The NEC PC-Engine: The Definitive Review

Perhaps the greatest machine to get a terrible name in the West

I came to the PC-Engine through emulation in the 1990s, as covered in a previous piece about emulation in general. The machine had always enjoyed a certain cachet with me, having been paraded through the late-80s games media as a gateway to the arcade-perfect 16-bit 90s we all harboured burning desires to inhabit. Yet it remained somewhat obscure; its manufacturer wasn’t a huge gaming presence like Sega or Nintendo, nor did the name have the same pizazz as MEGADRIVE or SUPER NINTENDO. It was a PC Engine, like a train or something? A PC like those really expensive beige computers you saw in computer shops and a steam locomotive? It was as baffling a branding exercise as Fujitsu’s FM Towns, which for me conjured images of extremely 80s Asian cityscapes soundtracked to Starship’s We Built This City. The PC-Engine’s parents, computing giant NEC and software house Hudson Soft, felt like unknown quantities to western audiences ignorant of the early-80s Japanese home computer scene. But of course, within the NEW CONSOLE EJACULATIONFEST features that invaded nearly every gaming publication between 1988 and 1990, the PC Engine’s screenshots spoke for themselves. And then, in the grand face-offs of specials like the C&VG Guide To Consoles, I was shocked to learn that very strictly speaking, the PC-Engine was an 8-bit machine.

In the searing heat of the incoming 16-bit fireball, the PC-Engine being 8-bit at its heart felt inadequate somehow, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary. The real secret, of course, being that the 6502-derived CPU was actually clipping along somewhere in the 7-Mhz range, putting it on a par with the Amiga’s 68000 in terms of cycles or double the speed of the ZX Spectrum’s Z80, and the games on offer would run perfectly fine with 8-bit instructions. Combine that with a custom graphics implementation that offered 64 sprites per frame (16 per scanline!) and 16 colours on-screen from a palette of 512¹ and you get the first machine that seemed to really understand the golden rule of action videogame hardware: the display is king. The PC-Engine has a whopping 64 kilobytes for video memory alone, putting it on a par with the Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo, only it launched two whole years before Sega’s 16-bit powerhouse. This marks it out as one of a very rare breed; the transitional console. I can only think of one other, but let’s see if you can guess what it is. Like the PC-Engine, it’s white and roughly square-shaped. It’s compact, and surprisingly so when you get your hands on one. But the PC-Engine had as much elegance in its form as it did in its architecture. The original release machine is simply gorgeous in its 14x14x4cm square. The case is adorned with all sorts of injection-moulded details and delights, making for a machine of tasteful grace. It’s quite removed from the sleek, glossy jet-black stylings of the Megadrive and Neo Geo, which seem to be chasing the same aesthetic as 80s Hifi separates, or the oddly staid greys of the Super Nintendo. Speaking of which, the utterly unnecessary redesign of the PC-Engine for the US market produced a new case that gave the US SNES a run for its ugliness crown and added a brand name of uncommon clumsiness to boot: Turbografx-16. You’d think we’d have learnt from Vectrex that while an ‘x’ might look cool, it’s horrible to say. Xbox being a particularly exquisite demonstration of this rule in action. It was a definite tragedy that NEC saw fit to bring the ‘x’ back to Japan with the launch of the Coregrafx revision of the original hardware. Bleurgh.

