PC-Engine will always be my favorite childhood console ^__^ It had a style and ecosystem entirely unique that will always be special.

I have to admit I always just assumed the PC Engine HAD multiple background layers, so this was an eye opener for sure! Thanks a lot for this video!

I loved the Turbo Graphics 16. I had it for like a week when I was younger, but my brother stole it and sold it for drugs.

I like how you chalked up the advanced techniques to witchcraft 😆

Having drawn tile graphics on a couple of Homebrew releases a d designed graphics for a couple of unfinished titles, the way these guys worked around the limitations is just amazing

I've done some hobby work programming for the Sega Master System and Game Boy in assembly. Getting those parallax effects or a HUD that doesn't scroll vertically OR horizontally is a really fun and interesting challenge, with many different ways to go about handling it. These are some really fascinating examples! I always wondered how the TG-16 got away with some of its more impressive effects with just one layer, thanks for sharing!

I LOVE this stuff! This is what fascinates me about the PCE's hardware! (Well, that and its awesome soundchip) I also actually really like the GBC in particular for very similar reasons!

Game devs were so clever during this time period. Limited hardware really made them have to think and come up with crazy solutions. What game was that at the very end flying around and shooting dragons and such?

Really love these techy videos that explain console dev tricks. Reminds me of GameHut! I am thanking the KZfaq algorithm that I found your channel. Wish you a lot of success in the future.

Awesome explanation of a rather complex topic! I still don't fully understand it, but I definitely understand it better than I did before watching this video! 🙂

10:00 this is insane, the trick to getting the healthbar there is extremely clever-if you pause on a frame where Ken goes above the healthbar (10:49), you can see that the healthbar creates some sort of wormhole that makes Ken taller because it doesn't actually overlap with the background! If you weren't pausing to look though, you'd never notice, so this technique is truly brilliant. Luv the PCE, luv this video. Subbed!

I always love videos like this and wish for more. I'd like to see a long play of games that us a lot of trick broken down.

Very interesting, thanks for the video. PCE is my main system but for sure a number of games do look quite flat where these techniques aren't used.

Love this kind of content! Keep it up!

very educational, thanks.

Great video

You talked about some of the systems specs in comparison to the Genesis and Snes but that isn't the entire picture. The TG-16 held its own for the same reason the Genesis did.... both machines were far more than their VDP/GPU's. For example, both consoles ran with a multiprocessor setup and are faster than an Snes. Sega just flat setup their 16-bit machine like an arcade cab with as little bottlenecks as possible. This gave Sega the ability to punch well above what they should have been doing. For example 99.9% of all Genesis games run in a higher resolution than the Snes. You sure wouldn't have guessed that just looking at their video output specs but it happened. Now, look at what indy developers are doing with the Genesis today. We are finally seeing what one is truly capable of, and it's amazing. I believe if indy developers decided to go crazy with the TG-16, we would see similar results.

As primarily a SNES fan who's interested in development there, I like seeing how stuff like this was done on both PC Engine and Genesis too, as the methods employed are almost always available to be used on SNES as standard as well. And, doubly interestingly in particular here imo, is that because the PC Engine's particular sprites per scanline limit and sprite pixels per scanline limit both fall a bit below SNES (16 and 256 on PC Engine vs 32 and 272 on SNES), you can actually do basically everything with sprites on SNES similar to how you see it being done with sprites on PC Engine (and even more in some cases), just with the potential for a little more flicker in some specific use cases if you were to similarly do it all just with sprites on SNES due to how priorities work on each system, which of course usually wouldn't be necessary on SNES anyway as you have up to four times as many background layers to work with there. What it means for SNES is that you can combine these methods you see for faking background layers and elements and such on both PC Engine and Genesis alongside the capabilities that are unique to SNES for some really cool results. Imagine using all of these tricks seen above on top of the four fully-overlapping full-screen background layers available in Mode 0 on SNES alongside the standard transparency effects and such there too for example. . . . Good stuff going into the various details and explaining how much of it works. It's very useful for people to understand this kind of thing imo, both the capabilities and the limitations, especially for potential developers on any of these beloved fourth generation consoles. PS. One little detail with the colours on-screen there: You've listed both the Genesis and SNES numbers including the transparent colours in each palette but the PC Engine minus the transparent colours in each palette. So, keeping them all the same, I think it should read 512 on-screen colours for PC Engine, 64 for Genesis and 256 for SNES, or I think 480 [+1 backdrop colour and 1 border colour] for PC Engine, 60 [+1 backdrop colour] for Genesis and 255 [+1 backdrop colour] for SNES. I'd probably just go with the full numbers including transparent palette colours for each for simplicity. PPS. I just subscribed. :)

