Where did NEC go wrong with the PC Engine?

[Newsdee]

It failed in France too, even if it had an official distributor (Sodipeng) and some minor ads on magazines on early 1998.
Price-wise it was about the same as a SNES but the games were expensive.

There was never a "European" version though; the machines were Japanese imports replacing the RF by an AV/SCART mod.

It all ended when Sodipeng bankrupted in 1993 if (I'm not mistaken), it was too hard to compete with the Genesis and SNES at that point.

 

Some ads can be seen here: https://necretro.org/Sodipeng

 

Edited January 20, 2020 by Newsdee

[CatPix]

It's hard to compare well-established companies and a local imported that had merely a legal agreement with NEC to advertise the PC-Engine and not be sued, but nothing else - NEC cleary told Sodipeng they would refuse any warranty claim since the Sodipeng PC-Engines were RGB modified.

The general agreement amongst French retrogamer is that Sodipeng did good, considering the difficulties they faced, but "good" compared to an import shop, not compared to Nintendo and Sega.

And Of course, in France, both the SMS and Megadrive were popular, Sodipeng couldn't (and probably didn't) expect to take Sega's place on that market.

[turboxray]

The success of the PC-Engine and its longevity in Japan, IMO, is kinda of surprising.

 

1) Having coded on the thing for some years, it's pretty apparent that a lot of software for it didn't begin to tap its potential. Even the early titles that did shine (hucards), aren't doing anything that necessarily pushes the system. So that begs the question; what's the excuse of the titles are below that bar??? It's been said by quite a few that the system was often treated an NES++, or on roids, or extra knobs to turn on. It's a not inaccurate statement, given the NES/Famicom as the bar (and what devs pulled off on it). When you look at games, especially through a debugger, and see that a system with 32 palettes giving on screen 482 colors with no hit to performance or memory... just leaving almost ALL of that on the table. I'm sorry, but palettes don't take up any room in rom, or processing power, or anything that explains the unused potential. Audio is the same way. There is a lot you can do with custom waveforms.. an yet a lot of games just used square and triangle/sine (ohh.. like a famicom game). You can literally have a waveform that changes the timbre on every single note. You can pair channels of the same note but different instruments, into a single waveform. Just so much stuff. You can make excuses for lack of parallax and such (requires more thinking and design, more technical experience, whatever) - but those other two things really have no excuse. If you look at the SNES/SFC.. right off the bat for release titles; they're really showcasing the SNES visual and audio hardware. I'm not talking about Nintendo's own titles, but 3rd party titles. Or Look at Genesis games.. parallax everywhere because it's dead simple to do. Wouldn't it be weird for a Genesis game to completely leave the 2nd BG layer unused for a whole game? That's the equivalent of palettes and audio on the PCE. So what does this have to do with NEC? Quality control. Simple. Expect, or demand, more from your licensed titles. Or incentives to raise that bar. Something..

 

2) The system itself had thee most incredible backplane bus ever! I mean, you could have easily upgrade any number of video (extra BG layer, bigger palette, etc) or audio functions. In comes the CD system with the potential to do just that... and does nothing. The CD unit is literally, besides storage and streaming CD audio, thee most limited added design possible for a CD system. No 64k buffer to directly DMA or stream data into, etc. Everything is manually done by the CPU.. including polling for 2k sectors.. for EVERY sector read in as data. Oh wait, they DID added a DMA function to ADPCM ram that didn't require cpu intervention, but that's port based, slow as hell to access, and was meant for streaming PCM vs CD audio. But yeah, the biggest flaw was having all those digital video bus lines on the backplane.. and did nothing with them. So much potential, so much waste. The Duo. That's a pivotal turning point for NEC. Historically, there really wasn't anything like it and to this day, people have a hardware categorizing CD games are PCE games. It's "another system" or whatever. It's a PCE through and through. There are no extra processors, video upgrades, etc. What they should have done, is include the SGX hardware into it. The SGX isn't that complicated, despite its larger case. On extra VDC and one simple bus muxer (VDp). It's not like a whole new video chip was design. It's the same old one they had been using for years. Why have that option when the SGX was dead? Because now you given the option for a developer to make a bi-compatible game. It doesn't have to be drastic; just turn on a 2nd BG layer if detected. Or use some of the extra sprites as a HUD overlay. The point is, the VDp was already made and the extra VDC was an existing chip. It wasn't a new design. Now the Duo really does become the all-in-one system.

