Recommend me some PCE Hucards

[AkumajoTonyX]

Sidearms is one of the proper 16bitish games, and it's fun. Nothing wrong with it

Can you explain further how it is more 16bitish ?

Arcade quality pixelart & shading, higher resolution than Genesis or SNES can do, arcade-superior sound, action that would cause slowdown in many Genesis shooter game engines and would melt the SNES.

The PC Engine / Turbo GrafX-16 has two 8-bit processors running in parallel, does it not? That is why it is considered 16-bit, yes?

[Black Tiger]

The PC Engine / Turbo GrafX-16 has two 8-bit processors running in parallel, does it not? That is why it is considered 16-bit, yes?

That's a myth as old as the console wars.

The "16-bit" generation got its name from Sega putting a large 16-BIT decoration on the Mega Drive. Before that, no one talked about bits at all.

The "bits" of a cpu isn't a measure of its performance, but even if it was it is still only one part of a console's hardware. The PC Engine's single cpu is "8-bit", but it handles 2D games better than competing 16-bit generation consoles.

The 16-bit graphics chip and the overall hardware design of the PC Engine also makes it the best at animating background tiles and especially sprites. A game like Sapphire shows how the cpu can handle Neo Geo game levels of sprites/action/animation, even with 2-player co-op, without slowing down. You'll notice that PC Engine games tend to have a variety of shapes and sizes of sprites, while SNES games have oddly proportioned sprites and minimal variety, similar to NES games.

The PC Engine has the most potential for color/shading/detail by having 8 times as many palettes as Genesis and twice as many as SNES, but this is the most underused hardware strength in the existing library.

Overall, the Genesis and PC Engine are comparable at handling a lot of action and variety, with the SNES far behind and closer to Sega Master System/Game Gear. Each console has strengths/weakness and trade-offs, with the SNES being the one with the most trade-offs.

In the end the PC Engine and its games are closest to other consoles that are grouped under the moniker of the "16-bit generation".

[turboxray]

Sidearms is one of the proper 16bitish games, and it's fun. Nothing wrong with it

Can you explain further how it is more 16bitish ?

Arcade quality pixelart & shading, higher resolution than Genesis or SNES can do, arcade-superior sound, action that would cause slowdown in many Genesis shooter game engines and would melt the SNES.

The PC Engine / Turbo GrafX-16 has two 8-bit processors running in parallel, does it not? That is why it is considered 16-bit, yes?

Ohh man, I'm sooo glad it did not have that setup. Especially if it was something like 2 x 3.57mhz like some magazines reported haha.

[AkumajoTonyX]

The PC Engine / Turbo GrafX-16 has two 8-bit processors running in parallel, does it not? That is why it is considered 16-bit, yes?

That's a myth as old as the console wars.

The "16-bit" generation got its name from Sega putting a large 16-BIT decoration on the Mega Drive. Before that, no one talked about bits at all.

The "bits" of a cpu isn't a measure of its performance, but even if it was it is still only one part of a console's hardware. The PC Engine's single cpu is "8-bit", but it handles 2D games better than competing 16-bit generation consoles.

The 16-bit graphics chip and the overall hardware design of the PC Engine also makes it the best at animating background tiles and especially sprites. A game like Sapphire shows how the cpu can handle Neo Geo game levels of sprites/action/animation, even with 2-player co-op, without slowing down. You'll notice that PC Engine games tend to have a variety of shapes and sizes of sprites, while SNES games have oddly proportioned sprites and minimal variety, similar to NES games.

The PC Engine has the most potential for color/shading/detail by having 8 times as many palettes as Genesis and twice as many as SNES, but this is the most underused hardware strength in the existing library.

Overall, the Genesis and PC Engine are comparable at handling a lot of action and variety, with the SNES far behind and closer to Sega Master System/Game Gear. Each console has strengths/weakness and trade-offs, with the SNES being the one with the most trade-offs.

In the end the PC Engine and its games are closest to other consoles that are grouped under the moniker of the "16-bit generation".

Excellent response. It is a tragedy that TTi didn't know how to market the Turbo GrafX-16 here in the States. I always knew that it was the better machine than Nintendo's and Sega's. Imagine what could have been, had the team really pushed through the biased magazines of the day.

[turboxray]

The whole bit thing came from computer culture, even in Japan. CPU's have a much more of an impact in the small home computers, especially ones that lack much hardware acceleration like gaming consoles had.

The Atari ST, the ST stands for 16|32 (Sixteen Thirty two). Meaning 16bit data bus, 32bit CPU. And that's the original 68000! And from a software developer standpoint, the 68000 is a 32bit CPU. So by extension the Genesis/MD is too. That makes the PCE even MORE impressive haha.

