Messages

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: IFU Backup Memory corrupted?]

Congrats man, sounds like you sure worked hard on it, very glad to see repair success stories!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Turbo Gouging on Ebay ( r.i.p. - gouging much )]

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: RAU-30 Supergrafx to CD Rom Adapter - For Sale]

Hey @poponon, good to see ya again! Never forgot your unique avatar. Wish I could say there were more eyeballs here to help sales move along but I did my best to rebuild PCEFX, make it viewable on phones, etc.

Admittedly your best bet is any of the PC Engine/TurboGrafx Facebook groups if you can't sell this on eBay.

Just in case, gonna tag @elartur77 since he's been buying/fixing NEC hardware lately and is active.

[Off-Topic / Re: Random Pictures Thread]

About the only Duo memorabilia I own is this TTi CD case (fits 12 CDs) which I bought together with my Turbo Duo in the 90's, though a piece of it cracked off on the other side, needs plastic repair glue. Can't find photos of it online, I even tried an image google search but found nothing. I could swear I've seen it shared on Facebook years ago though. Anyway, I thought I'd log my photo here. I keep my best games in it like Ys Book I & II, Ys III-IV, Cosmic Fantasy 2, Exile 1 & 2, Dracula X, Dragon Slayer, Gate/Lords of Thunder, and Valis II-III.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: FS: New Turbografx CD-Rom /PC Engine case latches]

It looks like he's active on YouTube, that might be another way to contact him besides email: jelloslug@gmail.com

https://youtube.com/@jelloslug

[News / [MERGED] PCEFX Reviews, Preservation of The Brothers DuoMazov!]

This topic has been merged into The Brothers DuoMazov 2.0 Returns - 100% Rebooted/Restored!!!!.

[News / Re: The Brothers DuoMazov 2.0 Returns - 100% Rebooted/Restored!!!!]

Progress: Last night I finished a decent Wayback download Perl script to download the whole Brothers DuoMazov website to finally move forward in totally rebuilding/rehosting it here on PCEFX 2.0!

There are 5,814 images / screenshots, 100% uploaded to PCEFX:
pcengine-fx.com/reviews/duomazov/images/?dir

It's live!!! Presenting "The Brothers DuoMazov 2.0" - 100% Rebooted/Restored!!!!:
pcengine-fx.com/reviews/duomazov/


The next step is another script to clean up the HTML and decide the basic template for which to upgrade all the review body/content, etc. Some new basic ideas like appending a @ChrisBucci TurboViews video will be considered for extra benefit when time/progress permit.

But yeah, seeing/realizing that ~7 years elapsed (WOW!) from when I first made these threads and manually downloaded/patched about a dozen reviews gave me some motivation to finally continue since nobody else cares or has done so, etc. I did mention somebody is working on rebuilding pcecp.com though, nice to see.



More Ideas:
* New Github entry to share the Wayback Download script.
* Full Offline copy of Brothers DuoMazov. A simple ZIP/7z file that you download and works 100% locally letting you browse/see everything. And we can send it to WayBack for final/guaranteed backup/preservation in the end. I do tend to think about the inevitable, if something happens to me, what happens to my work ? So I'm gearing up to eventually share my projects/code to Github, Wayback, or to friends, etc.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: IFU Backup Memory corrupted?]

Oh wow!

Before Chris/Keith sees this and maybe can offer advice, how about Covell himself who made that BRAM tool ? You can also ask him on X/Twitter: x.com/covell_chris

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / General Localization News]

February 13, 2025

Rather earth-shattering news in the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 community: Cosmic Fantasy 3 & 4 has been officially localized to English by Edia 30 years later! Hard to believe! I know their script quality is poor given the 1&2 port but still good to see.

nintendo.com/us/store/products/cosmic-fantasy-collection2-switch/

[PC-FX Discussion / Re: Space Patrol Luluco lays a sick burn on the PC-FX!]

/lulucopcfx.jpg

How dare they call it worthless garbage! But at least they're rethinking it.

Man, I can't believe I just saw a PC-FX reference in a 2016 anime. What a time to be alive, haha.

-We Blackholeians have shoplifted all kinds of things that hold value.
But because we shoplifted too many valuable things, we instead
ended up wondering if worthless garbage was actually more valuable.

-Huh? We made light of this stuff until now, but maybe it's actually amazing!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Patrol_Luluco
https://www.animerealms.org/watch?id=21637&ep=10&prv=prime
https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G63VM514Y/space-patrol-luluco

Admin Action: I noticed the image capturing this PC-FX anime reference was lost/deleted, so I took a research excursion to find out what Aggie was talking about, restore the image, or even better, make an animation .avif. I downloaded 13 subtitles of this (there were only 13 episodes) and began reading until I found "garbage" in the 10th one. Sure enough, that's what I was looking for, what Aggie was talking about. I then used ShotCut and ezgif.com to create the above animation and preserve/embed it.