As mentioned elsewhere, I did most of my PC-Engine gaming via 90s emulation. The full romset for the game’s HuCards is pretty compact and therefore was easy to amass on dial-up connections, and it’s full of absolute joy. Seemingly defining a spirit of highly-accurate arcade conversions from the off, the PC-Engine is probably best thought-of as a superb showcase for some of JAMMA’s greatest hits, including mini-catalogues from Namco, Konami, Capcom, Taito et al; the genuine leaders of the Japanese arcade scene that didn’t have their own domestic hardware platforms. Although Sega was perfectly fine with licensing passable versions of Outrun and Afterburner for the machine. We also see the likes of third-wave shmup gods Raiden and Twin Cobra alongside the game that made the console famous: Irem’s R-Type. Once again, I have previously written about R-Type’s magnificent charisma in the late-80s melee as the horizontal shmup that cut through the crowd with an emphatic stamp of individualism and graphical swagger. To have it arrive in the PC-Engine’s first six months, and in near-perfect form, was nothing short of staggering. This version of R-Type may have come on two HuCards, meaning you paid double to get the full game, but that only underlined the quality of the conversion. It meant fewer corners were cut and signalled a commitment to delivering accuracy that was hard to find elsewhere. In this sense, the PC-Engine defined the niche of the arcade conversion powerhouse that later machines would occupy, notably the extremely cult Sharp X68000. Interestingly enough, Hudsonsoft wrote the X68000’s operating system. As if to repeat myself yet again, I’ve already written about the wonderful Parasol Stars, the fated Bubble Bobble sequel that remains one of the series brightest lights, and this leads us into the stranger territories of the PC-Engine’s non-licenced titles. There are mad experiments in explorative top-down shooters like Metal Stoker and Shmups aplenty from Hudson’s own Star Soldier series to foundational cute-em-ups like Coryoon. And then there’s Dungeon Explorer, a marvelous mashup of Gauntlet and trad RPG. I always had a soft spot for Wallaby, an absolutely incomprehensible gambling sim where you bet on wallaby races. I should point out that all the above are on HuCard, the PC-Engine’s cartridge media. Being among the first platforms to offer CD-ROM add-ons means there’s an entirely different catalogue to be explored, although I can confess shamefully I’ve never done so. Mostly because it’s really quite expensive and tends to involve an awfully large amount of Japanese text.

Did you guess the machine the PC-Engine shares a curious kinship with? YES, IT’S THE DREAMCAST. Both launched in a transitional period, serving as pioneering vanguards into new realms, both knocked slightly into the shade by far larger, richer and better-marketed megabrands. We can see the PC-Engine’s CD-ROM adoption as the same brave leap as the Dreamcast’s integrated modem; a statement of intent and a predictor of what would become universal, delivered just a few years too early to make the impact it deserved. In the modern age, both the Dreamcast and the PC-Engine enjoy the sage man-of-culture reverence of the console cognoscenti, being unassailable beacons of quality and taste that by the nature of their individuality, have attained saint-like statuses above the corporate giants that eventually destroyed them. And again, it’s in their tragedy where the romance burns. The idea that the PC-Engine was cruelly ignored, or perhaps undervalued by NEC, isn’t desperately untrue, but nor is it entirely accurate. Nonetheless, its cult status reflects a flaw in strategy or a misstep in investment somewhere along the line. I own a bootleg PC-Engine logo tee and wear it proudly, often if I’m going to something where said cognoscenti may lurk. When I last went to meet an industry legend, I wore it with a kind of nonchalance that maybe they’d see it and know I was on the level. Nothing was said until right at the end of a meal, as we stood up to go. Said legend announced “Ahhhh, the PC-Engine. Absolutely mindblowing when it first came out”. And rightly so, they would have been there as an arch-enthusiast in 1987, would have definitely imported one, and hence a colossal sense of validation washed over me in waves.

I was a jonny-come-lately to hardware ownership, having been bought one as a surprise present around 2012 by my friend and later best-man, Mark. He got me a superbly aged one, which he claimed was the most yellowed PC-Engine available on eBay at the time. It really does have quite the patina. And I love it dearly. I love that it had lived a rich life in Japan before it came to me, and I honoured it by amassing a lovely collection of HuCards, with a sense of genuine fulfilment as I set about legally owning the ROMs I’d discovered and loved back in the 90s. Despite picking up a Vectrex and a Japanese Megadrive some years later, and a PAL SNES later still, it’s the PC-Engine I most adore. And it’s because its game collection matches the tastes that I have kept from the 80s and 90s. I had it running almost nightly last year on an ill-fated attempt at a Gradius 1-CC, and it still ran beautifully. Most of my collection is rambling, wild and unpruned, but the PC-Engine set is a real gem that I’m desperately proud of, likely because of that pre-curation, but also because I don’t own it out of any sense of nostalgia. I don’t love it for what it reminds me of, or what times it transports me back to. I love it because it’s great, and so are its games. And that’s as honest a statement as I can make about this wonderful little machine.

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1. The PC-Engine’s Wikipedia article insists the machine is capable of 482 colours onscreen, but I think that's confusing the 16-colour display mode with the ability to hot-swap between 32 individually assigned palettes. I think that means sprites can be coloured with any one of of those 32 palettes, as a distinct colour set from the palette in use for background/scenery graphics. Also the Wikipedia article is titled TurboGrafx-16, which a fucking abomination. Apologies to one L. Alexander, who wrote a lovely and touching article about her TG-16.