[Punch]

The PC Engine / Turbo GrafX-16 has two 8-bit processors running in parallel, does it not? That is why it is considered 16-bit, yes?

That's a myth as old as the console wars.

The "16-bit" generation got its name from Sega putting a large 16-BIT decoration on the Mega Drive. Before that, no one talked about bits at all.

The "bits" of a cpu isn't a measure of its performance, but even if it was it is still only one part of a console's hardware. The PC Engine's single cpu is "8-bit", but it handles 2D games better than competing 16-bit generation consoles.

The 16-bit graphics chip and the overall hardware design of the PC Engine also makes it the best at animating background tiles and especially sprites. A game like Sapphire shows how the cpu can handle Neo Geo game levels of sprites/action/animation, even with 2-player co-op, without slowing down. You'll notice that PC Engine games tend to have a variety of shapes and sizes of sprites, while SNES games have oddly proportioned sprites and minimal variety, similar to NES games.

The PC Engine has the most potential for color/shading/detail by having 8 times as many palettes as Genesis and twice as many as SNES, but this is the most underused hardware strength in the existing library.

Overall, the Genesis and PC Engine are comparable at handling a lot of action and variety, with the SNES far behind and closer to Sega Master System/Game Gear. Each console has strengths/weakness and trade-offs, with the SNES being the one with the most trade-offs.

In the end the PC Engine and its games are closest to other consoles that are grouped under the moniker of the "16-bit generation".

BT summed up my thoughts perfectly, but the PCE "not being 16-bit", or rather the processor being a custom 6502 meant that any hope of having advance 3D shenanigans like the genesis EA sims and later "mode 7" efforts is all but lost (even though theoretically the PCE's video hardware is much more suited for the task, as it's the only console that can access Video RAM at any time -- and trust me, this is a big deal in the console world!). Doing 3D math is slow if you have to juggle 8 bits at a time.

I feel like not only was NEC marketing terrible but also they tended to highlight only the low budget JP games... nothing wrong with most of them, but it's a fact that those games tend to look like "roided out famicom games" as I usually say to Lukester, both in art and gameplay mechanics. There's plenty of great, "arcade feel" software on HuCards and the CD addon is chock full of them, but alas we got a lot of "8-bit-ish" games on the US side and that tends to poison the well in internet discussions quite a bit, and that's not to say of the crappy US exclusive output.

The NAMCO PCE games are pretty good examples of what I mean by "8-bitish" but I'm sure you can think of plenty more on your own, both US and JP only soft.







It's a miracle that somehow we got arcade ports and some solid original works alongside those lame games (visually and sometimes mechanically too), because I don't think anyone in the US would have cared about this console at the time if all releases were Final Court Tennis, War of the Dead and Energy.

We can only imagine what could have been if the PCE was released one or two years earlier (since they spent so much time thinking about the US form factor and had to fight with the genny despite being on the JP market 3 years earlier). It's a cool console, NEC licensing was nowhere as bad as Nintendo, and devs would be happy to oblige and jump ship from Nintendo to PCE.

[majors]

That makes the PCE even MORE impressive haha.

When people get in to the "Turbo is 8-bits, blah" arguments, I use the tactic of saying exactly what you said, "Isn't it even more impressive then?".

Of course we are an echo chamber of obey love here...

[Necromancer]

Intellivision is 16 bit, and Jaguar is 64 bits.

Bits means shit.  Do the math!   

[Black Tiger]

Even though the PC Engine isn't suited for realtime rendering of scaling/rotation/3D, it can do them. Meanwhile the Neo Geo can't calculate anything in realtime at all, although it has hardware support for a specific type of scaling.

But no one feels that they're missing out on crude 3D effects in Neo Geo games. It's the 2D games that make the 16-bit generation and the PC Engine has a lot of timeless "16-bit" games.

Many of the "8-bit" style PCE games are still cool, but most don't represent the library's signature feel(s) that sets it apart from the other 16-bit consoles.

It's also cool that the main 16-bit generation consoles each have a different kind of chip sound. Imagine how boring it would be if each console didn't have a distinct "voice".

[turboxray]

BT summed up my thoughts perfectly, but the PCE "not being 16-bit", or rather the processor being a custom 6502 meant that any hope of having advance 3D shenanigans like the genesis EA sims and later "mode 7" efforts is all but lost (even though theoretically the PCE's video hardware is much more suited for the task, as it's the only console that can access Video RAM at any time -- and trust me, this is a big deal in the console world!). Doing 3D math is slow if you have to juggle 8 bits at a time.