Mesen 2 pce emulator is your friend. The status bar in SF2, while yes is a scroll reposition for the bar (background).. it also turns off sprites for that section and then turns them back on at the bottom of it. This forces the sprites to "appear" underneath bar. The PCE can turn on/off the background and/or sprites on a scanline basis. It can change a lot of video register values on a scanline basis.

Would love to hear you talk about the Neo geo MVS or AES hardware techniques.

Thank you for explaining all the tricks they use to make games for the PC Engine(TurboGrafx16). I wonder what Sega games could NEC made for the system. Could there been a Sonic the hedgehog for the PC engine. I wish they have made more fighting games for the TurboGrafx16; but somebody thought Americans was tired of fighting games. 😂😂😂

Good video thanks. I remember the pc engines had many arcade ports. A great machine.

Great stuff, thnx!

The TG16, which was created to challenge the NES, was a magical piece of hardware that unfortunately was overlooked by most North Americans.

Back in the day when frame buffer doesn’t exist. Impressed how creative developers can be especially when they did a pseudo-3D games using a sprite only to create a 3D illusion like racing games or flight games.

3:35 worth keeping in mind that while the SNES had 256 color registers it also had color math (add, subtract or average two layers), so the potential number of on screen colors would still be way higher,

Nice video! Have to watch it again soon to understand everything better, too much noise around here now. With three of the main 16-bit consoles covered, there's only one left. Some consider it more of an arcade machine, but it was competing with the others in the magazines back then, with ads and reviews. Any plans for covering that one?

Remember my cousin getting one of these and a important copy of Rondo Of Blood. The guy who had it imported spent alot of $$ getting it to the US.

Sounds very similar to how the Neo Geo did a lot of it's effects. It doesn't have a lot of fancy capabilities, just a lot of sprites and brute force,

I miss my tg 16. My brother took mine to college without asking. Had around 20 games. It magically vanished probably for beer money.

didnt sf2ce on pc-engine have an enhancement chip by way of it being a memory-mapper-chip on the bulker rom-card

Doesnt the Super CD card add additional RAM as well?

No-one in my capital city carried any TG-16 games and I was stuck with Kieth Courage until emulation creeped into my life...e-m-u-l-a-t-i-o-n...aaaaaagggghh...

The snes was also not a true 16-bit console, could you make a video about that?

Pc engine was officialy distributed in France by Sodipeng man....

It's so funny. The PCE had a 7.16Mhz 6502 based cpu, designed by Hudson. Which is extremely fast for a 6502 style cpu. The SNES has the same 6502 base, but only 2.56Mhz. It has a 16bit ALU! But limited 16bit instructions, maybe 4, for multiplying, moving a decimal point, stuff like that. All completely pointless because the bus was 8bits. They pulled the same trick with the N64. The bus is memory speed and running games needs lots of it and for it to be fast.

Nice overview of the game tricks! The PCE was a lot more powerful than first thought- it can chuck around sprites more similar to a NeoGeo, so it's possible to create an entire background layer with large sprites on top: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/obtnoNyG3cvRips.html Interestingly, the soundchip can be better than the Megadrive and Snes in that it has cleaner pcm playback. Another sprite capability is rotation and some scaling: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/d7adiKiTrquUZHU.html Colour is the main strength of the VDP though: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gLN5d61227qsaIU.html The cpu is actually quite powerful though, and could do comparable 3D: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/idaPpZZnnpOdj2g.html

Would not be the Master System or Mark III the first console to have the scanline counter?

Im simple. Someone posts Turbo content i click sub.

