Images

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Turbografx-16 & PC-Engine Reproduction Hucards & Cases Now for Sale!!!!]

i c u.

Toes be creeping in too

Holy cow, just noticed that. 

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: The Local Girls of PCEFX.com]

LOL, I do not miss the days of slow internet. Also the pixellation in those girls is pretty rough. 240p and limited pallet. I'll take it anyway; hopefully the puxels don't chafe too badly...

I'd hit it. I love her, chunky pixels and all.

Word. It seems some of the photos converted better than others. 224p reminds me how dated 90s tech was. But there were answers to people's desparation I guess. Even though the PCe had a large pallet available, the number of colors per sprite tile were limited to an extent. So assuming the graphics hardware is capable of tiling the entire screen with unique tiles (of which the PC Engine can obviously do to some capacity), each 8x8 or 16x16 tile can only display so many colors, as well the hardware does not have an endless buffet of pallets to assign, so groups of tiles must share the same colors between each other. There is some work involved in getting good screen transfers, hence why some babes look better than the others. A PC-CDROM with GIFs/Jpegs or good old soft-core VHS might have been a better medium, but then we would not be discussing them here.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Turbografx-16 & PC-Engine Reproduction Hucards Now for Sale!!!!]

My order came in today. Thank you; they're gorgeous!



https://atariage.com/forums/uploads/monthly_06_2016/post-33189-0-32491500-1466662711.jpg

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: New PCE chiptunes thread]

I got my cover to work within 60hz by switching between 100 and 90 bpm with effects, so it should be at the correct tempo on a real system. I also changed the noise volume from 1D to 1A since Deflemask's noise emulation seems to make it too quiet (it's much louder in the emulators I've tried). I don't have an Everdrive or a PC Engine on hand so I had to use Mednafen as a test bench.

Download: AcidJazz5-HES.zip

I can confirm it works on Everdrive. Black screen but the sound is amazing!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Hucard / SuperCD are NOT the same system...]

Well, two out of five, anyway.

As with the context of what it was like at the time this was all happening, just because you're not familiar with it, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Also, the system costing 30,000 yen with one game and only coming with one controller is enough to make us go "ouch".

Consumers Distributing catalog from late 1987:



In October 1987, $240 U.S. = over 35,000 JPY.


Other interesting products in the same catalog:


NES Power Pad (no console) $120!

NES SMB Set (NO $48 ZAPPER INCLUDED!) advertised on the same page: $149.

NES Action Set + Power Pad = $40,000 JPY.


At least the Power Pad received much better software support than the rip-off PC Engine CD-ROM.

So it's like how PS3 was the cheapest BluRay player on the block for a while, with the PC Engine CDROM playing CDs. Couldn't the CDROM unit be used as a standalone player?

Also I have a CIB "NES Action Set." Serial is fairly early, 4.8 million, smooth surfaced finish (not textured like the later models). There is a Kmart price sticker on the box that reads $109. It came with Mario/Duck Hunt, 2 controllers, AND the Zapper! 40,000 yen seems really steep even if you subtract the worthless PowerPad...

EDIT: Check your facts! "NES Action Set" couldn't have been released in Japan because it was called the Famicom there and had a completely different form factor.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Fat HuCards]

Turns out I learned from another thread that the bubble in SFII is actually empty. The black area below the pins is the actual PCB which has glop tops for chips which fit recessed regions in the Hucard plastic. The remainder of the card is simply for artwork and structural support.

Here's the SFII PCB:

https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=21093.msg461142#msg461142

It's longer than a standard Hucard game so they used the bubble form factor to afford more space to fit the logo. Neato!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Hucard / SuperCD are NOT the same system...]

Nothing inside the SFII bubble? That is news to me. I thought the bankswitch logic chip was too big for a glop top so they needed a "fat" card. I would definitely have liked to see have seen more bankswitched cards though.

Nah. Here's a pic:


That the bottom side of the PCB (that faces down). The PCB is slightly longer, but there's nothing inside or under that bubble. You can clearly see the three rom chips (512k, 1024k, and 1024k, and the mapper which is the round blob). Just like the Arcade Card Duo, and that mapper is way more complex than this - still the same size (the round glop-top).

 The SuperCD ram was too little to handle a SF2 port (it needed to be at least 512k), and the arcade card wasn't finished yet (started development in 1992), so they released it on Hucard. Kind of a last huraah sort of thing.

So we basically only got this wonderful Hucard gem based on a technicality. It seems like it must have been a very good seller, as the price was not high for a CIC despite being extremely popular with collectors.

Also the bankswitching works with the Everdrive v1 which presumably doesn't have extra RAM in it. How can the SFII ROM function on Everdrive if it needed 512kbytes of RAM to work on CDROM? Or are all those needed assets handled by bank-switching? The SFII ROM is 2.5Mbytes so I'm guessing it has the capability to swap out four 512kbyte banks worth of assets on the upper ROM while leaving the other 512kbyte program bank in a fixed location on the lower ROM. This all fits conveniently within the 1mbyte footprint allotted by the card bus.

