2 Years Later! What Went Wrong With The TurboGrafx-16 Mini!

it's been nearly two years since the turbografx 16 mini released time really does fly holy crap i remember being hyped as hell for this thing growing up i only knew one kid who had the original console and i thought it was pretty cool it was an interesting system in the usa it didn't do too well back in the day but you know it still holds a lot of nostalgia for people i think a lot of us had you know sega or nintendo consoles at that time but we all knew one kid who had a turbografx 16 right now when the mini released it was kind of a strange thing i got mine a bit early as japan launched the line of konami minis earlier than the rest of the world and i remember having other youtubers come at me about breaking some kind of embargo date no i i bought mine i didn't get a review unit so screw your embargoes get off my ass right it's kind of weird now this mini classic console release was met with a lot of hype like i said i was pretty hyped but also there was a lot of confusion unmet expectations and problems that caused many people who bought one of these minis to never actually be able to play it and people who just couldn't get their hands on one so let's look back at this release and kind of revisit how things went down so right after launch i i did get to play around with the turbo graphics 16 mini and the other two variants i did videos on all of them there was the core graphics which was for the european market for whatever reason and in japan they got the pc engine mini plus in japan they also got the us and european versions as well so they got the core graphics and the turbo graphics this inevitably caused the supply chain problem in my opinion with so many people wanting the turbografx 16 mini in north america it didn't last very long and stock had remained in japan for quite a while people were left out unless you wanted to import a version of these minis why would japan get stock of the turbo graphics 16 mini anyway didn't really make sense to me but i'm sure they had some kind of reason for it the other thing was that these minis were not sold in stores remember the nes super nintendo classic the genesis mini the playstation classic all of those could be bought either online from numerous retailers or in stores all over the place best buy walmart gamestop target plenty of other locations but not the turbo graphics 16 mini these minis were all amazon exclusives in the us amazon in the uk amazon in japan amazon stock and these were limited to whatever amazon had you could only rely on them or the secondary market now the core graphics mini in the uk lasted for sale for a quite a bit longer than the turbo graphics 16 mini in the us and essentially there was no real difference between the two just the core graphics was smaller than the turbo graphics the game list was the same now the pc engine mini could be a fine option for people as it you know has lasted forever for retail being shipped and sold from amazon japan i mean it's still available to be ordered right now but it does have a few game differences nothing major and the controllers that are included with the pc engine mini do not have turbo functionality both of the other versions have that they have turbo but there are other you know controller options for you out there like the 8 bit though pc engine mini controllers that are wireless that's an option but you know each of these consoles shipped with just one wired controller and a power cable that was it with the system obviously so already we have a couple problems here the official controllers were only ever sold in a single white edition of the pc engine controller that now had turbo sliders these are you know near impossible to find nowadays well for retail anyway and they were very difficult to get in the us so you know there's really no way of getting multiple controllers that fit the theme of your chosen console version unless you bought multiples of the console these were all launched for around 100 each so not really practical for those wanting extra controllers that were the same color right now there are a couple more issues i want to mention one that sucked but maybe you could live with and another that had devastating consequences so first with these being amazon exclusives if you bought the turbo graphics 16 from amazon in the us these guys have no logical process for how to package items to be shipped a lot of people received the turbografx 16 shipped just in its original box no shipping box with a shipping label slapped onto it so collectors were pissed they were getting messed up boxes with you know stickers on them you will see this quite a bit looking at reviews on amazon it's one of the most common complaints out there now the other thing you will see in those reviews is how their work their systems didn't work or the controllers didn't work there are tons of people complaining about that and there was a reason for this and one that really should have been avoidable so you know many people wound up using whatever micro usb power supply that made sense to them since the console didn't come with the brick for the you know supplied power cable many wound up using a raspberry pi power supply you know or others that were similar now depending on what you used perhaps the power supplied was just a little higher than the 5 volts 2 amps the machine required and boom your console no longer works or the usb ports for the controllers would go dead and there's no way to play it anymore this seemed like a very common problem and this was and it's a problem i still hear from a lot of people to this day if you wanted to play it safe you needed to buy the official power supply brick from hori oh but those were not easy to come by if you were outside of japan even now in japan the cheapest price i see for this official brick is nearly 200 makes no damn sense to me it should have been included to begin with with the console if it was gonna have issues with other power supplies i mean you would think it would be fine using a power supply for another mini or you know single board computer but nope your average consumer wouldn't know and then they'd all of a sudden have a paperweight instead of a cool mini gaming machine now there are ways for people to fix the dead usb ports but this requires getting a new usb controller chip and replacing it on the console's board this is not something everybody's going to be able to do or is willing to do or is even aware of so it kind of sucks especially for people who bought one of these things and had this issue happen when stock like really started becoming unavailable and there really wasn't like any restocks of the turbo graphics 16 mini that i recall like it was like in and then like it just kind of went out like it was gone you couldn't get it no more from amazon us so a lot of people were screwed selling like bricked units on ebay and stuff for uh you know discounted price because they just you know either return it or you know if the problem eventually happened they couldn't get their money back right so now let's talk about the unmet expectations that i touched on in the beginning of this video so whenever a console like this launches a lot of people are waiting for news on how to hack the console and add more games and get more features that you know the system didn't originally ship with and this just did not happen for the turbo graphics 16 mini so there was a proof of concept shown for a hack a while back but nothing ever again i mean this was early on where the proof concept was shown you know as far as when the console launched but for the past couple years there have been just a couple updates concerning the hack and both updates were just the hey this uh pandemic screwed things up so there is no news situations change for people and those working on hacking the console you know have put it on the back burner they got other things going on you know who knows if work will ever start again for the hack or the turbo graphics you know mini or if someone else will wind up jumping into it and making their own hat but i almost feel like with how limited of a release this thing was and how it's no longer the currently hyped product on the market we just may never see a hack but who knows i mean i would have liked to have a hack for this but also at the same time if i'm not creating one you know i'm not creating the hack myself i don't have any crazy expectations or you know demands to make things happen you know it's just like hey if it happens cool and we started just kind of expecting it because every mini console that came out there was a hack right you know sometimes people do these hacks out of their own enjoyment of the hobby i don't know i mean look at it however you want but overall with what we received as far as the game list and turbo graphics 16 mini goes i'm perfectly happy with what i have if i want to play other games i have a million ways to do so i just really like these official mini replicas of these retro consoles and i just wanted to revisit this one with you guys maybe one day these fools will re-release this console and get it back out to people because there's still a lot of people who want one and with the way they went about it didn't happen for everyone so kind of sucks let me know what you guys think down below really do appreciate every single one of y'all catch the next one bye [Music] you

Channel: Madlittlepixel

Views: 54,613

Keywords: turbografx 16, turbografx 16 mini, turbografx 16 games, pc engine, coregrafx, mini, classic edition, konami, madlittlepixel, remembering the turbografx 16, retro gaming

Id: cYp_qYLb7xw

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022