 

3) Software. NEC was a huge company compared to Nintendo and the competition. They could have easily pushed the system to the top, regardless of hardware. NES/Famicom was enjoying top tier AAA titles that were must haves in gamers eyes by developers... not developing on the PCE. They didn't. They just assumed they could sit back and it would be successful by itself. In some ways it was, but it could have been so much more had NEC (of Japan) really put their resource behind it. Instead, you have a low 'bar'. That means companies could more easily reach that bar. That results in software being technically inferior to the consoles capabilities (colors, graphics, audio - again NES with knobs). When you do look at PCE games that went above and beyond that bar, and compare it titles on the opposite end.. the difference is really striking, especially when you take into account proportions between the two. Where were the Megamans and Contras on the system? Where were the Marios of the system!? The SMB series is often taken for granted, IMO, but they're actually really impressively designed games. The physics and platforming, and polish - there really isn't anything like it on the PCE.. when there should have been. It's as if PCE hucard games became intentionally 'cute' (matching the small cards and small system), and by 'cute' I mean maintaining a simplistic type of charm to game design and aesthetics. Where as the CD softs stumbled to find their own standing and representation.

 

 

For the record, I don't view the SGX as a new PCE ver 1.2 or whatever. Given the incredible backplane bus, all that was achievable via an update unit, why make that all available if you're NOT going to use it. Engineers just don't design something 'just because' or an edge case of 'what if'. There were plans for this. Video upgrade plans. That means the PCE was just a 'core' system, a base. It wasn't the complete design. I mean that's pretty evident from the CD addon being in development while the PCE launched. IMO, I see the SGX as the completed PCE. I mean, look at the renamed PCEs to 'core'. And both bare the monarchique of 'PC-Engine'.

[Punisher5.0]

@turboxray

 

Whats the highest color count you've seen in a TG16/PCE game?

[DJ Clae]

On 1/17/2020 at 9:21 AM, Zoyous said:

And as I've occasionally researched buying one, I've become aware of subsequent consoles like the CoreGrafx and SuperGrafx. Although I don't know too many details about them, I've gathered that they didn't have as many games released for them. 

The Coregrafx is just a redesign; not a separate console with its own games. Think Genesis 2.

 

They should have made Bonk's Adventure the pack-in game the second it was released. Also, AV out compatibility out of the box would have been a good idea, not to mention a second controller port for the US redesign.

 

NEC just dropped the ball from the beginning of the US launch and never picked it back up. So many great 3rd party titles were never available in the US. Games like Castlevania and Street Fighter 2 should have been on the shelves at Toys R Us, but by then it was already too late. They had a chance to be more like Sega with the Genesis, but never had the marketing or distribution they needed.

 

I agree with homerhomer about it being the mysterious system growing up. Fortunately I grew up in a house with brothers all reading gaming mags and we thrived on this stuff. You could rent a TurboGrafx at our Hollywood video (if only they had some post-launch titles to try) and we eventually got our own. Soon we bought used Lynx, Jaguar, CD-I, 3DO, Neo Geo on the cheap. TurboGrafx is probably what got us into importing.

 

@turboxray, I think NEC was just willing to accept any 3rd party games they could get, and they didn't want to push developers to make the games the most advanced. I've been playing Ninja Warriors, and it's a really by-the-numbers downgraded port. They certainly could have done better, but you had to take what you can get with early games on the system. NEC certainly did a much better job attracting developers than Sega did with the Mark III.

 

I like your idea of including the Super Grafx in the CD hardware, but it should've been all CD hardware, not just the Duo. Perhaps that's just too early to expect that, but it would've been a simple upgrade, much like the extra hardware included in the Mega CD, but much cheaper and easier.

Edited January 23, 2020 by DJ Clae

[Gentlegamer]

Reminder

 

[Zoyous]

Thanks, y'all, for clarifying for me that CoreGrafx wasn't really a successor system with different specs, but a redesign of the original PC Engine. It's interesting to me because you can see that, at that point, NEC was attempting to unify its naming convention across markets with the "-Grafx" suffix.

 

Regarding the Western library, it's amazing to me that Sega allowed ports of some of their signature games like Space Harrier and Fantasy Zone to be released, but other third party licensed games didn't get released. I can only guess that their hands were tied with licensing agreements. A certain degree of exasperation could be detected in their last year or two of marketing (looking at you, Johnny Turbo... then looking quickly away because you still look super mad about Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective).

[+Black_Tiger]

18 hours ago, Punisher5.0 said:

@turboxray

 

Whats the highest color count you've seen in a TG16/PCE game?

Some games get up into the mid-100's.

 

If some of the assets for FX Unit Yuki didn't get cut for spave and/or time, some scenes would have pushed around 200 colors at once.

 

 

This screenshot from FX Unit Yuki uses 161 colors. The scene which inspired the background uses 61 colors:

 

Edited January 23, 2020 by Black_Tiger

[+wongojack]

On 1/18/2020 at 5:37 AM, Flojomojo said:

It was a fine system, but the others were better. Gaming system market share was winner take all back then, so the machine with the most success got the most developers which fed more success. 
 

