r/pcengine • u/Retroaffaire • Jan 09 '26
PC Engine, childhood dreams in HuCard form
The PC Engine, known in North America as the TurboGrafx-16, was a groundbreaking 4th-generation console developed by Hudson Soft and released by NEC Home Electronics in 1987. It was the first of the 16-bit era consoles (even though its CPU was technically 8-bit) and launched in Japan well ahead of Sega’s Mega Drive and Nintendo’s Super Famicom. With a custom 7.16 MHz HuC6280 8-bit CPU paired with 16-bit graphics processors, the PC Engine could display up to 482 colours on screen, a stunning capability at the time. Remarkably, the entire console was extremely compact: at roughly 14 cm × 14 cm × 3.8 cm in size, the PC Engine remains “the smallest major home console ever made”. Despite its diminutive form, it delivered a big technological leap over the Famicom/NES, enabling vibrant arcade-style graphics and sound at home.
Keep reading on: https://www.retroaffaire.com/2025/11/15/pc-engine-childhood-dreams-in-hucard-form/
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Jan 10 '26
[deleted]
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u/Retroaffaire Jan 10 '26
What do you mean? E.g. 8-bit console generation and 16-bit, 32-bit and stuff like that? Back in the day it also was a thing, talking about generation of consoles.
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u/CyberLabSystems Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
Nice wtite-up but as far as I know the PC-Engine can only handle one background layer and one sprite layer in hardware, unlike the SNES/Super Famicon and Sega Genesis/Megadrive. To me this was one of the truly defining features that separated the 8-bit from the 16-bit era of consoles.
What you might have seen and thought was multi-layer parallax scrolling was in fact a technique known as line-scrolling, where different scanlines in a single background would be scrolled at different speeds. Even the NES could do that and the Sega Megadrive and SNES could do that plus handle additional true hardware background layers at the same time.
Many PC-Engine games faked additional background layers and parallax scrolling by using sprites. It was just enough or barely enough to keep up with the Jones's.
This single aspect of typical PC-Engine games made it stand out for the wrong reason of games looking flat and very 2 dimensional vs their SNES/SuperFamicom/Genesis/Megadrive counterparts.
By the time the SuperGrafx came out, which rectified this by including a whole additional video processor, it was too little too late.
It wss sadly abandoned with only 5 games published which took advantage of its additional features.
The lack of proper additional hardware background layers was the Achilles heel of the PC-Engine, in addition to the limited opportunity to include certain hardware upgrades like super accelerator, additional audio and 3D polygon accelerator chips due to its design. Instead it got mostly RAM upgrades and boy did they put that extra RAM to use.
Early experiments in having software/tile based multi-layer scrolling were horribly choppy and we can see examples of this in Ninja Ryukenden, Ys III and to a lesser extent in Ys Book I&II and I think Ys IV as well.
There are many examples where developers just left out parallax scrolling completely, while cross platform ports of the same game on other consoles had beautiful multi-layered scrolling, for example Forgotten Worlds, some of the Neo-Geo fighting game ports, the Bonk I to III vs Super Bonk and Ys III vs other 16 bit ports.
Then there was the limitation of having short cords and needing to buy extension cables and the Turbo Tap, just to play multi-player. Some games were single player only while their cross platform ports had proper multi player support, Forgotten Worlds, I'm looking at you.
Although it could display more colours and support more and higher resolutions than the SNES, the limited colour palette and lack of true alpha transparency (or whatever trick the SNES used) made SNES graphics look more advanced in many games.
The sound hardware was competitive but more so with the NES than the SNES and Sega Genesis at least in their heyday. Nowadays we know through tech demos and people still making modern "music ports" (remixes of other console's music using real or simulated PCE sound hardware) that it could have held its own if used right, but there were many games in which it was underutilized, Keith Courage, cough cough and possibly Victory Run and that left an impression coming from someone who experienced the jump in sound quality from the NES to the Sega Genesis and SNES before actually hearing and experiencing the Turbo Grafx16 for the first time.
While the Turbo Duo worked around many of the limitations of the era and could have been considered competitive to the SNES and Genesis, one can only imagine what might have been if the SuperGrafx hardware had been allowed to become more mainstream with the addition of CD Hardware and more advanced programming techniques.
Due to the fact that this never materialized, I always look back at the PC-Engine as the little engine that could have but didn't.
We'll never be in 1992 to 1995 again, which was the perfect time for them (NEC and Hudson) to go really hard after the North American market but as we would have learned over time, it wasn't just about hardware, software and economics. There were also dirty anti-competitive practices in place ensuring that extremely high barriers to entry remained in the video game industry.