For some reason, or reasons, I don't seem to understand, diehard NEC PC-FX fans are growing in number from 12 up to 24 these days (go figure) , so I thought they might appreciate this little bit of history if it could be recovered.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is only thanks to PCEFX 2.0 that you could learn about the mysterious "Blackholeian shoplifters" so I'm proud to have made that possible for you...  Guess that helps explain why PC-FX prices are skyrocketing over the years...

[General Gaming / Heroine Anthem II]

This is a temp placeholder post, I just wanted to upload/share these Wayback screenshots to someone. It's a 2004 thread on my offline backup of RIGG/Retro ISO Gaming Guild, an ancient PC Engine forum primarily. I hope to rebuild it and upload it again here to keep the threads/history shared. Anyway, this post may be deleted, so I wouldn't bookmark it or anything, I just temporarily want the screenshots.

I came across chinese rpgs about a year ago and been addicted to it since! Well maybe me being chinese also had something to do with it XD

Chinese RPGs are probably never heard of by USA rpg lovers and here is a preview of some of the biggest titles.

here is a popular title in China Heroine Anthem 2










Heroine Anthem 2.; its a sequel to Heroine Anthem: The Elect of Wassernixie (or bride of Mermaid if you will). Heroine Anthem is a story follows the girl Edda, who drowned at sea trying to save this boy while on board a slave ship. She was saved by the mermaid prince, who turned her into a mermaid intending to make her his bride. She fled the palace of Mermaid under the help of a lobster named Bedin, wanting to find her lost sister; who was also sold into slavery. During her advanture in the mermaid world, she finds out that Ragnarok is upon the world, and the Dark Ark of Noah has also returned (the Dark ark of noah has monsters trapped in it since the time of the great flood). So bascially she is trying to stop it from happening and finding her sister. The game is split into two parts that tells one whole story which is an interesting way for an RPG to present itself(like the way Matrix's 2 and 3 presented itself).

The entire game takes place in a 2D world (well 3D pre-rendered background) and there is no world map, so going from place to place takes alot of walking or running around through forests, dungeons and moutains etc.

Music wise I think its very well written here is couple of music samples hope you'll enjoy.
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track01.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track04.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track17.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track20.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track29.cda

graphic wise it is 2gb of pure 2D graphics. I would show some frames, but I can't seem to get this tool working right, so maybe at a later time.

Battle system wise it is also quite different from many of the traditional rpg battle system. Each character has special moves that takes up SP(SP can only be gained from being attacked) and then each takes a certain amount of time and when u select a move it is allocated onto his or her action bar; certain moves take alot of the time and certain takes very little and you can do this for all characters and these characters will excute all the list of actions you have allocated onto their action bar. So timing is definitly a very important element in this game, it could mean wining and losing an important mission. and all the characters can be attacking at the same time causing an effect of linear motion battle system like Tales of Destiny. Once a characters action has ran out you'll be prompted to select more actions. Character placement are also up to u, u get a 3X3 grid to form your formations. Characters in the front actually do get attacked more than characters in the back and also ur spell has ranges so how u place ur character can also mean whether or not ur spell will effect them in battle to save them.

Magic system is also quite interesting. Through out the game you find rune stones that has certain vocabulary attached to them individually. To create magic spells u need to learn the enchantment of it to get the spell to form properly. You can also form summon spell, which I've yet to be able to do so, since u can only learn certain enchantments at a certain stage of the game.

Cutscenes in this game is done with real nice anime and decent CG and converted into Bink Video. Some reason WindThunder never makes HIGH res CGI movies for their game, so some of the movies seems blocky. I guess the intention is let the game speak for itself rather than having high res cutscenes to speak for it.

here is one movie. u need divx to watch it, quality is bad but I'm no coding expert so there
Gameplay movie for HA2 FEAST YOUR EYE ON THIS BEAUTY!

And the second game I'm here to present is a game called Fantasia three kingdom!!!  losely based on the story of Romance of Three Kingdom several important events of that story were taken to formulate this amazing game. I wrote a review for it but the site is under construction so I'll link it when its back!!! :p

here is a preview for you all who loves RPG

[Off-Topic / Re: Random Pictures Thread]

FIGHT‼

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Emerald Dragon Localization Project!]