This is something I've talked about for as long as I've been online. The actual technical differences and potential of what could be practically done and make good business sense for various formats and various consoles is quite a bit different from how it actually manifested. What made early CD games and the PC Engine library in general so special is that developers just happened to look at game development differently and with so much more variety of approaches.

Nice writeup on the pros and cons of asset reuse. I was watching a youtube longplay of Gates of Thunder, and I noticed they seriously went all out on the intro scenes. Normally with limited storage it is the gameplay that counts so all efforts are focused there first. Compared to most Hucard games, the intros were very short or only consisted of a static or briefly animated title screen combined with short gameplay segments on the demo loop.

If you need some money to buy a Duo, sell the TG-16 along with some of that Atari garbage.

Or just go back in time a week and buy a Duo instead of Soldier Blade.

HuCards are so much more expensive compared to CD games today that the logic of "price of entry" making CD games too expensive and therefore a separate console, just makes it impossible to take any of someone's arguments seriously.

LOL on the Soldier Blade. I ultimately got Super Star Soldier as well (imported the Japanese version) and SSS seems to be a closer spiritual sequel to Blazing Lazers / Gunhed compared to Soldier Blade anyway. Since it didn't come with a case originally, I settled for a loose card + sleeve.

And is it just me or does anyone else find it odd that US Soldier Blade appears to be going for cheaper than it's Japanese counterpart? That flies in the face of all logic.

Given the TG-16 upward pricing trend, if I decide I don't want SB anymore, I could easily wait a few months and flip it. The inflation is getting stupid. Sometimes it's a whole "buy now while you still can or forever hold your peace" type thing. Still kicking myself for letting Neutopia slip away.

Finally, it's not necessarily the money issue although Turbo/PCe collecting is kind of hurt on the wallet a bit. It's more an issue of "Am I ready to add/invest a new console/platform to my collection? Someday I will probably get that Japanese Duo or IFU Breifcase, but as I said, my plate is full.

Also Atari is not "garbage."

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Fat HuCards]

Sadly I don't have any prototypes..

Very nice to see the whole family together though! It seems all the official bubbles were cast in the same mold...

Phat Card!

Dude, so jealous! I didn't know they released that on Hucard!

Since we are sharing pics, I'll upload mine:


Not much to see here, SFII, Blue Atlantean, Green Everdrive, and a PC henshin region converter which doesn't really count as a "card" but being oversized, I snapped it anyway.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: My "overengineered" logo backlight mod.]

If it glows under UV light, how about UV LEDs behind?

Haven't tried that honestly. I doubt if the glow would be brighter than with white backlighting though. One advantage is that fluorescent glow is always diffuse, though the logo does a pretty good job of diffusing the white LED light as is.

I'm also not sure how color fast the dyes are over the long haul. Be a shame if after a few months of usage, the logo faded to white. Has anyone ever witnessed a TG-16 with sun-faded logo? I don't think 405nm violet LEDs they sell at Radioshack are strong enough to fade organic pigments however. That wavelength isn't even short enough to truly fluoresce cotton like the ~370nm fluorescent blacklights do. The UV coating in my prescription eyeglasses don't filter the LEDs either but if filters real blacklights.

Truthfully blue light fluoresces the logos as well so what you see is a combination of diffuse from the yellow phosphor and fluorescent from the blue component. The yellow dye actually fluoresces with a greenish tint. I may take a photo of the logo toplit by a UV violet 405nm LED as I have a couple of them I bought for unrelated console mods.

EDIT: UV Blacklight. Notice the logo is now bright orange and bright green instead of orange and yellow.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Hucard / SuperCD are NOT the same system...]

By that logic, the Game Cube was specifically designed to play Game Boy games. Therefore all Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games should be considered a part of the larger Game Cube library simply because they were playable on properly equipped Game Cube using an attachment available separately at retail.

Errrr ... nope. And even suggesting such a silly thing makes me wonder if you're just trolling. 

The point I was trying to make was that CD System started it's life as add on hardware. We also don't refer to GBA games as DS simply because they run on a DS Phat or DS Lite. In fact I played GBA more often than not on my DS Phat because the GBA SP was so tiny it hurt my man hands.

First came PCe. Then the CDROM. Then the Duo. I think we can both agree that SuperCD and Hucard are Duo games. The Duo system is an Umbrella over both formats. The original PC Engine and Tubografx only played Hucards. So when I think of PCe or TG-16, I think of Hucards. When I hear the name Duo, I think of both.

