Beating the limitations of the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine | White_Pointer Gaming

This fixation with the number of bits in the processor architecture has been plaguing us since the 80s. It wasn't long ago I was yelled at because our company used 32-bit office, the guy claimed 64-bit was "much better" (and he didn't even use big spreadsheets or anything). I think Sega and Nintendo started that nonsense.

The CPU was actually pretty beefy. A 65c02 at 7Mhz is no slow poke, whereas it was very efficient in clock cycles per instruction. Having only 1 background layer was its main technical limitation. Its sound abilities weren’t as advanced as FM or PCM of Genesis and SNES. NEC was also seen as nickel and diming consumers due to no RCA composite out or 2nd controller port unless you bought add on devices. It was also more expensive than Genesis by a little bit. NEC should have just released the SuperGraphx instead. With extra ram and another background layer, along with a slightly cheaper price $149, two controller ports, a composite video out and Ghost & Goblins as a pack in, it could have done well.

2:45 This was stupid the console was called TurboGrafx16 not TurboCPU16. It's not false advertising because the Grafx I mean graphics were 16-bit. Having only an 8-bit cpu has zero effect on the visuals. The only thing it might limit is frame-rate and objects on screen.

Been binging your videos, they’re so so good!

HudsonSoft are very experienced famicom devs. So when they made own hardware platform – they made true Famicom 2.0 in every aspect. Also with expansion in mind and CD-ROM as true media for it.

wtf is a white pointer ?

Seeing this makes me see how Nintendo and Sega did little to nothing to improve over the PC engine 😮

I always liked tg16 because it was already dead in the mid 90s when i began collecting. So it felt obscure and unique. And no one else had one. So i got to introduce games to my friends that they had never seen. My only letdown was that it never truly upgraded. All the add-ons used the same hardware other than a memory upgrade. So going from chip games to the CDs never felt like a major difference. It wasn't like the difference between NES and SNES. The biggest improvement was the game music and voice-overs. I always wondered why they never upgraded the processor. Even the supergrafx wasn't a huge leap. When they made the Duo, they should have used the supergrafx chipset, instead of just combining the older tg16 hardware into one unit. But history played out that Nec and Sega tanked themselves with expensive add ons that didn't add much to the graphics or gameplay. Its still my favorite retro system though. I would love to see the homebrew community fully make use of every trick and exploit to squeeze every last bit of juice out of the system and see what it could really do when pushed to the limit. I feel the same way about the Jaguar. That system is the definition of unrealized potential. It was a powerhouse on paper but none of the games used its full capability, and that made it a pass up system. Before KB toys went out of business they were selling the jaguar for 20$, and the cd add on for 40$. I remember that because i was about to buy one just because they were so cheap. But the games were so lack luster that i passed.

The animated tiles thing was used on several C64 games at the end of the '80s, which is even more crazy when you consider the 1MHz CPU and limited RAM(the 64kb was shared between the graphics and CPU program space, you couldn't just bank switch or load in more tiles when the game is stored on cassette tape as most C64 games were, new data could only be loaded between stages and in a linear fashion) available.

The 482 on screen color count of the TurboGrafx-16 is a bit of a misnomer when you consider the 9-bit RGB system palette as a whole not having a tremendous amount of color gradient range beyond what a 4bpp graphic can display individually. Yes it is much easier using 16-tile palettes and 16-sprite palettes than the measly 2+2 the Genesis offered just in asset management alone, but a 9-bit RGB system palette of 512 colors is a lot smaller than the SNES 15-bit RGB system palette of 32,768 possible colors.
As a result it was a color system of diminishing returns collectively in the long run Ie. more individual palettes per bitmap but the contrast gradient range being equal to Genesis but less than SNES per individual graphic element. This is evident in live action or CGI based graphics on the TG-16 where it never looks rich enough in gradient quality to do the aesthetic justice and layering more colors together doesn't yield much improvement. Same sort of pitfall Sega CD FMV had with color count stacking creating only a moderate boost in gradient fidelity until the 32X. Even the Shadow & Highlight option on Genesis can only blend 4bpp-maximum graphics together rather than making 5bpp or higher quality because 512 colors only stretches so far.
So collectively you're more likely to use the same colors and or shading values across more palettes than ever to use 482 individual colors at the same time, as there isn't enough color gradient contrast present in the system palette to do that effectively. Realistically you'll do graphics in the 256 color range seen on SNES or DOS-VGA which is a pretty good standard to match.🙂