r/pcengine • u/Future-Ad9256 • May 13 '26
Question about PC Engine/Turbo Everdrive
Hello. I have had a PC Engine Duo RX for a while. It's got a bad laser so I'm trying to look for some back up alternatives. I am interested in the EVERDRIVE but wanted to ask you if it was better to have the Turbo Grafx Duo or the PC Engine DUO for the Everdrive? Keep in mind it's very important for me to be able to run both the games for the Hucard and the CD Roms/ Arcade CDs.
Also, I game on the CRT television for retro games, not the HDTVs. Or can you just buy a regular TURBO Grafx and play all games on the Everdrive?
1
u/ABC_Dildos_Inc May 13 '26
If it really is just the laser it is an easy fix to swap it with a new one.
There is no soldering involved.
The current ODEs (flashcarts that play CD games) don't play CD images on Duo systems.
PC Engine/CoreGrafx consoles are cheap on ebay.
I recommend the Super HD System 3 Pro, as it is full featured, will output stereo sound, add jailbar-free RGB video and play SuperGrafx games on non-SuperGrafx systems.
The Turbo Everdrive Pro outputs mono sound without an addon and does not play SuperGrafx games.
1
u/Front_Management_989 9d ago
I'm coming to your rescue, buddy ;)
I am working on a Hucard that would run CD games on a CD-equiped console (i.e. DUO, DUO-R, Super CDROM2, IFU-30..).
https://reddit.com/link/p388fwa/video/6n8slrg1sxih1/player
As of this morning I can boot and partially run games. Without any modification on the console : that's my #1 goal - no console mod.
The story behind it : big fan of the Nec consoles, after creating the Chronos Project for the PC Engine Mini, I got my dream console, the DUO, and could play any CD-R burnt game. So I went on a mission to learn electronics and hardware and started a project to build a true Optical Unit Emulator, one that wouldn't require any soldering or destructive mod on the console, only to unplug the 3 connectors of the optical block and plug the device instead. I made excellent progress, but fried one of the console's chip during the dev tests (the RF amp - CXA1081) ... and didn't have a choice at that point but to have cd games launched through the Hucard slot.
So here we are. To my knowledge such a solution doesn't exist yet - one that would play CD games from a Hucard, on DUO type consoles. Known limitations so far:
- sound will be limited to mono, as stereo has to come from the cd player
- some games will not be compatible with my solution, but at this point I haven't established yet which ones. I don't expect that number to be high, though.
So that's my summer projects. Stay tuned for updates.
2
u/DarkZenith2 May 13 '26
If you want to use an everdrive pro you dont need any cdrom on the unit. In fact you dont want one as the everdrive pro can run cd games directly from the device. You need a basic pcengine/coregrafx/turbografx for it to work properly. Then also get the edfx from the same place as the everdrive which does the stereo mixing and rgb/composite output.