PC-Engine - any good retrospective views anywhere...

[+GoldenWheels]

Sometimes I wonder where people grew up... I mean, I live in a pretty reasonably rural area of Texas and we still had merchants that offered TG-16 products... well... one at least.

I'm from CT, so you'd think being in the "NYC area" it would be considered a major market and I'd get some turbo love. Never saw a one on display in my town, which had a few 80s behemoths (Sears, Service Merchandise, JC Penny) .

[derFunkenstein]

Sometimes I wonder where people grew up... I mean, I live in a pretty reasonably rural area of Texas and we still had merchants that offered TG-16 products... well... one at least.

I grew up in a small town (less than 1,000 people) about 40 minutes south of Peoria, IL. We had nothing in town for any games except a video rental store. That only had a very few of the most popular NES, SNES, and Genesis games. We had to drive to Pekin (about 30,000 people) to buy any games. And then all they had at Walmart were (you guessed it) NES, SNES, and Genesis. Go farther north to Peoria or about 50 miles south to Springfield and there was TG16 stuff. By the time I had a job in high school and could buy my own games (1994), the Turbo was officially dead in the US, and I had my eye on a Sega CD to go with my Genesis.

[Tanooki]

I don't think the TG or PCE ever had a presence outside of a super limited distribution in the European area and mainly just was a US and mostly so Japanese only setup so it would be no surprise if someone from another region or continent had no idea until the internet came along and then stumbled across it in the late 90s or 00s.

 

NECs failing was their own doing horrible choices and worse decisions on what games to look over and what to release which is why it was doomed so badly outside of Japan. The hardware was more than capable of keeping up with Sega and making it look and sound worse too in many cases. Sega just learned from being stupid years earlier when Tonka ruined them on the SMS and so they took over and basically did the opposite of those fools to get all over with their merchandise. Had NEC noticed that foul up it could have been different.

[Eltigro]

Maybe my perspective is skewed, because it seems there are many that are more rural than I am. lol

 

The "local city" where I saw Turbo stuff probably had a population of around 65k back then. Google states it is at 82k now. Even then, my parents didn't get my TG there. I had told them about a free game offer (send in UPC and copy of receipt and get a free game), but they didn't have any with that offer, so they actually went to the closest "big city" of Shreveport, LA.

[NE146]

I was in college in the Bay Area.. there was one large retail store that had both the TG16 & Genesis on display at launch.. but I forget their name. Aside from that it was primarily Electronics Boutique (later just known as EB) and Software Etc. that sold Turbografx games.

[derFunkenstein]

NECs failing was their own doing horrible choices and worse decisions on what games to look over and what to release which is why it was doomed so badly outside of Japan. The hardware was more than capable of keeping up with Sega and making it look and sound worse too in many cases. Sega just learned from being stupid years earlier when Tonka ruined them on the SMS and so they took over and basically did the opposite of those fools to get all over with their merchandise. Had NEC noticed that foul up it could have been different.

Look worse, sure. The PC Engine could show many more colors and had a bigger palette to choose from. I disagree with the "sound worse" part. Street Fighter II on the PC Engine had better sound effects and voices than the Genesis, but I can't stand listening to the music in that game, just as an example.

 

You can hear overtone distortion caused by the tiny samples, and that's what really put me off of just about every game I played on the system. The PC Engine only had 20 bytes of sample RAM per channel. If NEC was not going to give enough memory for proper instrument samples, then Sega made a better choice with the Yamaha FM synth. Both fall well short of the standard set by the SNES, though, which had a whopping 64kbytes of audio RAM. Using Street Fighter II Turbo or CE as a point of comparison, SNES > Genesis > PC Engine for music. SNES > PC Engine > Genesis for effects.

 

If you play a Z80-patched ROM on an Everdrive via real Genesis hardware, though, you'll hear that sound effects could have been much better. Capcom did a crappy job programming sample playback in the game and ROM hackers have fixed it without making any other changes.

[Tanooki]

I guess it's personal taste in both our cases. I felt the Genesis has the crappiest audio of the three. While the TG/PCE has a more arcade audio even a bit muffled perhaps on the samples in cases, it still sounded more richer, clearer, and not scratchy and metallic and static like the Genesis did. Genesis seemed to just excel with like techno/electric guitar type riffs but other than that just felt pretty miserable. Either way as you said both fell far short of the sample setup that the SNES used as that systems visual eye candy and audio richeness really blew people away back in 1991 as no one was pulling off audio that solid outside of the computer market.

 

I've not played with the patched SF2 on Genesis but I have run it over a youtube video done in HD for clarity and you are right, Capcom was just blatantly lazy and halfassed with the vocal samples as the system could handle far better.