Hey some huge spoilers for you because you don't seem to know... basically the TRUE reason why the NEC Turbo GraFX 16 failed in North America is because Hudson Soft and NEC headquarters in Japan entrusted the subsidiary branch (a subsidiary branch is NOT the headquarters of a company and can never be... this is harsh lesson to Sega Genesis fanboys) to launch the NEC PC-Engine in North America by 1988 however the subsidiary branch management decided that the name "PC-Engine" needed to be changed and that the plastic shell design also needed to be changed which by all accounts required an entire YEAR wasted doing that... then what sealed the doom of the NEC Turbo GraFX 16 was the fact and ONLY fact that will make sense in that again the subsidiary branch were apparently looking at the sales numbers they could potentially estimate for the U.S.A. (btw there is a problem of subsidiary branches back then minus Nintendo of America of completely ignoring Mexico and barely making a presence in Canada and French Quebec so when you take those two regions where middle class wealthy people existed and were technology literate and if the marketing and distribution was very subpar then that will translate to major problems later) which means the fifty states of the Union and could also use the additional territories but back then being that NEC Turbo GraFX 16 was new and that NEC America had to overcome themselves instead of doing proper research, apparently they felt too confident that they could reach a particular sales number of units sold in a year's time frame and they just decided to order something like 700,000 TG16s for the launch in 1989 which apparently makes it clear that the NEC America management staff were convinced that they were actually going to sell that many units at $200 dollars a pop.. eh ... just because? Therefore a clueless American public and quite possibly snubbed Canada and Mexico... nevermind that even in 1989 it was not easy for all fifty states and towns within to have retail stores to buy a Nintendo NES even though Nintendo had the advantage of building distribution relations earlier on. Therefore we can look back and confirm that many of the shipped TG16 units simply sat in stores while some indeed sold but the proportion of units sold to the 700k number was disproportionate during the first couple of months which means that when these TG16s were just sitting there in store shelves during 1990 year that they were becoming a loss to the retail shops who were convinced to order them so when new shipments were available for more units to order, most of those retail stores opted not to order more TG16s. Then combine that with the then rising EGM magazine article with data that was alleged to have been supplied by then Sega of America's management staff who later made a special contract deal with the EGM publisher to make an additional official Sega quarterly publication (Sega Force) and the then rising hardcore gamers who were teenagers rising into young adult gamers and the remaining arcade and Atari gamers who had been gaming since the early 1980s and were still amazed by and interested in arcade and the newer tech from Sega and NEC and Nintendo and as such an image that somehow the TG16 marketing was lying became a thing... however that is a minor issue.. the real problem was the NEC America management being too over confident in how many units to order and ship which is also the SAME problem faced by Michael Katz who was the new manager hired by Sega headquarters in Japan to be the main manager of Sega of America (a subsidiary branch) and according to some old numbers it was said that Michael Katz's marketing team were confident that they could sell between probably 700k and one million Sega Genesis systems and note that the big Sega Genesis package in 1989 included two gamepads, Altered Beast ROM Cartridge and the Sega Genesis system (the Sega MegaDrive because again Sega of America's management had some weird ideas even though they failed to market the Sega Master System and decided they did not like the MegaDrive name so they went through several name changes until they settled on Genesis and most likely also WASTED almost an entire year where a North American MegaDrive launch could have happened by December 1988 to even say February 1989... but more important is that back then the Japanese 1988 launch MegaDrive shipped with one gamepad and no game for roughly $210 USD equivalent in 1988 and by 1989 SoA was selling the Sega Genesis with an additional gamepad and a free game for $190 USD which tells us that they were losing money giving a free game and gamepad so if a certain number of units were not reached then they could not expect a percentage of one million buyers to buy additional game software which is a huge problem with the truest reasons why Sega of America's management led Sega as a brand and company down to bankrupcy.

Actually it was an 8bit machine as you said. But SNES is 8bit too. The databus is 8bit. With that in mind, if snes is a 16bit machine cause its cpu is 16bit internally, then the megadrive is 32bit...

The snes was also not true 16-bit, you should make a video about that.

I loved, no LOVE Splatterhouse and Jacky Chan on the PC-Engine. Really remarkable games as well.

Instead of it being a weak "16bit" machine, I've always thought of the TG16 as the beefiest 8bit game console ever!

Boycott of 50 Hz flicker is the only right way. PcEngine can output RGB on the expansion port without modifications inside. So no need to call that NTSC .

wow I always thought tg and genesis were like neck and neck hardware wise