Can you expand on that? Unclear what EA sims. Do you mean Road Rash? If so, if the slower-than-NES Master system z80 can pull it off then surely the PCE can too. Not sure what mode 7 stuff you're talking about. Unless it's the recent stuff in the past 5 years, and that's simply because of Genesis linear pixel mode for tiles. Planar is a bitch for anything pixel related. I've done realtime scaling on the PCE, and it was slower to convert the scaled linear graphics to planar than it was to do the scaling itself! 3D stuff was extremely limited for era, outside of F-zero and Mario Kart. But if 3D really mattered, something like an SVP or FX2 chip would have served that purpose on the PCE (I mean outside of MUL the SNES has it worse than the PCE; 16bit, 24bit, and 32bit math is faster on the PCE than the SNES haha).

[Punch]

BT summed up my thoughts perfectly, but the PCE "not being 16-bit", or rather the processor being a custom 6502 meant that any hope of having advance 3D shenanigans like the genesis EA sims and later "mode 7" efforts is all but lost (even though theoretically the PCE's video hardware is much more suited for the task, as it's the only console that can access Video RAM at any time -- and trust me, this is a big deal in the console world!). Doing 3D math is slow if you have to juggle 8 bits at a time.

Can you expand on that? Unclear what EA sims. Do you mean Road Rash? If so, if the slower-than-NES Master system z80 can pull it off then surely the PCE can too. Not sure what mode 7 stuff you're talking about. Unless it's the recent stuff in the past 5 years, and that's simply because of Genesis linear pixel mode for tiles. Planar is a bitch for anything pixel related. I've done realtime scaling on the PCE, and it was slower to convert the scaled linear graphics to planar than it was to do the scaling itself! 3D stuff was extremely limited for era, outside of F-zero and Mario Kart. But if 3D really mattered, something like an SVP or FX2 chip would have served that purpose on the PCE (I mean outside of MUL the SNES has it worse than the PCE; 16bit, 24bit, and 32bit math is faster on the PCE than the SNES haha).

Yeah for Mode 7 I meant homebrew.

There are plenty of aircraft sims on the Genesis and Falcon doesn't touch the graphical complexity of those (even though framerates are just as bad...)

It was way faster in my memory though. In the words of Detective Cole Phelps, "I guess I made a mistake..."

[AkumajoTonyX]

I always thought it was cheesy how the artists would draw half of a person's head/face, and then just copy and paste it for the other side. Such a lazy move, and makes the characters look goofy.

[turboxray]

I always thought it was cheesy how the artists would draw half of a person's head/face, and then just copy and paste it for the other side. Such a lazy move, and makes the characters look goofy.

Yeah but saves rom (and vram on other systems) space because cell flipping.

[turboxray]

BT summed up my thoughts perfectly, but the PCE "not being 16-bit", or rather the processor being a custom 6502 meant that any hope of having advance 3D shenanigans like the genesis EA sims and later "mode 7" efforts is all but lost (even though theoretically the PCE's video hardware is much more suited for the task, as it's the only console that can access Video RAM at any time -- and trust me, this is a big deal in the console world!). Doing 3D math is slow if you have to juggle 8 bits at a time.

Can you expand on that? Unclear what EA sims. Do you mean Road Rash? If so, if the slower-than-NES Master system z80 can pull it off then surely the PCE can too. Not sure what mode 7 stuff you're talking about. Unless it's the recent stuff in the past 5 years, and that's simply because of Genesis linear pixel mode for tiles. Planar is a bitch for anything pixel related. I've done realtime scaling on the PCE, and it was slower to convert the scaled linear graphics to planar than it was to do the scaling itself! 3D stuff was extremely limited for era, outside of F-zero and Mario Kart. But if 3D really mattered, something like an SVP or FX2 chip would have served that purpose on the PCE (I mean outside of MUL the SNES has it worse than the PCE; 16bit, 24bit, and 32bit math is faster on the PCE than the SNES haha).

Yeah for Mode 7 I meant homebrew.

There are plenty of aircraft sims on the Genesis and Falcon doesn't touch the graphical complexity of those (even though framerates are just as bad...)

It was way faster in my memory though. In the words of Detective Cole Phelps, "I guess I made a mistake..."

 I can't speak to Falcon's code, but only having 8k of system ram probably contributes to it. A polygon filler isn't that quick on planar graphics either. Considering both Falcon and Gunboat are small roms, probably don't have nice LUTs for faster acceleration. There's a 3D raytracer (wolf-3D 2D ray caster) game on the Genesis (blood something), and 768k of it is basically pre-compiled code path! Screw LUTs, that's the next level haha.

[AkumajoTonyX]

I always thought it was cheesy how the artists would draw half of a person's head/face, and then just copy and paste it for the other side. Such a lazy move, and makes the characters look goofy.

Yeah but saves rom (and vram on other systems) space because cell flipping.

Interesting. I hadn't thought that it would have been rom-draining to do so. Thanks!