Hey Tom, good to see an OG PCEFX veteran stop by our fledgling "PCEFX 2.0" reboot! ; )

- Legend of Xanadu I & II: These projects are inactive/hibernating, nothing new to report. Sam went on to have a family, still wants a 100% day-one localization patch with dubbing, and since that's on hold the team won't release a text patch (which they said they finished). elmer fudd did say if enough years/time go by and no movement on dubbing happens, he'll go ahead and release said text patch.

- Emerald Dragon: Same. I don't have any active fan/hobby projects at present.

About the only occasional hobby project I sometimes work on if I power on my desktop PC (I mostly migrated to my Android phone for all social media/video consumption) is this: "PCEFX 2.0" I'll recover images or upgrade the CSS to make sure this forum is readable on a phone's resolution/constraints.

* Just the other day I recovered 2+ image(s) here thanks to Wayback (it's the classic thread of Saber Riiiiders...ridin' off with all yo money cuz riders gonna riiiiide! ):
pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?msg=488647


* And if you look at a PCEFX thread on a phone, the posts now show the avatar and I eliminated excess spacing, so more posts can be seen vertically.



Still not as good as Facebook or XenForo forum software, but quite a bit of improvement for viewing old threads.

Anyway, it's hard to justify all the time needed for a localization project and I just have other priorities, so I dunno when I'll resume. I actually thought maybe this winter but I was tied up with offline projects/work.

[News / Re: 2024 PCEFX Newsletter (Archive)]

The email queue finished...today, that is, all PCEFX newsletter emails finally finished being sent out to the 5k legacy membership! My host is annoying, has 300 daily email limits, that sort of thing, which I had to work around by slowing down the email queue process...

Anyway, one interesting development thanks to publishing the newsletter is it turns out that someone else also tried to archive pcecp .com similar to me! He successfully downloaded all the images and passed along a copy, and I in turn gave him a raw MySQL copy of the pcecp database that Bt Garner gave me in 2021 before he passed away. I'll report the progress if he actually does rebuild pcecp soon on his site:
http://gamezero.online/special/pcecp/

Other than that, I noticed a few extra visits, but not much new posts in response... Sadly my hopes for this PCEFX revival project didn't live up to expectations, but oh well. I'm just glad we can save/archive as much of the site/forum as possible even if we'll never get back some decent active membership. Have to accept reality/circumstances.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: TurboFont]

Just everything you see here I suppose. We'd have to track down @2X4 and ask. Like many he's MIA, and I dunno if his email is still valid either.

Confirmed - His email address is expired/bad/invalid:

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<strandc@unk.edu>
SMTP; 554 5.4.14 Hop count exceeded - possible mail loop ATTR34 [SN1PEPF0002636D.namprd02.prod.outlook.com

You'll have to find another way to contact him.

[News / Re: 2024 PCEFX Newsletter (Archive)]

OK, the 2024 PCEFX newsletter is shipping out (late as it is)!

It feels like 2024 saw more significant localization projects like Team Innocent than what was published for PC Engine! Let's hope that changes for 2025!

Happy New Year!

[Off-Topic / Re: Random Pictures Thread]

Made from a deleted YouTube video I extracted out of WayBack.
See: pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?msg=208700
(ep: Retro Hardware - TurboGrafx-16 via youtube.com/user/TheGameStation)



Big Wayback TurboGrafx-CD Surprise! ; ) To illustrate how big the original TurboGrafx-CD box was, I guess this YouTube content creator had a friend hide behind it and then stand up to say "Surprise!" Unless he found the clip from someone else. And I dunno why he deleted the video, pretty well edited and short, to the point about Hudson/NEC legacy...

[News / Re: The Brothers DuoMazov 2.0 Returns - 100% Rebooted/Restored!!!!]

pcengine-fx.com/reviews/duomazov/
pcengine-fx.com/reviews/duomazov/ys-book-i-and-ii.html
pcengine-fx.com/reviews/duomazov/ys-iv-dawn-of-ys.html


I took a quick excursion tonight to make my small collection of DuoMazov reviews format better on mobile (Android phone in my case). : )

Here's how it looks on my Samsung Galaxy OLED. Quick'n'dirty CSS dynamic media resizing I learned, good enough.

The way that Nat coded the pages made it pretty easy to work something up in a few hours. So the width is changed to 100%, all images to 49%, and the title & side bars made invisible when the window/screen width is < 720-860px using dynamic support in CSS (JavaScript not necessary).

Future: Yeah, I'd still like to build a script to download/process the whole site some day from WayBack, or if Nat has all the files in a local HDD to share, that'd be nice too!

