Limitations in The 16-bit Era
Although marketed as a next generation "16-bit" console, the TurboGrafx-16 was built around an 8-bit microprocessor as its CPU. However, the overall speed of the hardware was comparable to contemporary 16-bit machines. Sometimes criticized as an inaccurate gauge of overall speed, NEC touted the TurboGrafx-16 as having a higher MIPS rating than both the Genesis and Super NES. While true, drawing direct comparisons between the TurboGrafx-16, Genesis, and Super NES CPUs is difficult due to differences in architecture, bit bandwidth, speed measurements in MHz/MIPS, and the way those measurements are related to overall speed due to said architectural differences. The microprocessor takes more instructions to perform the same actions compared to the competitors, with a major bottleneck being floating point operations as it slowed the system down to a crawl. TurboGrafx-16 games could not use floating point computations due to the speed limitations. NEC's marketing department played on the fact that the TurboGrafx-16 was designed with a dual 16-bit graphics chipset, and chose to view it as a hybrid system. This backfired on NEC in the North American market as more and more people learned the TurboGrafx-16 was, in reality, an 8-bit system.
The TurboGrafx-16 featured a 16-bit custom video color encoder chip, 16-bit video display controller, and an 8-bit CPU with an integrated custom programmable sound generator. This three chip architecture allowed for larger and more numerous sprites, an expanded color palette, more onscreen colors, and improved sound capabilities compared to other systems available in the 8-bit console market when it launched. This made it comparable to other systems in the 16-bit market. Yet it lacked hardware support for more than a single layer of background scrolling, whereas its 16-bit competition heavily featured multiple plane parallax scrolling. This forced developers to code routines to simulate multiple background layers in software, or in some cases, make do with the single plane. NEC attempted to remedy this problem in the SuperGrafx by including an additional video display controller that allowed it to not only draw multiple plane backgrounds in hardware, but multiple sprite planes as well. Another area the TurboGrafx-16 had a notable disadvantage in was amount of work RAM. While the Genesis and Super NES featured 64KB and 128KB of work RAM respectively, the TurboGrafx-16 had only 8KB available for HuCard games. This meant there was less RAM available for temporary storage of variables and decompressed graphic data. As a result, self modifying code and/or code featuring storage of a numerous amount of variables was largely ruled out, and almost all decompression of graphic data needed to be done in real time, rather than stored in RAM. The SuperGrafx was given additional work RAM for a total of 32KB. TurboGrafx CD-ROM games used the greatly expanded RAM capacity that was inherent to the hardware, and largely avoided most problems with RAM limitations.
In order to reach a low price point in the market, the original TurboGrafx-16 and PC-Engine systems only supported RF modulation for (monaural) audio/video and required an optional expansion add-on for anything more (the competition by comparison had built-in support for stereo audio, with composite video as well as s-video and RGB output). Later models of the TurboGrafx-16 provided built-in support for better audio/video capabilities without additional hardware.
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