So the all encompassing Duo system is both formats. That's why it's called a "Duo" meaning two. PC Engine or Turbografx simply did not ship with CDROM capability, so the Super CD cannot fit under the umbrella of stock hardware. Just compare these two images. Do they look remotely like the same thing?



I own Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on CD and I also own it on vinyl record. Additionally, I own MOON8 by Brad Smith, a demake for the NES as chiptune album. I would not consider the CD and Vinyl release of DSOTM as part of the same format, and certainly not the chiptune cart which sounds nothing like the other two.


Same album, different format. Likewise I wouldn't consider the CD and Hucard versions of Bonk III the same format either, even if it plays mostly the same on a Duo system. You can't play CDs in a record player any more than you can play SuperCDs on a stock PCe/Turbo. The media is incompatible.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Fat HuCards]

lkermel has some nice info on 'em here: http://www.videogameden.com/pirate.htm

That mushroom top is atrocious!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Hucard / SuperCD are NOT the same system...]

Some of my absolute favourites are hucards. Devil Crash, Cadash, Super Star Soldier and Final Soldier. I'm pretty sure Soldier Blade will be on that list once I play it.

Yes, Soldier Blade will be on the short list.

Soon, soon.

Haha, is that a Family Guy cutaway screengrab? :p

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: My "overengineered" logo backlight mod.]

Good to know about the sticker.  Always been nervous about doing the mod because I was afraid the sticker would get stress marks from being removed.  I like the Velcro attachment for the led panel.   Too bad it has to have a hole cut in the shielding to fit.  Thanks for posting pics and info of your mod.   I love looking at this kind of stuff.

The velcro just allows me to readjust it as many times as I need until it looks perfect. I imagine my seven LEDs will give better dispersion compared to Game Tech's three, even if mine have a narrower beam. LED stuff is always hard to photograph though when it saturates the CCD sensors in the camera, so I sometimes take photos with and without the flash. The non-flash photo of the LED array (in my Flickr stream), you can't even see the board! The naked array is also garishly bright to look at with your eye:


Then there's the AV Famicom Power LED. Completely over-saturated in the photos but it gives off the most brilliant red glow to the unaided human eye. Maybe if I had something higher end than a $200 Nikon Coolpix to shoot photos with. Still light years better than a smart phone:

[Console Repair/Mod Center / My "overengineered" logo backlight mod.]

So I posted in another thread regarding my backlight mod:

I also keep thinking I want to do the LED mod to the logo.  Did you use an LED strip or just single LEDs?

As for the LED mod itself, I bought out my local Radio Shack of white four-pin 3mm LED packages. Wanted 8 but they only had seven so I had to make do with what I got. I later realised I got robbed pretty bad buying all seven square mount LEDs they had, paying $5 each for parts I could have ordered online for 25 cents. I installed the LEDs on a perfboard PCB and supplied each one with a 100 ohm resistor because I don't trust them to stay in tolerance when parallel connected. The perfboard was cut to size, roughly 1x3.5 inches, and the whole assembly was covered in several layers of black electric tape. The PCB is held onto the case with velcro so it can be repositioned if need be. I used leftover pieces from the perfboard I originally cut to build up a platform for it to rest on so the LEDs didn't poke the backside of the decal. Because the LED board is too thick, I had to cut a rectangular hole in the top side shielding to allow the assembly to fit. I ran the black and red wires and soldered directly to the 7805 regulator. After I installed everything, I looked up a video tutorial on Youtube from Game-Tech

and realized I had way over-engineered my backlight mod. I took photos of it but haven't uploaded them online yet. I'll eventually upload them to a Flickr album and make a thread about it later.

And here it is:





Full gallery, also showing off my AV Famicom power LED and custom backlit DMG Gameboy...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/30203515@N04/sets/72157669550796415/

Compared to Game Tech's tutorial video, my backlight seems really over-engineered.

Also Radio Shack was highway robbery. I bought all seven 4-pin package white LEDs my local store had in stock at $5 a piece, for what really should have been a 50 cent part, a fairly high markup for buying them local and not shop around elsewhere online...

Radio Shack @ $4.99
https://www.radioshack.com/products/radioshack-4-pin-dip-3mm-round-white-led

Digikey @ $0.47
http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?mpart=OVFSW6C8&vendor=365

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Dumb Buyers]

I'm personally a big fan of the Cube, particularly the hardware. Virtually no load times on many 1st party games. They never overheat. A GB Player with Wavebird or Hori Gameboy Player Controller over 480p component is a premium experience.

I miss my Hori digital Game Cube controller. I had one before crooks broke into my house and stole my entire Game Cube Collection shortly after Thanksgiving in 2006. They left all the cart systems thankfully. I eventually re-purchased most of the games they stole that I really wanted to play again, but shortly after the burglary, in early December, I stood in line at Walmart for seven hours for a Wii.