P. S. In case I didn't mention here, I did start a preliminary Perl script for such a purpose to work with Wayback and used it to download the TurboStation-16 PCEFX section that Aaron deleted in 2003:

https://www.pcengine-fx.com/TS/


Also, try the "?dir" command option I added to the site to access all media/images:

https://www.pcengine-fx.com/TS/?dir

Not everything was saved in Wayback, most of the videos and audio files were lost unfortunately. But lots of manual scans were recovered, nearly all - I patched some missing ones and ~2 Falcom audio tracks.

https://www.pcengine-fx.com/TS/mp3_selections_-_ys_collection.html

_{► /mp3/Ys Piano Collection 2 - 06.mp3}

_{► /mp3/TOWER OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH-04.mp3}

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: Turbo Duo CD-Rom issue]

I got a hold of Steve on that, the PCE EE expert, he says:

That sounds like no response from the Sony chips. Odds are it's a bad via again... Could be anywhere between the card slot and the motor controller. This time it's likely data bus, not power.

Sounds like you need to go on a via repair-spree! Clean and repair as many vias as you can. Between the card slot and motor controller helps narrow an area down but I'd go further since others are likely to fail and cause unpredictable symptoms/problems.

So sand, flux, maybe push clean copper inbetween the via where you can see it stick out both sides and then solder it. And of course check continuity from both sides to make sure the traces are restored when finished to be 100% it's repaired.

Good luck!

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: Turbo Duo CD-Rom issue]

You want a photo of the area? Do you not know what a via looks like?? It's a drilled hole to divert a trace from one side to the other, top to bottom. If it's corroded you can shine it up with sand paper, both sides, add flux and then apply solder both sides! That should restore full conductivity/continuity. Once finished, check continuity with a DMM that you get 0 to low Ohms.

[Off-Topic / Re: Audio Interview with Victor Ireland & John Greiner (former head of Hudson Soft).]

I got a special one for ya retro fans and figured I might as well append it here!

GameSack @Joe Redifer, Coury of My Life in Gaming, sat down to chat today with none other than Victor Ireland of Working Designs!

They're discussing the recent Lunar remasters by GungHo America (AKA exXSEED Part Deux).

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/881c616e-7520-4271-9913-814372d1d165?t=120

https://retrohangover.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-victor-ireland-ft-coury-of-mlig-joe-of-game-sack

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: PC-Engine Duo-RX CD-Rom Issues (Looking for Advice on how to repair)]

I'm also looking forward to any good games that have been released since FX-Unit Yuki I should check out or any new noteworthy translation projects that have come out since then as I've not really been paying attention to the scene, for example did the Kaze no Xanadu I&II trans/english dub ever come out?

Same story with the Legend of Xanadu projects unfortunately: SamIAm got too busy with a growing family so that hobby work was put on indefinite hold/hibernation... The FX-Unit Yuki team however is working on a new PCE homebrew I noted in the forum news/chat modules.

Anyway, congrats on fixing your CD laser, that's the type of DIY success stories I like to see!

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: NEC PC-FX Homebrew (Alpha) - Cascade FX (3D graphics !)]

Hey @gameblabla, thanks for stopping by and sharing your PC-FX work!

For some reason I actually didn't see this thread till a week later! I need global email notifications turned on as admin to know if ANY post is made since our forum here is slow and I don't check up on it as often.

Anyway, yeah, I remember this demo from the discord, it's PCFX 3D Tetris!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: TG-16 Manual Scans]

What do you think happened? You think it was showing how rushed these ports and releases were being churned out in the US towards the near end of the TG-16's life in the US?

Yeah, all of the above. They were rushed, had to totally rely on human editors to catch typos like that as built-in Grammar/Spell Check didn't exist just yet in Word Processor publishing software (whatever was used to design/publish magazine/manual/booklet pages back then, early 90's).

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: PC-Engine Duo-RX CD-Rom Issues (Looking for Advice on how to repair)]

Hey Tom, thanks for stopping by!

I'll forward this to @Keith Courage when I get a chance.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Joined the Duo club.]

Re: Joined the Duo club.
WELCOME!

https://www.foromtb.com/attachments/clubduo-jpg.1702681/
_{disco-insider,de/images/locations/ClubDuo.jpg}

Special Thanks to @Tak-MK for figuring out how to get activated in this random Spanish forum (foromtb.com) to save/recover this particular "Club Duo" image (the LAST one!) that served as a "PCE Turbro" meme, so to speak, when @turboswimbz shared it!

This happened a few months ago when I wandered into this thread as part of my PCEFX image-recovery task/project which I believe has now saved/preserved 20,000+ PCEFX images from its ~20-year history mostly with Wayback, and a custom caching system for Photobucket and 2 other hosts (I'm considering caching IMGUR also before it's too late but I need a .webp image conversion layer)!

