TurboGrafx-16 - Region Protection

Region Protection

With HuCards, a limited form of region protection was introduced between markets which for the most part was nothing more than running the HuCard's pinout connections in a different arrangement. There were two major after-market converters sold to address this problem, and both were sold predominantly for use in converting Japanese titles for play on a TG-16. In the Asian market, NEC went an extra step of adding a hardware level detection function to all PC-Engine systems that detected if a game was a U.S. release, and would then refuse to play it. The only known exception to this is the U.S. release of Klax which did not contain this flag.

The explanation commonly given for this by NEC officials is that most U.S. conversions had been skill level reduced, and in some cases censored for what was considered inappropriate content. Because of that, they did not want the U.S. conversion to re-enter the Asian market and negatively impact the perception of a game. The poster child for censorship in this fashion was Kato-chan and Ken-chan released as J.J. & Jeff in the U.S. With some minor soldering skills, a change could be made to PC-Engines to disable this check.

The only Japanese games that could not be played on a U.S. system using one of these converters were the SuperGrafx titles which also required additional system hardware to run.

The first converter to market was an Asian-developed module labeled the Game Converter and marked with a model number of WH-301. The second converter, named the "Kisado", was created and initially sold by David Shadoff to members of the Turbo Mailing-List in pre-ordered batches before later being offered through on-line retailers.

For CD games, it was an entirely different situation. While there was no region-protection on CD games, there were several different CD formats: CD, Super CD (SCD) and, later, Arcade CD (ACD). TurboGrafx-CD, equipped with the original System Card (version 2.01), could play all Japanese and North American CD games. A TurboGrafx-CD, equipped with the updated Super System Card (version 3.01), could play all Japanese and North American SCD and CD format games. The Arcade System Card (for playing Arcade CD titles) had two versions, Pro and Duo.

The Arcade Card Pro was specifically for pre-Duo systems although it was compatible with all PC-Engine systems (including the SuperGrafx), it included both the SuperCD operating system and the extra memory found in the Duo systems. The Arcade Card Duo worked with Duo based systems exclusively as it featured only the Arcade enhancements. This allowed the Duo card to be sold at a lower price. All Japanese released system cards worked in U.S. systems with the use of a HuCard converter.