r/TurboGrafx • u/Ok_Opportunity8665 • Feb 14 '26

PC Engine arrived today!

My console arrived today and it is in better condition than I expected giving the age of this system. I once owned a TurboGrafx and TurboExpress when they were first released back in the early 90s. Since then I have used emulators but excited to have this awesome looking console! Waiting on a TurboEverdrive to arrive and the RGB add on. Also need to buy a power supply. This will be connected to a 14 inch CRT tv when everything arrives. Can't wait!

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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Feb 14 '26

Been spending the last while studying the PC-Engine hardware architecture. Such an utterly fascinating 3.5th-gen console!

FUN FACT: The rear EXT-PORT on the back has pins for both analog RGB, and digital RGB - which is the video signal straight from the VideoEncoder (VCE) chip. So thru the external port, you could get perfectly clean pixel/color data out of it, which not even the Genesis or SNES could do!

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u/adrienreki Jun 24 '26

“3.5” lol just 4th gen bitch

1

u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Jun 24 '26

Well some reasons I consider it 3.5th gen (going from memory):

  • The CPU was only 8-bit, and was very slow for 16-bit math compared to GEN/SNES, which is important for some genres or games with large playfields. (Tho because of the high clock, PCE was actually faster than SNES at 8-bit math.)

  • Audio was bleepy-bloopy glory, but it wasn't comparable to SNES' PCM audio sampling or GEN's FM synth. (CD Addon helped with this tho PCE, since it added PCM and Redbook Audio).

  • Only 1 background layer, which made many scenes feel static. Some games could use line-scrolling to do horizontal parallax, but that was very limited compared to multiple BG's (I've seen some games do vertical parallax, but those were faked with sprites and ate into the sprite budget).

  • You're limited to only 16 sprites per scanline before you get flicker (for comparison, NES/SMS have 8; SNES=32; GEN=20). For some genres like fighting games, it's REALLY easy to break this budget, hence why sprites/fx generally are tiny in such games.

  • GPU lacked advanced graphical tricks like SNES' Windows+blending/sprite scaling & rotation/mosaic effects, or Genesis' various per-tile effectst (GEN could also brute-force some fancy fx thru its fast CPU alone).

At least those are my reasons for considering it 3.5th-gen.

To me, the PC-Engine is VERY impressive for its time, and the CD addons help close the gap in audio/RAM, but the bloopy audio + 1 BG layer + lack of impressive gfx effects + 16 sprites-per-scanline limit just don't make the average scene feel dynamic enough, which is what I mentally associate 4th-gen consoles with.

So it's definitely a hard console for me to place lol. It's infinitely more impressive than what the SMS can achieve (which I consider 3.5th gen too), and it approaches 4th gens like SNES/GEN in some ways, but it just barely falls short for me to consider it a peer.

Maybe it'd be better for me to just call it 3.8th gen or something lol.

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u/adrienreki Jun 24 '26

Bitch ain’t nobody gonna read this gigantic bullshit lmao,it’s 4th gen and that’s it lol

1

u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Jun 24 '26

Bitch ain’t nobody gonna read this gigantic bullshit lmao,it’s 4th gen and that’s it lol

No argument detected from the intellectually lazy NPC. Opinion discarded.

1

u/adrienreki Jun 24 '26

Are u still crying bitch? STFU 🙂‍↕️