So the story around "Club Duo" is it was a night club in Munich Germany, but as best as I can tell it was closed during COVID-19 lockdowns and subsequently went out of business, so its websites expired and most of any shared images were lost. Another casualty of lockdowns... The image was shared from a general club website, link below, that showcased billboards/photos of many clubs in general, but it too was expired and Wayback didn't save the particular image:

_{disco-insider,de/images/locations/ClubDuo.jpg}

Anyway, as you can discern, it doubles in usage as a "Club [Turbo] Duo" in this context/forum, and with the extra work/help put into obtaining the ONLY copy of this image left on the Internet, I logged the story. I have manually rescued dozens of images like this when my automatic Wayback plugin can't help, so I don't bother to log the work, but this is the one I wasted the most time with waiting around for another forum admin to approve my account, and finally getting help (from Tak-MK who is Spanish) to make progress.

I can't believe I finally wrote this post, I really didn't feel like it, it's just one image, but it became something of a little hobby of historical excavation to find lost PCEFX history/images like this! Most forum archives/rebuilds have lost their images/assets, so I wanted to do a better job if at all possible with my PCEFX clone.

[General Gaming / Re: VG Box Art Dejavus]

Bloody Wolf was more "inspired" (AKA ripped-off) from Arnold's 1985 Commando. I honestly didn't make this exact connection all this time, I figured general 80's action muscle-bound movie star influence, sure, but that they literally stole the EXACT pose/copycat from a movie poster/promo I really didn't expect!



I made this one for fun, sized-up side by side after reviewing these threads some more and patching a few lost images. I'm not sure there was a fuller poster of Arnold where his arm isn't clipped off or I would've used that instead.

A more extensive collection happened in another thread by @Tatsujin:
https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=8501.0

And HG101 has the most here:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/tracing/tracing.htm

Before I forget, I asked a very talented Bloody Wolf fan to make this for me to illustrate the point because he made some similar animated Bloody Wolf covers in the past. This was supposed to be included in the original post, I waited until I could try/learn to do the animation better, but I guess I didn't find the time/motivation to try, so might as well share his original before it's lost/forgotten. I compressed it to the modern/superior .avif format which is a high-color GIF alternative to animate images (a GIF would be 1.7MB while this is only 62KB!):



Thanks again to castle_zotz.

When there was confusion about the source of Arnold's pose being either from Predator or Commando, he made this too (but it's Commando, so this mockup is inaccurate):



Henceforth let it be known as "Bloody Predator".

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: TG-16 Manual Scans]

Did you guys ever notice that New Adventure Island's manual has some strange typo and grammar issues?

Check out page 8-9, the heading reads "Be Sure You Know How These Items"

That's it. Hahaha! Was there a slip in quality control? This late into the conversion efforts, did TTi staff start getting sloppy? Hahaha! That heading ends so abruptly.

Huh, you're right, never knew about it! The correction would be something like, "Be Sure You Know About These Items" or maybe with more words, "Be Sure You Know How To Use These Items" ?

And then at the back cover, the word "Adventure" is spelled "Adventyure".
 

Hm, another one...

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Mysterious Chiptune... (can you identify it?)]

_{► /GameBox/TurboGrafx-16_GameBox_(iOS)_Title_Theme.mp3}

12 years later, and we still haven't the slightest idea who composed this stellar track or where this track may have come from.

Beautiful track nonetheless.

Still happy I was able to rip it when I did, as the app is delisted and gone.

I see, thanks for revisiting this memory, it makes all the trouble rebuilding this site/forum worth it!

I remember this thread and tune! Esteban still cares about his legacy tg-16.com site so all his links work and I coded a decent audio/video embed module so mp3 files can be played instantly in-thread (as you can see/test).

Trying to make classic threads here more viewable/accessible on mobile phones has been part of the point. Might as well be the best PCEFX archive even if we can't revive much membership activity!

Can you identify the chiptune? It's a damn catchy tune that sounds like it is ripped from an existing PCE/TG-16 game...but I (and many fellow pcefxers) can't figure out what title (if any) the song originates from. What are the chances that Hudson commissioned (created) a new chiptune for the GameBox emulator?

_{► /GameBox/TurboGrafx-16_GameBox_(iOS)_Title_Theme.mp3}

I have a hard time believing that Hudson would have taken the time to create a brand-new tune. Call me cynical.

Special Thanks! to @farankoshan for providing the .mp3!

Ah, so esteban credits you for providing the mp3. It's protected/mirrored by Wayback here as well, don't worry about it ever being lost even if he closes his site. Maybe I'll also mirror it on my /audio best of PCE collection folder:
https://www.pcengine-fx.com/audio/

Anyway, take care.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: My Modded PC Engine is no longer powering on.]

