It really is a shame that only a handful of games came out for it. NEC went from making such a popular console with the PC Engine to one that developers just didn't want to support. Pretty crazy.
@@catsaregovernmentspies we had internet back in the 80’s it was just super slow I was one of the few kids in the late 80’s that knew what the internet was
I think hou are seeing it from a 2020 perspective
@@zachmcguire6659Are you sure?
Remember seeing this in The Games Machine and then waited for the software coverage..
Think i saw all of 1,maybe 2 games reviewed, then nothing..
So many "failed" platforms never achieved their potential. It's frustrating if you happened to back the wrong horse. Like I did with the Amiga 1200 and the Atari Lynx. 🥺
bonk was such an amazing game for it......im actually had a tb 16 when i was about 5-6 so mearly 90's
Just like the PS3, it's reminding me of a memory.
Apart from having actually being released, this could rival the Konix Multisystem as one of the greatest consoles that went nowhere. Being technically superior isn't a guarantee of success - see Sega's offerings versus their counterparts, or go back earlier to the Intellivision vs the Atari VCS. Maybe if NEC would have considered selling these at or below cost and making their money from the games it could have had more potential, but I doubt the market at the time would have supported such a strategy, especially with a limited library of console specific games available. Backwards compatibility helps, but it can only go so far to convince people to spend their money, even now.
Back in the day, I had read that the TurboDuo was going to have the upgraded graphics AND the ability to run some IBM software.
But a warehouse fire at NEC scrapped those plans.
What might have been.
NEC made a big mistake releasing the suprgrafx and extent the cd add-on. When the pc engine and its cd add-on was doing fine in Japan. Plus, the duo console was coming out a year later.
Ghosts n Goblins was the ORIGINAL ARCADE Name to somehow now be called Ghouls n Ghosts In Australia.. Was my First favourite game and the 1st stage was a challenge
Then there was R-TYPE ... Best space shooter side scroller for Decades !
I thought Ghouls 'n' Ghosts was the sequel to Ghosts 'n' Goblins?
@@elhazthorn918correct
I had one in the late 90s, swapped two atari 800XLs, a C64 and an electron for it.
I played everything in this era, down to the most obscure stuff, and I barely even ever heard of this thing.
those games look arcade perfect
Love the super grafx ❤
I just subscribed whoohoo
9:35
I mean, if it's good enough for Master Roshi, it's good enough for me.
SNK Neo Geo ports needed the Arcade card to able to run on the console like the 4 Ram Cart for the Sega Saturn with the Capcom and SNK fighting gamea.
Damn..5?
That's even less than the Virtual Boy lmao
I think it might have also been a marketing issue.
I was around back in the day, looking at consoles, and I never heard of this thing. I'd even seen stores still selling the Turbo Grafx in the 90's, but not its successor.