TurboGrafx-16



"The higher energy video game system."

The TurboGrafx-16 (or PC Engine in Japan) is a console designed by Hudson Soft and produced by electronics giant NEC.

In Japan, this system was a huge success; its advanced graphics made it impressive next to the aging Famicom, and it had a whole year to establish itself before Sega released the Mega Drive. Even though Nintendo's Super Famicom eventually took back the crown, the PC Engine remained at a solid second place there. But things didn't go so well elsewhere. NEC feared that its compact, almost toy-like design was not to America's manly man tastes, and took months redesigning it into a more hardcore machine. This was a fatal mistake, as it allowed Sega to launch their new machine first and quickly dominate that market. NEC also failed to entice more than a handful of Western third-parties, and the European release was extremely limited. Also, their marketing was just terrible.

The TurboGrafx was succeeded by the SuperGrafx... well, at least that was the idea, but it was such a flop that it died out before the TurboGrafx.

An asterisk * indicates the game is also available on the Turbo CD.

Specs
As the first console of the 4th generation, it was notably weaker than the others. It used a souped up version of the same 8-bit CPU as the NES, while Mega Drive and SNES had 16-bit ones. It could do more simultaneous colors than either of those, but it could display fewer simultaneous sprites, and only one background layer (developers still achieved parallax scrolling with various tricks but it was often noticeably more limited).

Add-ons
This system was cleverly designed for expandability. The port on the back was used to connect the CD add-on, memory expansions, improved audio/video output, and so on. While that was very appreciated in Japan, it also gave it a reputation in America of a system that needed expensive accessories to do anything. The fact that a multitap was required to connect more than one controller was particularly jarring.

Variants
If you want to play CD games, the TurboDuo is the system to get; it is the console, the CD drive, and the Super System BIOS, as a single device. If you have the regular TurboGrafx, you can get the other parts separately.

The TurboExpress was its handheld version. It ran the exact same HuCards as the console, and was more advanced than any portable system at the time. However, it was also the most expensive portable system at the time. So it sold very poorly, even less than the Lynx.

Region lock
HuCards' pins are arranged backwards depending on the region, so a converter is necessary to run Japanese games on an American TurboGrafx-16. There is no check on the software against it. However, there is a software check on American games. So, along with the converter, a hardware mod will be required to run American games on Japanese hardware.

Converters are hard to come by these days. Alternatively, there is a very affordable mod to run Japanese HuCards on an American console.

CD-based games, on the other hand, have no region lock or copy protection.

Shmups
The TurboGrafx-16's library was dominated by shoot 'em ups (thanks in great part to Hudson Soft), so this system is to this day a favorite among fans of the genre.

Some of these games offer a special "High-Resolution Arcade Mode" that attempt to recreate feel of the actual arcade cabinets. It's a bit tricky to make it available in some of the games so follow this guide.

Videos
yh_CKMO9OXw 2FO7P1KYFUI Xod4EVkK2Eo