I've had over decade of soldering experience and started small practicing on broken DVD Players, to modding the Gameboy, PS2 to now rather crazy mods like this. I really want that guy's upcoming Sega Neptune Motherboard to turn the ugly 32X add on into a Neptune. I would love to build a Sega Neptune console someday. But until then I want to get this PCE working and I would like to know what the value of that diode is, D102 as I would prefer to replace it with a new Diode instead of reusing the old one. It would also be nice to know what FL109 is, it's some type of power inductor, replacing that with a modern equivalent would be preferred, they're built pretty weak, the legs in these break off without much effort.

Yeah, definitely pretty cool idea to keep the systems alive. If an OG PC Engine died from too much decay due to time and/or leaked capacitance fluid but the main chips are still good, then donating them off to a freshly-made "repro" motherboard is a great idea if you got the soldering skills!

I never did buy and learn how to use a hot air gun to solder a chip off. I wanted to so I could replace a suspected bad SRAM chip in my SNES, but just never bothered after I got an Analogue NT SNES clone. Still, it'd be a useful skill to have sometime but overall my preference is to move on to FPGA clones like the Analogue Turbo Duo, another one I own despite its incomplete state (they launched it too early, the firmware needed more time in the oven).

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: My Modded PC Engine is no longer powering on.]

That is not an actual PC Engine lol

Oh wow, I think he bought a recent fan PCE motherboard and soldered on the chips from a donor PC Engine. That's probably what's going on, I remember seeing them on sale on Twitter some months ago. Way beyond the scope of most of us I'd say but good luck!
Found it! They're called motherboard reproductions. I suppose the theory is they'll last a lot longer if you can successfully salvage the main donor chips from an original console... Real risky if you ask me but interesting idea.

willsconsolemodifications.co.uk/product_id=129
https://aergan.wordpress.com/2023/10/10/pc-engine-repair-reproduction/
https://github.com/Board-Folk/PC-Engine#bill-of-materials

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: PC Engine DUO-R laser motor not working]

Congrats! I haven't been optimistic with all these repair threads but at least it's new content giving the forum some purpose/activity.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: TurboDuo : CD-ROM stopped working]

Dude, you're here! OMG! That's gonna ruffle some feathers, hint hint!

Sorry to say the incel "DarKKKobold" still stalks me/this forum although if I catch it he gets "special horse " redirects, lmao! I even caught him spying on your profile ~2 years ago (according to @Sarumaru he had a full psychotic breakdown, spent thousands of work hours coding a videogame about me/banning his psycho gang!), his stalking log is massive - total unhinged creep! DildoPhiles still don't take 'no' for an answer (never understood no means no...), imagine that!




Anyway, I didn't think you'd ever stop by again given that whole ordeal from those destructive nutjobs... I still talk to Steve (retired from repair biz) and Chris Courage (who still is active in the repair business) on Facebook, so I can reach them for this if you can't fix it on your own.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: Super CD Rom2 crackling noise]

OK, Steve watched the video and has some advice I'm forwarding back:

1) Check the output pins on all op-amps, should be around 4V. If this is the problem, it could be the "LR clock trace." He's seen that once, so implies it's a rare failure.

2) If not, a capacitor could be bad or it's an issue with the bias resistors or even cap juice on board (meaning, you should've washed/dried the whole motherboard to really clean leaked capacitance fluid off before soldering on the new caps...).

Good luck!

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: Super CD Rom2 crackling noise]

TheSteve wants a test to make sure that just Redbook PCM wave audio is playing. Load a regular music CD, play any track to hear what happens.

[Off-Topic / Re: Game Sack]

GameSack-16: Joe's Top 10 TurboGrafx-16 Games!

#X Bonk's Revenge
#9 R-Type
#8 Devil's Crush
#7 Soldier Blade
#6 Bloody Wolf
#5 Splatterhouse
#4 Lords of Thunder
#3 The Legendary Axe
#2 Ys Book I & II
#1 Dracula X: Rondo of Blood

[Off-Topic / Re: What are YOU watching on YouTube.com?]

News: Dracula X [PC Engine CD] gets a little review from James Rolfe / Angry Video Game Nerd this time (he laments not taking the opportunity in the past). So he's trying to decide if Super Castlevania IV [SNES] is still his all-time favorite though mostly against Symphony of the Night [PS1] by the end. Anyway, pretty good 25-minute retrospective of Castlevania legacy.

On the other hand, the opening vampire skit REALLY sucks... I wanted some kind of joke out of this like "AVGN 2024 version updated for modern audiences..." It validates typical trends that everything sucks nowadays (mediocrity is the default), haha. Funny enough, I didn't realize the obvious vampire/sucks pun in my first post draft, had to edit it in, *I* suck!

