In December 1987 the British developer Rare took delivery of a console from Japan that was, in The Games Machine’s phrase, a “monstrous midget”. NEC’s PC Engine measured 135 × 130 × 35 mm, and Edge later called it the smallest home console ever made. Its games came on HuCards of 85 × 55 × 4 mm, the size of a credit card, and yet it ran arcade conversions such as R-Type that looked far beyond the Famicom. Rare’s Chris Stamper, bound by a non-disclosure agreement, would not answer technical questions, and the magazine could not settle whether the processor was 8-bit or 16-bit. It was 8-bit, and the question followed the machine for the rest of its life.
The PC Engine went on sale in Japan on 30 October 1987, made by NEC Home Electronics and designed with the game publisher Hudson Soft. By Edge’s account it outsold every other piece of hardware in Japan in 1988 and stayed the country’s second-best-selling console until the Super Famicom arrived. In December 1988 it became the first games console with a CD-ROM drive. In America, renamed the TurboGrafx-16, it lost to Sega and Nintendo.
Fast facts
- Makers: NEC Home Electronics, with Hudson Soft.
- Released: 30 October 1987 in Japan; August 1989 in North America as the TurboGrafx-16.
- CPU: Hudson HuC6280, an 8-bit CMOS processor with a memory mapper, timer and sound generator on the same chip. It runs at 7.16 MHz in its high-speed mode, from a 21.48 MHz master clock.
- Address space: 2 MB, through eight mapping registers.
- Video: HuC6270 video display controller (VDC) and HuC6260 video colour encoder (VCE).
- Colours: a 512-colour palette; 481 colours in the picture at once, plus a border colour.
- Sprites: 16×16 pixels; 64 in use at once, 16 on a line.
- Sound: six wavetable channels in stereo, built into the CPU.
- Media: HuCards, then CD-ROM² from December 1988.
Three chips, and a processor that does too much
“An 8-bit CPU with 16-bit graphics” is how the PC Engine is usually described. Hudson’s own manuals show where the 8 bits end. The HuC62 System Outline Note builds the machine from three chips: the HuC6280 is the “CPU + PSG”, the HuC6270 decides what goes on the screen, and the HuC6260 turns it into a television signal.
The HuC6280 is described in its hardware manual as containing “an 8-bit parallel processing ALU, eight mapping registers for address expansion, a 7-bit interval timer, an 8-bit input port, an 8-bit output port, and a programmable sound generator (PSG) on a single chip”. Edge describes the core as a custom version of the 6502. Two of the extras shaped what programmers could do.
The mapping registers give it “2M bytes of address space”. A 6502 sees 64K. The HuC6280 divides that 64K into eight 8K windows and lets the program choose which 8K of the 2 MB each window shows. A HuCard could therefore be far larger than 64K without the extra bank-switching chips that Famicom cartridges carried.
The sound generator is on the processor. Each of its six channels plays a waveform the program writes into it: “waveform memory method (32 words for a cycle)”, a loop of 32 samples of 5 bits each. Channels 5 and 6 can switch to “pseudo random noise” for drums and explosions. A “direct D/A” mode lets the program feed a channel samples one at a time instead, which is how PC Engine games play speech and sampled drums, and every channel has its own left and right volume. The short hand-drawn wavetables give PC Engine music its thin, bright sound.
The clock comes from a 21.48 MHz crystal. The chip divides it to run the processor at 7.16 MHz, although it starts in a low-speed mode after a reset and the program has to switch it up. The manual’s “3.58–21.48 MHz” is the range of that input clock, not the processor’s speed. Hudson’s tech notes give programmers the budget that follows: about 120,000 machine cycles per frame at 60 frames a second.
The sprite limit, and which sprites survive
The HuC6270’s sprite figures come in three tiers, and only the last constrains a frame:
| Patterns that fit in video RAM | 1,024 (with 64K words of VRAM) |
| Entries in the sprite attribute table | 64 |
| On one horizontal line | 16 |
Sprites are 16×16 pixels and background tiles 8×8, each drawing from a set of 16 colours. The manual states what happens when a line is overloaded:
Up to 16 sprites can exist on one horizontal scanning line. If an attempt is made to display 17 or more sprites on one horizontal scanning line, the 16 sprites having higher priority are displayed and the rest not.