Is anyone stoked for the mini console coming soon? I'm not nostalgic for the system, I don't think a mini would be cute, and besides, it is well emulated so the games are already accessible to me. When the mini console bombs and gets a steep reduction in price, perhaps I'll be tempted like with PlayStation Classic. 

 

I'm watching it.  I've only played the system a handful of times and have put no effort into maintaining any type of ROM collection for emulation (although I have emulated it occasionally).  Once it drops in price, I may get one just out of curiosity.

 

The thing that usually cools off my curiosity is that the "best of" lists for TG16 are filled with pinball games and shmups.  Now, I love pinball games (and do ok with shmups), but for pinball to be in the top on any system seems really strange.

[Greg2600]

PC Engine/TurboGrafx was a great system.  PCE/TG CD was also very good, and pretty successful in Japan.  It was a far better system games-wise than the SEGA CD.  As many have said, NEC and/or Hudson Soft didn't have the resources the competition did.  The hardware was costly and NEC was a problem for Hudson.  I believe at one point, the CEO of Hudson wouldn't revoke factory orders in Taiwan, out of honor, but that decision cost the company tons of money, and left them with 100's of thousands of unsellable hardware.  Newer hardware like the Express or Turbo Duo was too expensive on the consumer, and the HuCard too problematic for most publishers.  The last hurrah was the PC-FX in Japan, which was a huge joke. 

[DragonGrafx-16]

1 hour ago, wongojack said:

 

I'm watching it.  I've only played the system a handful of times and have put no effort into maintaining any type of ROM collection for emulation (although I have emulated it occasionally).  Once it drops in price, I may get one just out of curiosity.

 

The thing that usually cools off my curiosity is that the "best of" lists for TG16 are filled with pinball games and shmups.  Now I love pinball games (and do ok with shmups), but for pinball to be in the top on any system seems really strange.

It is THE shmups system... that's why I love it. Little to no slow down on this system. It destroys the SNES and might have an edge on the Genesis for shmups. I actually prefer the more chiptune-y sound over the Genesis' FM. Though both kill the SNES for shmup soundtracks...

[Flojomojo]

2 hours ago, wongojack said:

The thing that usually cools off my curiosity is that the "best of" lists for TG16 are filled with pinball games and shmups.  Now, I love pinball games (and do ok with shmups), but for pinball to be in the top on any system seems really strange.

Same. The pinball games on TG-16 are listed because they're really unique and well done, even if Dragon's Fury on the Genesis is pretty much Devil's Crush. The platform games like Bonk don't fun me at all, because the world has moved on. I could understand having nostalgia for it if that were someone's favorite system, like how we all grew up with Atari. 

 

Demon's Tilt is a nice modern answer to Devil's Crush. It's on Xbox Game Pass so you can play on Windows or Xbone, or just buy it for $20. https://www.demonstilt.com

[+wongojack]

Yeah, I have Demon's Tilt installed, but I have yet to actually play it.  I recognized it immediately as inspired by Devil's Crush.

[Tanooki]

I got some new games for mine today, been playing a little this and that this evening.  The variety is really there, amazing presentation value, but as others said, internal crap between Hudson and NEC hurt them, as did the bungling outside Japan far more.  The hardware was plenty capable and counting the motherland, far better presence of quality than the Genesis/MD had.

 

Shooters came up, just put a little type on PC Denjin (Air Zonk) solid game and good use of variety of speed, colors, many layers of scrolling, and a heap of on screen action there.  But you also had your slower more calculating walking shooter too like Red(Last) Alert.

[CatPix]

18 hours ago, wongojack said:

The thing that usually cools off my curiosity is that the "best of" lists for TG16 are filled with pinball games and shmups.  Now, I love pinball games (and do ok with shmups), but for pinball to be in the top on any system seems really strange.

I was going to comment but then noticed you mentionned TG-16.

Because for Pc-Engine, I've never seen any pinball game listed. SHMUPS yes, and the PC-Engine have a reputation for those, but not pinball.

There's a great deal of various games, most of the acessible even without a grasp of Japanese or just a very simple guide. For most games are very simple (you don't need to understand Japanese to play PC-Genjin) or are in English already, especially Hu-card ones.

[dj_convoy]

16 hours ago, wongojack said:

Yeah, I have Demon's Tilt installed, but I have yet to actually play it.  I recognized it immediately as inspired by Devil's Crush.

Demon's Tilt is fun, if a little difficult for my old eyes to see. 

[dj_convoy]

27 minutes ago, CatPix said:

I was going to comment but then noticed you mentionned TG-16.

Because for Pc-Engine, I've never seen any pinball game listed. SHMUPS yes, and the PC-Engine have a reputation for those, but not pinball.

There's a great deal of various games, most of the acessible even without a grasp of Japanese or just a very simple guide. For most games are very simple (you don't need to understand Japanese to play PC-Genjin) or are in English already, especially Hu-card ones.

Alien Crush and Devil Crush are considered two of the must haves for the system. There's also Time Cruise which... uh... isn't.

[Tanooki]

I'm a little confused on the pinball comment.

Alien Crush, Devils Crush, Time Cruise II, and I think there was one other but that's a maybe as I forget.  If there was, I'd buy it, own the other 3.  And I do like Time Cruise, reminds me of Sonic Spinball so the variety is nice.

[+wongojack]

6 hours ago, CatPix said:

I was going to comment but then noticed you mentionned TG-16.

Because for Pc-Engine, I've never seen any pinball game listed. SHMUPS yes, and the PC-Engine have a reputation for those, but not pinball.

There's a great deal of various games, most of the acessible even without a grasp of Japanese or just a very simple guide. For most games are very simple (you don't need to understand Japanese to play PC-Genjin) or are in English already, especially Hu-card ones.

Perhaps the added variety of the full library pushes them down, but the net is full of lists like these:

 

https://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2014/08/the-16-best-turbografx-16-games.html

https://magisterrex.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/the-top-ten-turbografx-16-hucard-games/

[CatPix]

Well those aren't "filled with" pinball games. There's 2 in the first list and only one in the second.

[+wongojack]

2 hours ago, CatPix said:

Well those aren't "filled with" pinball games. There's 2 in the first list and only one in the second.

I guess I was thinking of Devil's Crush and Alien Crush.  2 games, and I remember there were others. . .   

 

It IS the #1 game in one of those lists, and I can't think of any other system where a pinball game would be listed #1 in anyone's top 10 list.

[+Black_Tiger]

23 hours ago, wongojack said:

Perhaps the added variety of the full library pushes them down, but the net is full of lists like these:

 

https://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2014/08/the-16-best-turbografx-16-games.html

https://magisterrex.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/the-top-ten-turbografx-16-hucard-games/

"Best of" or "Top" lists tend to be click bait. Just think of them as ranging from "my favorites" to "the only ones I'm aware of".

 

There are only 3 pinball games for TG-16/PC Engine. Most lists from English speakers are from people who've only randomly dabbled in partial rom sets or pass on "everyone says" opinions that they've heard.

 

I don't like ranking games and feel that there is a point that a game gets to that's as good you can ask for and that it isn't necessary to pit those games against one another.

 

The PC Engine probably has 100 of those games. It would be easy to fill a top ten list with RPGs alone.

 

 

[turboxray]

On 1/23/2020 at 12:03 PM, Black_Tiger said:

Some games get up into the mid-100's.

 

If some of the assets for FX Unit Yuki didn't get cut for spave and/or time, some scenes would have pushed around 200 colors at once.

 

 

This screenshot from FX Unit Yuki uses 161 colors. The scene which inspired the background uses 61 colors:

 

200 colors would have been nice. I mean if you got it then flaunt it haha. I take it that 200+ is without doing rolling BG color trick (aka copper colors)? 

 

On 1/22/2020 at 6:03 PM, Punisher5.0 said:

@turboxray

 

Whats the highest color count you've seen in a TG16/PCE game?

It runs the gamut, but color counts by themselves aren't the end all. Especially when it comes to designing graphics with palettes. You can have 50 total colors on screen, or an alternative version of the same that's 60 colors on screen and the difference can be huge. This is what I'm talking about. Because palettes are locked to 8x8 sections of the background. You can have a high color count but low color fidelity resolution if you don't use enough palettes for 'transition' or common colors across tilesets. Of course, that also comes into play with art.. but that's my whole point.. having 32 palettes means a much more freedom of design. 

[+Black_Tiger]

8 hours ago, turboxray said:

200 colors would have been nice. I mean if you got it then flaunt it haha. I take it that 200+ is without doing rolling BG color trick (aka copper colors)?

Yeah. The Gods of Lightning stage in Henshin Engine was finished last and a lot was cut just for time. Even just some of the palette variants of enemies or some of the deluxe versions* with unique sprites for different attacks bumps the color up pretty quick.

 

*things like this:

 

 

 

This pic has 198 colors:

 

 

 

 

I also pitched inverted palettes for when enemies take damage:

 

 

 

It's an effect that adds to the aesthetics but would have also been a huge bump in onscreen color counts, as it adds the kinds of colors that are rarely used. But it's also the kind of superfluous extra touch that the PC Engine can spare palettes for.

 

 

[Tanooki]

That looks beautiful, never played it, just Gate of Thunder which I really need to get back into my hands.