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: Pc-Engine DUO - White Screen - No sound, No Boot, No Bios loaded]

Ah, too bad!

My advice:
1) Ask/PM @Keith Courage while he's around. He was just here by request.
2) Use the forum Search function for "white screen" - I'm sure I've seen old posts/threads about this problem in my years viewing this forum. There may be some lost clues somewhere in old posts.

Example: Here's a case that @thesteve (a pro EE & Turbo Expert) fixed with explanations of what was investigated/probed/etc. (he's retired though, you can't hire him).

EDIT: 3) To help out somewhat further, I reached thesteve on Facebook and asked for general advice on no-boot/white-screen failures, he said to check the reset pin and address lines!

Best of luck.

[Off-Topic / Re: Random Pictures Thread]

Hahahahaha!!! Does this remind you of anyone ??

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: Repair people in the US]

Hi Ben, wow, you go way back to the early years of PCEFX in 2006! I thought you were a new registration for a minute there. Welcome back then, yeah, this is a rebooted PCEFX forum with some upgrades here and there. Thousands of images that were watermarked or lost are now recovered /cached /protected which has been my primary focus hence why the theme is still ugly/unfinished. Images are lost every other month until action is taken so that's more important.

Alright, so @Keith Courage (Chris Computers) from Indiana is active and recently visited. Just PM him or reach him with the Facebook link like I do. You literally just missed him when I asked for tech help for @elartur77's problem, he's you're best bet!

The others I know are retired and the rest are in Canada (Jodi Whetham @ Turbo Reproductions) so shipping costs are higher.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: Pc-Engine DUO - White Screen - No sound, No Boot, No Bios loaded]

Ah, definitely you should've changed all/100% capacitors when you started changing any - they are ALL leaking/failed/out-of-spec by now! You always want 100% new capacitors for NEC hardware to rule out any other problems! Before you continue, finish that job first.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Patched PC Engine CD BIOS files by Elmer for use in the Turbo Everdrive?]

Do you know if you would get CDDA out of the Express when using a TED Pro?  Thanks.

Just in mono. That's the audio limitation (loss of genuine stereo). Unless you were using headphones you were always getting a mono mix anyway from the single speaker in that case [portable].

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Patched PC Engine CD BIOS files by Elmer for use in the Turbo Everdrive?]

It's a "hybrid" 50/50 solution mixing a FGPA add-on with real NEC hardware. So imagine playing Dracula X PCECD for the first time on your Turbo Express / PCEGT or gaining quasi "ODE" support for base PCE consoles (anything with the expansion bus)!

This would've been very cool to me 20 years ago but I already played Dracula X too many times to care, heh. However I try to think/promote in terms of uninitiated gamers/newcomers having all these new options/ways available to enjoy Hudson/NEC gaming legacy for the very first time.

Oh right, a Y-YYUGE missed opportunity that krikzz should've really implemented to make the Turbo Everdrive Pro the absolute best/ultimate PCE product was a micro-HDMI output near the SD/USB slot! It'd eliminate the competition of UperGrafx or crazy Alex's TerraOnion "thingamajig" (the Super SSD3) that have HDMI output ports for modern/4K TVs and solve the CDDA stereo output problem! So unfortunately if you want pure digital/HDMI video you still need one of those "Turbo Booster" add-on products or to just go all FPGA with the Analogue Duo.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Patched PC Engine CD BIOS files by Elmer for use in the Turbo Everdrive?]

Ah, yeah, I sorta thought it was a missed opportunity that the early Turbo Everdrive couldn't act as an Arcade Card Duo/Pro as I own Strider and a black US Turbo Duo but never got around to buying both a region adapter and an Arcade Card.

I don't care now since I finished my PCE ACD Strider 20 years ago when I got the Magic Engine emulator running. I guess it finally happened though with the new TE Pro as well as offering CD emulation so you could play CD games on a portable Turbo Express but it's expensive and I already spent that money on the Analogue Duo clone.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Patched PC Engine CD BIOS files by Elmer for use in the Turbo Everdrive?]

Anyway, I guess the alternative OS you want is TEOS (maybe Krikzz already patched his, but no idea):
https://github.com/jbrandwood/teos

It avoids the potentially damaging memory bus-fighting that occurs with Krikzz's OS when running the PC Engine (or TurboGrafx) Super System Card HuCARD on the Turbo Everdrive.

Yeah, Tak-MK provided the link you're looking for. I don't really know how useful that is nor why you're that "excited" for it seeing as you say you don't even own a Turbo Everdrive yet, but there you go...