The sprites that vanish are the least important ones. The Neo Geo’s specification describes the opposite rule, losing sprites “from the highest priority”, so the two machines break in opposite directions when a scene is too busy.
Counting the colours
The HuC6260 stores 512 colours, each a 9-bit value with three bits of red, green and blue, so it can choose from 512 shades. Its colour table holds 32 sets of 16 entries: 16 sets for backgrounds and 16 for sprites. Hudson’s tech notes explain which entries show. Colour 0 of the first background set is the screen’s background colour, colour 0 of the first sprite set is the border around the picture, and colour 0 of every other set is “always clear”.
That leaves 15 visible colours in each of the 32 sets, 480 in all, plus the background colour: 481 colours in the picture at once. The figure of 482 often quoted for the machine also counts the border.
Japan
The PC Engine arrived when the Famicom was starting to look dated and before Sega’s Mega Drive. Edge’s 2003 history credits its success less to the hardware than to the speed with which publishers joined Hudson: Irem, Taito, Namco, Human and Naxat were early supporters. Irem’s R-Type, converted by Hudson in 1988, came on two HuCards, and The Games Machine found it “astonishing” that the card could hold such a game. Edge reckoned that about 80 per cent of the machine’s software was shoot-’em-ups and role-playing games.
NEC’s first plan was a home entertainment system with the console at its centre and a keyboard, disk drive, printer and CD player around it. Edge reports that its research after the launch showed Japanese buyers wanted a simple console, and NEC shelved most of the add-ons. The CD-ROM drive survived.
The first CD-ROM console
The CD-ROM² went on sale in Japan on 4 December 1988: a CD drive plus an interface unit that locked the console into it and doubled as a carrying case. Early sales figures disagree. In July 1989 ACE’s correspondent Akihiko Yabu, editor of the Japanese magazine Login, reported “five games available for the PC Engine CD Rom and NEC have sold ten thousand units”, while Tony Feldman’s 1990 British Library study of electronic books put sales at 60,000 in the first five months. By June 1990 ACE counted “over 200,000 CD ROM units” in use, and in 1991 NEC gave Computer Gaming World a worldwide figure of 500,000.
A CD held far more than any HuCard, and it could play CD audio, so games gained recorded soundtracks and spoken scenes. Later System Cards added memory for bigger games: the Super CD-ROM² format arrived in December 1991, and the Arcade Card in 1994 was designed, Edge says, for conversions of Neo Geo games.
The TurboGrafx-16
NEC brought the machine to North America in August 1989, in a larger case, as the TurboGrafx-16. Edge’s history lists what went wrong. The console cost $200 and its CD drive $400. Sega’s Genesis came with the arcade conversion Altered Beast, while the TurboGrafx-16 came with Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, a game American players had never heard of. Sega told buyers that the TurboGrafx-16’s CPU was 8-bit, and NEC translated few of the best Japanese CD games.
In 1991 NEC’s Ken Wirt gave a software conference reported by Computer Gaming World a figure of 750,000 TurboGrafx-16 consoles in the United States. In 1992 NEC and Hudson formed a new company, Turbo Technologies Inc., to try again with the TurboDuo, a console and CD drive in one case, which Edge reports was reduced to $200. The US library came to 138 games, according to the collector Hani Ghattas in Edge.
Britain had no proper launch. In August 1989 NEC placed a notice in ACE and The Games Machine saying that “there are no authorised distributors of the PC ENGINE in the United Kingdom” and that its guarantee covered only unmodified machines used in Japan. Importers sold PAL-converted consoles anyway. In June 1990 ACE expected an official UK launch that autumn; by September its buyers’ guide reported “all plans shelved. NEC must be barmy”. After the American failure NEC cancelled its European plans, and only a small number of PAL TurboGrafx-16s reached British shops through the distributor Telegames.
The family of machines
NEC kept redesigning the hardware:
- CoreGrafx (1989): a new case with composite AV output.
- SuperGrafx (1989): a second video chip and more memory. The Games Machine reported the price as ¥39,800 on 30 November 1989, and Edge counts only five games made for it.
- Shuttle (1989): a cheaper model without the expansion port, so it could not take the CD-ROM drive.