Backwards compatibility was nice too but no Game Boy Players. eStarland was clearancing their stock of Hori Game Boy Player controllers for $18.99, purple was sold out but they still had black. I had my heart set on Purple and figured I could pick one up at a later date used for cheap. I realized my mistake a couple years later when they were selling for $100 on Amazon... 

Nowadays I use this for Game Boy goodness:

http://www.retrousb.com/product_info.php?cPath=31&products_id=31

Sadly they've been discontinued sometime after Wii dropped the Game Cube ports. SNES controller made the best Game Boy Player controller ever, and I can even use my custom arcade controller with it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/30203515@N04/sets/72157634800361528/

Sorry for the off topic rant... 

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Anybody else using cheap aftermarket extension cables with your Turbografx?]

No TG16 for me, but I got a couple of the generic mini-DIN cables (from TZD back in the day) for when I'm not using the wireless pads.

Is there such a thing as extension cables for PC-FX?  Its controller cables aren't so terribly short, but I wouldn't mind being able to sit a bit further away.

never seen one. unfortunately the 7 pin dsub design they used seems to have been unique to that system.  never seen another cable with the same connector on it that i can reacall.

the bliss box people got some connectors somewhere though.  not sure if they had them manufactured or i just dont know how to search for them
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-bliss-box-has-started-the-kick-starter-for-the-4-play

Funny you bring up the 7-pin Dsub (top left).


Hacking up a 9-pin Dsub connector by cutting off the edge would not work because of the oversize pins. They look to be designed similar to the NES controller pins, only stacked in triangular rather than square grid formation.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Turbografx-16 & PC-Engine Reproduction Hucards Now for Sale!!!!]

Trying something new with the dual hucard.

Neat idea. Maybe give buyers the option of whether to do stack the images vertically or diagonal. I'm thinking maybe do the horizontal strips for the card art (due to the small size, horizontal logos on cards would be easier to read) and maybe the diagonal orientation for the boxart? But some people would want it uniform.

Perhaps do a poll?

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: TG-16 arcade joystick: Durability? Like it? Use it?]

...it's too big. I know they were trying to be bigger than the NES Advantage...

Wow, does anyone want to offer up a comparison picture along with the NES Advantage?

I had to re-read this, I never realized the stick is even larger; I kept my NES Advantage on top of the NES console since it was so large.  Wow!  After reading the threads, I sort of want one for the size of it.

You guys are doing it wrong if you think the NES Advantage is too big. I built some truly jumbo sized controllers. They are sturdy on a table or in your lab, and effing huge. Size comparison of my homemade controller:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/30203515@N04/albums/72157629736738048


https://www.flickr.com/photos/30203515@N04/albums/72157634800361528


https://www.flickr.com/photos/30203515@N04/albums/72157649774625620

I also have a multiconsole Cthulhu I'm using for USB/MAME/Retro Freak. The Cthulhu also works with several consoles including Turbografx/PCe and I have an 8-pin DIN cable but I haven't wired up the harness yet. No photos yet as it's a work in progress but I used a "kit" controller instead of cutting my own, curtesy of retrobuiltgames.
http://www.retrobuiltgames.com/diy-kits-shop/arcade-fight-stick-v3/
I stained and finished the wood myself. It is a thing of beauty. Because I'm using it primarily for classic consoles and MAME, I plugged the rightmost pair of buttons. I was originally going to add SNES and Genesis (and by extension NES and Atari through backwards compatibility) by pad hacking Yobo clone controller PCBs, but the rats nest of wires inside got to be too much to deal with so I scrapped the clone pads.

I also have a Porta Pi MAME cab from retrobuiltgames. It's the perfect little arcade cab and the perfect compromise between practical size and portability.

http://www.retrobuiltgames.com/diy-kits-shop/porta-pi-arcade-wood-kit-10-hd/

= = = = = = =

As for the TG-16 Arcade stick, is it comparible to the NES Advantage and Sega 3-button Arcade Stick? They're good but not great. If so, I may have to buy one for the collection.

EDIT: Sorry if the embedded photos cut off due to the forum software. Right click and view image for full view.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Dumb Buyers]

The disc art is not "ugly". It's just text. "Plain" or "lame" is probably more accurate. It's downright Peter Savile by US Turbo art standards.

Not by existing CD2 disc label standards at the time. After the original CD disc style, it was all downhill.

The kinda-italic font on Ys and the spacing that makes it look like "Y s", the giant TM in a contrasting font, cobbled together with the Turbo DuoTM and CD-ROMROM logo is bad enough. Adding that shade of blue only ruins it further.

This isn't a generic TurboGrafx-16 demo disc, it's freaking Ys.



It's not worth a 50% premium, just the opposite. That's not evening taking into account the lack of a tray liner and a whit case that doesn't match the rest of your Turbo games.

I think the top disc looks nicer. Wish we could see the whole thing.