I hope to just move on to the Analogue Duo when the jailbreak firmware improves for modern 4K TVs, I'll only keep my real Turbo Duo around for testing/debugging localization projects.

There were other far more interesting ideas for custom/hacked system ROM firmware, like @dshadoff's "PC Engine System Card Translation Font Extension" which implements easy 8x12 English/ASCII font support. But the problem is if you tie your localization patch to depend on this, you'll need users to own a Turbo Everdrive in order to play it. Still, it's a more interesting/useful idea than what elmer did.

https://github.com/dshadoff/SYSCARD_Translatefont

Code Select Expand

In this modification, the goal was to implement an extension which would cause
the least amount of disruption to the calling function, and yet satisfy the
translator's other requirements:
- use of ASCII for 1-byte character text
- font is included in the system card, not the game
- as little as possible adjustment to the print function

3) Set $FF in ZP to one of:
   0 = 16x16 font (SJIS only)
   1 = 12x12 font (SJIS only)
   2 =  8x16 font (ASCII only)  (**NEW**)
   3 =  8x12 font (ASCII only)  (**NEW**)
Many more PCECD RPG games could be localized without someone as talented as Supper[tails] or EsperKnight, but yeah, there's a catch: if you want to play it on real NEC hardware you'd need a Turbo Everdrive booted with this system firmware. I'm not a fan of creating more hardware dependencies, but I am a fan of seeing more localization projects and if it can help someone when all other options are exhausted, so be it I guess.

There's actually ONE example that made use of it for the Magic and Magic localization, so you can already test it out:

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: (Homebrew/NSFW 18+) Kidnapped Innocence]

So @gameblabla went all in with his PC-FX homebrew game: ports to GBA and N64 being worked on and actually pursuing physical copies. I didn't expect you'd go that far!

[General Gaming / Re: VG Box Art Dejavus]

Bloody Wolf was more "inspired" (AKA ripped-off) from Arnold's 1985 Commando. I honestly didn't make this exact connection all this time, I figured general 80's action muscle-bound movie star influence, sure, but that they literally stole the EXACT pose/copycat from a movie poster/promo I really didn't expect!



I made this one for fun, sized-up side by side after reviewing these threads some more and patching a few lost images. I'm not sure there was a fuller poster of Arnold where his arm isn't clipped off or I would've used that instead.

A more extensive collection happened in another thread by @Tatsujin:
https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=8501.0

And HG101 has the most here:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/tracing/tracing.htm

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: question, how can you extract the video from battleheat game]

@EsperKnight's email is the same ID, just add/append '@yahoo.com' - if you mouse over his email icon you can see it, or if you PM him here he should get an email notification. There's also a Reply-To-Email option on an account.

For Aaron, like I said, you can just reply to the YouTube video right there and ask (he ignores/abandoned his email); it seems he's already been doing exactly what you're asking about.

Good luck.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: question, how can you extract the video from battleheat game]

Welcome ?? So I'd say your best bet is to contact some of the localizers who worked on PC-FX projects like @EsperKnight. He's somewhat active on Twitter https://twitter.com/esperknight and responds to emails.

Ooohh, does this maybe have something to do with these recent video HD restoration projects on YouTube ?

Well, there you go, you can try asking Aaron himself in his video I guess!

I wasn't sure at first, but he states right at the start of the video he extracted the raw data file from the disc, so it's confirmed: he already knows how to do what you're asking for. At first I thought he might've taken an easy approach of recording the videos for conversion, but no, it appears he learned how to extract the raw video file using a hex editor and info which isn't for the novice.

A PC-FX CD, like PCECD, has no ISO file system, it's a compiled binary of code, assets (text/images/audio/data), etc. so you need to become handy with a hex editor and even a debugger for more advanced goals/searches.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: What Turbo game are you currently playing?]

I'm with Tengai Makyou, using v1.2 translation now that I know it exists... Before that I abandoned the game a week before because of the v1.0 issues with loading from real hardware 

I was actually looking forward to break in my new Analogue Turbo Duo clone using Supper's localization patch for Ziria, but it's on the backburner after being very disillusioned with the buggy state of the firmware/product... Hopefully the jailbreak redeems it.

Incidentally, Analogue released a new firmware v1.2 [2024-03-15] today actually. But this presents a hard choice to the user: get the bug fixes, but go back to being a normal Duo again, so no CD/ROM image support from the SD card, resume using CD-Rs for localizations... Just gotta wait some more until the jailbreak firmware is synced.
https://www.analogue.co/support/duo

If an updated/synced JailBreak is published soon this is the link to keep watch of:
https://github.com/analoguejb/Analogue-Duo-JB