- PC Engine GT (1990): a handheld that played the same HuCards, sold in America as the TurboExpress at $300. Compute!’s tests in 1991 got 2.5 hours from its six AA batteries. A TV tuner was available.
- Duo (21 September 1991): console and CD drive in one unit, with the Super CD-ROM² memory built in. The Duo-R followed in 1993 and the Duo-RX in 1994.
- LT (1991): a laptop-style unit with a four-inch flip-up screen.
Sales
Sources disagree on the total. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Famitsu’s sales tables of June 1995 and June 1996, gives 3.92 million HuCard consoles and 1.92 million CD-ROM² units (including the Duo) sold in Japan. An Asahi Shimbun article of 1 December 2001, drawing on NEC’s managers, put worldwide sales at 5.8 million. GamePro estimated in 2008 that about 10 million had been sold worldwide, 2.5 million of them in North America. In the United States, NEC’s own figure in mid-1991 was 750,000.
The end
The last HuCard game, 21 Emon: Mezase Hotel-ō, came out in Japan on 16 December 1994, the same month NEC launched its successor, the PC-FX. CD games carried on for another five years, ending with Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 in June 1999.
Sources
- Hudson Soft / NEC, HuC62 System Outline Note, pp. 1–3: the three chips and their roles.
- Hudson Soft / NEC, HuC6280 Hardware Manual: the chip’s contents and 2 MB address space (p. 4); the features list with the 3.58–21.48 MHz operating frequency; low-speed mode on reset; the clock divided by 3.
- Hudson Soft / NEC, HuC6280 PSG Manual, pp. 3–4, 6, 11: six waveform channels, 32 five-bit samples per cycle, noise on channels 5 and 6, direct D/A mode, stereo, LFO, the 7.16 MHz driving clock.
- Hudson Soft / NEC, HuC6270 Video Display Controller Manual, pp. 4, 22: tile and sprite sizes, sprite counts and the 16-per-line rule.
- Hudson Soft / NEC, HuC6260 Video Colour Encoder Manual, p. 3: 512 colours.
- NEC / Hudson Soft, HuC62 Tech Notes, pp. 1–2: the colour table’s 32 blocks, the background, border and transparent entries, 9-bit colours; about 7.19 MHz and 119,904 cycles per frame.
- Edge issue 127, September 2003, pp. 71–78, PC Engine history: the launch date, size and HuCards; 1988 sales and second place in Japan; third-party publishers; the shelved add-ons; 80 per cent shooters and RPGs; the US launch, prices, pack-in games and marketing; TTI and the TurboDuo; the models and their dates; the SuperGrafx’s five games; the Arcade Card; Hani Ghattas on the 138 US games.
- The Games Machine issue 8, July 1988, pp. 28–29: Rare’s PC Engine, the card measurements, the Japanese price and R-Type.
- The Games Machine issue 26, January 1990: the SuperGrafx at ¥39,800.
- ACE issue 22, July 1989: Akihiko Yabu on the first CD-ROM sales. Issue 33, June 1990: “over 200,000 CD ROM units” and the expected UK launch. Issue 36, September 1990, console buyers’ guide: the UK plans shelved.
- ACE issue 24, September 1989, and The Games Machine issues 21–22, August–September 1989: NEC’s notice on unauthorised UK imports.
- Computer Gaming World issue 83, June 1991, pp. 64–67: Ken Wirt of NEC on 750,000 TurboGrafx-16s in the US and 500,000 CD-ROM drives worldwide.
- Gregg Keizer, “The Fingertip Arcade”, Compute! issue 132, August 1991, pp. 102–104: the TurboExpress’s price and battery life.
- Wikipedia, “TurboGrafx-16” (web, secondary): the CD-ROM²’s release on 4 December 1988 and Tony Feldman’s The Emergence of the Electronic Book (British Library, 1990, p. 29) on its first five months; the US launch on 29 August 1989; Turbo Technologies in 1992; the cancelled European release and Telegames; the dates of the Shuttle (22 November 1989), GT (December 1990) and LT (13 December 1991); the GamePro estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboGrafx-16
- Japanese Wikipedia, “PCエンジン” (web, secondary): the Famitsu sales figures, Sumio Ogawa’s 2011 total of 5.84 million shipped in Japan, the Asahi Shimbun figure, the Super CD-ROM² date and the last HuCard and CD releases. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCエンジン