PC Engine
The PC Engine was a collaborative effort between the relatively young Hudson Soft (founded in 1973) and NEC. NEC's interest in entering the lucrative video game market coincided with Hudson's failed attempt to sell designs for then-advanced graphics chips to Nintendo, similar to Nintendo's later rejection of Sony's designs for a Super Famicom CD attachment which evolved into the PlayStation.
The PC Engine is a very small video game console, due primarily to a very efficient three-chip architecture and its use of "HuCards" (Hudson Card; also referred to as "TurboChip" in North America and based on the BeeCard technology Hudson piloted on the MSX). The cards were about the size of a credit card (though slightly thicker), similar to the card format used by the Sega Master System for budget games. However, unlike the Sega Master System (which also supported cartridges), the TurboGrafx-16 used HuCards exclusively. The console featured a HuC6280 processor (a derivative of the 65SC02) and a custom 16-bit graphics processor, as well as a custom video color encoder chip, all designed by Hudson.
The TurboGrafx-16 was the first console to have an optional CD module, allowing the standard benefits of the CD medium such as more storage, cheaper media costs, and redbook audio. The efficient design, backing of many of Japan's major software producers, and the additional CD ROM capabilities gave the PC Engine a very wide variety of software, with several hundred games for both the HuCard and CD formats.
The PC Engine initially performed well in Japan, beating Nintendo's Famicom in sales soon after its release, with no fewer than twelve console models released from 1987 to 1993. Despite the system's early success, it started to lose ground to the Super Famicom. NEC made one final effort to resuscitate the system with the release of the Arcade Card expansion, bringing the total amount of RAM up to a then-massive 2048K. Some Arcade Card games were conversions of popular Neo Geo titles. The expansion was never released in North America.
New games were released for the PC Engine up until 1999.
Read more about this topic: TurboGrafx-16
Famous quotes containing the word engine:
“There is a small steam engine in his brain which not only sets the cerebral mass in motion, but keeps the owner in hot water.”
—Unknown. New York Weekly Mirror (July 5, 1845)