Designing an '80s-style console that combines the best features of all those systems and still be designed to be easy to work with would be a really cool thing to do.
Sumez wrote:
NES is interesting because of the cultural icon it has become, and the nostalgia people have for it. PC Engine is, well, for nerds.
Well in Japan it started out as a very expensive alternative to Nintendo and Sega, but eventually it became number two after the Famicom. There was an official homebrew scene in both BASIC and Assembly thanks to the consumer level Develo Box. Magazine CDs for the PC Engine are floating around on internet that contains BASIC and Assembly homebrew, music and pictures that people made with it.
Sogona wrote:
Pokun wrote:
I think another system that is balanced well for homebrew is the PC Engine. It's more powerful than Nes and Master System but still doesn't have, unlike the Snes, tons of overcomplicated registers and memory mapping, also it has programmable waveforms and especially it has colorful RGB video! If it had been more successful outside Japan I think we would have seen lots of PC Engine homebrew.
From what I've looked at, PCE/Turbografxs range from around $80-$150 used. Doesn't seem too bad. I just bought a Master System, so I think I'm gonna wait a while before I consider buying another console.
And it's CPU is based off the 6502? That's really interesting. I've always kinda overlooked the turbografx; don't really know why.
I recommend a PC Engine Duo R or Duo RX as those two are the only way to get a reliable CD-unit. All PC-Engine models do cartridges (HuCards) but it was mainly designed with CD in mind (which is why it turned out to be so expensive and good for arcade ports) and there are far more CD games than HuCard games for it. Also Duo R and RX are the only CDs that reliably reads CD-R discs which you want if you want to make CD homebrew.
Yep Hudson designed the Hu6280 based on and improved 65C02 probably so that they could easily steal developers from Nintendo that was used to program for the Famicom. It is a really nice CPU although some of the improvements seems quite weird and very PC-Engine-specific. It's also much more flexible about vblank time than other consoles of the time, it can mix different sprite sizes and it's lightning fast (about the same as the Mega Drive). The biggest criticism is usually that there is only one background layer, which made it harder for parallax scrolling in arcade ports, but that is only an disadvantage if you compare it to 16-bit machines. Also that there are no smaller sprite size that 16x16 which is bad for danmaku games, and the fact that sprite patterns and character patterns are in two different formats (sprite patterns are interleaved while BG character patterns are straight).
The official development docs (from the American Turbo-Grafx 16 version) as well as the Develo Box Assembly Manual in Japanese (which contains parts of the official Japanese dev docs) are floating around on the internet. Both are quite easy to read (especially compared to Nintendo's dev docs).
Also I made a software/hardware mini guide for the PC Engine
here.