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PC Engine CPU

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Re: PC Engine CPU

#51

Post by runjake »

pipes wrote: post #49
runjake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a teenager, I had a hobby of importing Japanese gaming consoles and video games. I had a PC Engine and a Super Famicom (well before the SNES made it to the US!). They both had cosmetic differences but I thought that the Japanese versions of both would be more attractive to US customers. I'm not sure why they shipped different casings like they did.

Presumably you were in the USA? We had grey imports in the UK too, but it was prohibitively expensive. My family was relatively well off, but no way I'd have been able to wangle an expensive import super famicom. Even worse when the snes did finally arrive we were stuck with pal 50hz squished slow versions, especially noticeable in street fighter 2.

Yep, I was in the US. IIRC, the Super Famicom cost me about $350-$400 at the time. Also had the .jp version of the Neo Geo, which was even more. And the PC Engine and Famicom. I did some tradings between consoles there. We weren't well off but all my job money went into it.

Re: PC Engine CPU

#53

Post by hakfoo »

tombert wrote: post #46
sillywalk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the main thing that killed the 3DO was the price I believe this was because 3DO didn't make the consoles themselves, they licensed the design to others who made it. The console had to be profitable, rather than be sold at a loss and be subsidized by game sales.

I always wondered if the better approach would have been to have the 3DO company subsidize the development of the consoles in relation to how many games were sold, and maybe in relation to how many of those specific consoles were sold. e.g. if they dedicated half the licensing proceeds to paying back the consoles, and 80% of the 3DO consoles sold were Panasonic, than they'd give 40% of the licensing fees back to Pana…

What was the story for the manufacturers though?

Why would you get into the 3DO business knowing that if it took off, you'd end up competing with other, potentially cheaper brands?

I guess the expectation was that it would be like CD players and VCRs, the market would be big enough to maintain a bunch of different brands.

Re: PC Engine CPU

#54

Post by sleepmode »

Diehard Gamefan was a magazine that gushed over the console’s engineering and its releases quite frequently while mainstream rags barely mentioned it. I could never afford it, even the handheld was eye-bulging expensive, but I could at least experience it vicariously, poring over the screenshots, amazed at the gorgeous sprites and artwork. Now that I can run it on emulators I fully understand the hype.

Re: PC Engine CPU

#55

Post by unleaded »

wk_end wrote: post #14
alexyoung wrote: post #5

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 t…

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.

It seems to me like there's a pattern with it in regards to differences between Japanese systems and those from everywhere else. Most Japanese arcade games in the early 1980s borrowed heavily from Galaxian's model of tilemap+sprites which pretty much became the standard. But a lot of American games (e.g. Williams' Defender, Robotron, etc. and Taito America's Qix, Zookeeper..) used a big framebuffer & blitter. Maybe memory was more expensive in Japan.

Re: PC Engine CPU

#56

Post by dosisking »

ushimitsudoki wrote: post #42
christkv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they tried to sell it to Nintendo at some point.

According to Wikipedia, Hudson originally approached Sharp before pitching the idea to NEC. While Sharp was enthusiastic and agreed that it had great commercial potential, the deal ultimately fell through. The deal-breaker was Sharp’s deep relationship with Nintendo at the time. Apparently, developing a console with Hudson’s CPU was seen as something that would have jeopardized their partnership with Nintendo. What S…

I believe Hudson did design the chipset for the Sharp X68000 though, which was a very nice machine, much better than the Amiga

Re: PC Engine CPU

#57

Post by msephton »

I once read that PC-Engine almost used the Motorola 68000. I'm a nerd so I bookmarked the reference.

https://archive.org/details/beep198807/page/n45/mode/2up

"According to Mr. Nakamoto of Hudson, during the development of the PC engine, he also made a prototype of an experimental machine and a game using that 68000."

Re: PC Engine CPU

#58

Post by tombert »

hakfoo wrote: post #53
tombert wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered if the better approach would have been to have the 3DO company subsidize the development of the consoles in relation to how many games were sold, and maybe in relation to how many of those specific consoles were sold. e.g. if they dedicated half the licensing proceeds to paying back the consoles, and 80% of the 3DO consoles sold were Panasonic, than they'd give 40% of the licensing fees back to Pana…

What was the story for the manufacturers though? Why would you get into the 3DO business knowing that if it took off, you'd end up competing with other, potentially cheaper brands? I guess the expectation was that it would be like CD players and VCRs, the market would be big enough to maintain a bunch of different brands.

I think they were going for the lattermost point. The name 3DO was kind of a pun: Audio, Video, 3DO.

Re: PC Engine CPU

#59

Post by LocalH »

nicole_express wrote: post #2

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 rapidl…

The PCE (and by extension, TG16) proved that outside of games that relied on high processing speed (3D games like Elite, or sports games), 8-bit CPUs could give every bit as compelling an experience as 16-bit chips.

Wonder what a good programmer could do with a modern 6502-based ISA clocked at 20+ MHz but otherwise identical hardware to . Imagine being able to hit I/O registers on every single hardware cycle because your CPU blows that out of the water (see: SuperCPU on C64/128 which can very much meet the demands of "write a new value each 1MHz cycle")

Re: PC Engine CPU

#60

Post by wmil »

tombert wrote: post #13

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 re…

It was actually a big success in Japan. NEC America completely botched everything in the US market.

In Japan it came out in 1987, two years before the Sega Genesis. In the US it launched a few weeks after the Genesis. The pack in game was based on an anime that didn't come out in the US.

It's big weakness was probably that putting button batteries on HuCards was awkward, so it didn't really have many longer slower paced games with save systems.

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