TurboGrafx 16

The Turbografx-16, "PC-Engine" in Japan, was a video game console released by Turbo Technologies, a joint venture between NEC and Hudson Soft.

The TG-16 was an 8-bit system (contrary to their misleading ad-campaign), capable of 482 simultaneous colors, released in 1989 in North America. It was in competition with the Sega Genesis. The most notable feature of this console was its thin memory card storage medium, similar to that of the Sega master system[?]. It was also the first console to have a CD-ROM peripheral.

Initially, the TG-16 sold well, but there were a lot of bad quality games. Plus, the CD-ROM peripheral was widely considered overpriced, and hard to find outside of big cities. As a result, the TG-CD sold poorly.

In 1992 because of the failure of the TG-CD peripheral, TTI released the Turbo Duo, which was a Cd and TG-16 hybrid. TTI began printing 'Johnny Turbo' comic-like ads.

They featue Johny Turbo, a crime fighter, pitted agains the evil Feka (rhymes with Sega) who cheats kids out of their hard-earned money. Feka tricked kids into thinking that the Sega CD was a stand-alone console (even thought Sega never actually said this once). Johnny Turbo then came to the rescue saying that the Turbo Duo was the world's only complete CD system.

Johnny Turbo was way over confrontational and actually backfired; their argument was based on a false premise. The Turbo Duo sold poorly in the long run. The system only lasted 4 years.

There was also a portable version, the Turboexpress. It was the most advanced handheld of its time and could play all the TG-16's games, but suffered from horrible battery life and a hefty price tag. Furthermore, it was fairly common for TurboExpress systems to have missing pixels in their displays, due to the fact that TFT LCD manufacturing technology was still in its infancy at the time.

Another variation of the hardware is the SuperGrafx, an improved, backward-compatible version of the PC Engine with two sets of PC Engine hardware. This allowed for two background planes instead of one, and twice as many sprites. However, very few SuperGrafx-enhanced games were made, and the system fell into obscurity.

Specs:

• CPU: 8-bit HuC6280 @ 3.58 or 7.16MHz (switchable by software) - Hudson Soft's improved clone of the 65C02. Features integrated bankswitching hardware (driving a 21-bit external address bus from a 6502-compatible 16-bit address bus), an integrated general-purpose I/O port, a timer, block transfer instructions, and dedicated move instructions for communicating with the HuC6260 VDC.
• Work RAM: 8KB
• VDC: 16-bit (source of their misleading "16 bit graphics" slogan, comparing to 16 bit CPU systems) HuC6260. Port-based I/O similar to the TMS99xx VDP family

VRAM: 64KB

• Resolution: 256x256, 320x256 (through hardware manipulation)
• Sprites: 64 entries in sprite table; maximum 16 sprites per scanline.
• Background planes: 1