Hey how's it going everyone? I'm White_Pointer
and I've done videos covering various graphical tricks on the Super Nintendo and the Sega Mega
Drive but I haven't covered that other relevant console from that generation: the TurboGrafx-16, called the PC Engine in Japan. So let's fix that with a video dedicated to NEC's machine that
dared to dream. The PC Engine released in Japan in 1987, around a year before the Mega Drive, and
in North America in 1989 as the TurboGrafx-16. NEC manufactured and marketed the hardware but
it was actually designed by Hudson Soft, a game company that is unfortunately no longer around
because it was purchased by and then eventually fully incorporated into Konami, but were probably
best known for the Bomberman series at the time. Unlike its main competition at the time, the
console didn't see an official release in PAL regions, apart from a limited release
in the UK, only being available in a select few European countries, and never being available
in other regions like Australia, a fact I'm still personally a bit disappointed by. The PC Engine
actually enjoyed some pretty strong sales in its home country of Japan - in fact it significantly
outsold the Mega Drive relegating Sega to a distant third in the Japanese market. However the
same couldn't be said in North America, with both Nintendo and Sega leaving it well behind. The
limited European release largely had to do with the console failing to have much of an impact
in the North American market. It's historically significant too. The Japanese PC Engine was the
smallest console ever made at the time. It was the first console to have a CD-ROM add-on, so it
was the first console to play CD-ROM games. It was the first console to have an official multitap.
It was the first console to receive a redesign that looked like a... shuttle? Uh yeah okay maybe
that last one isn't so great. It was originally intended to compete with the Nintendo Famicom
and Sega Mark III, but found itself butting heads with the Super Nintendo and the Mega Drive instead.
Surprisingly, it held its own, despite not being as technically capable as those systems, and had
some really impressive looking games. So how did it pull them off? That's enough about
the history so let's start diving a bit deeper. Well let's address the elephant in the room
straight away in regards to the system's technical specification. It is considered a fourth gen system
but... no... it was not a true 16bit console. While its Graphical Processing Unit or GPU was 16-bit - in fact
it technically had two 16-bit GPUs - its main Central Processing Unit or CPU was only 8-bit. The CPU
was no slouch though, it was actually an upgraded version of the 8-bit CPU found in the Famicom,
clocked at about four times the speed at 7.16 MHz. Of course this discrepancy caused some controversy
in North America due to their decision to name the console the TurboGrafx-16. Because the
CPU was 8-bit, they were accused of deceptive marketing. Head to-head it doesn't seem like
it should have much of a chance. While the CPU was pretty fast for the time, it was only 8-bit, it had a fraction of the RAM, it only had one background layer, it had no special display
modes, it couldn't even display as many sprites on the screen at once. While it had the same number
of total available colours as the Mega Drive, it did have one technical advantage in this area
and that was being able to display a lot more colours on the screen at once than either
the Mega Drive or even the Super Nintendo could. One main trick that was used a lot is
something I've spoken about previously and that was being one of the first consoles to have
a built-in scan line counter. This allowed it to split the background into multiple segments on
specified scan lines which could then be scrolled independently of each other at different speeds
or even in different directions, which was used to good effect in many games to create parallax
scrolling. This could even be done on individual scan lines. The illusion of extra layers was
often created by using sprites as part of the scenery, putting them on top of the background
layer. This was done on the other consoles too to an extent, but was employed more often on the
TG-16 due to its lack of background layers. Despite its relatively low sprite limit, the console could
just about pull this off well enough to not cause noticeable graphical issues. In fact the PC Engine
had a reasonably complex sprite priority system. I've previously covered how the Mega Drive's priority
system worked but this goes even beyond what Sega did. Instead of just having a priority flag to
set a sprite to low or high priority, NEC did it so the sprite priority is determined by the order
that is stored in the memory. Sprites could not only appear on top of or behind other sprites
but they could also appear on top of or behind the background. By layering sprites to look like
parts of the background, it further enhanced the illusion of having multiple background layers. Just
take a look at this for example and consider how many layers of sprites are going on in just this
specific scene. The HUD is made up of sprites and that sits at the very top. Then you have the player
and enemies behind that and the ship's bow behind them. Then that first distant ship is behind that
and also is behind the background, then there's another ship behind that one. There's also the moon
behind the background too, though that's probably the same priority as one of the distant ships. But
that's effectively at least five layers of sprites - that's insane when you think about it. Another
technique that was sometimes used to create an appearance of multiple background layers was
to use animated background tiles. Let's take this example. You can see a part of the background
seemingly scrolling independently of the other parts which might suggest, well they're just
using the trick of splitting it on scan lines to do that. But then you see other parts of the
scenery like the rocks and the gravestones that are in front of it. Maybe you might be thinking,
oh well those are sprites that are just sitting on top of it. But nope, those are not sprites, they
are indeed part of the single background layer. So what's actually going on here, how on Earth
is this parallax effect being done? The answer is animated tiles. If we take a look at a tile viewer
we can see that some tiles are set up to show this looping animation when the player moves left or
right. The background tilemap is then constructed to show these animated tiles on either side of the
non-animated tiles. It's a pretty clever workaround for the technical limitations of the system and
really shows how developers used to think outside the box back then. This was used in a number of
games and when it was done well it created an experience that wouldn't have looked out a place
on one of the more powerful competitors at the time. One last thing I wanted to cover was how
some games created a static part of the screen that did not scroll with the rest of it, such as
a HUD. We've already seen one way this was done, which was to construct it out of sprites and this
is something that every console of that generation did from time to time. But there was another common
method which was to use a horizontal split. which created an entire segment of the screen that
did not scroll and was not transparent. On the other 16-bit consoles this was pretty easy. As
I explained in my Mega Drive video, that had a dedicated window plane for this exact purpose.
The Super Nintendo could split the screen to show a different background mode in that segment or
simply use one of its extra layers for the job. But the TurboGrafx-16 didn't have a window
plane, nor did it have different background modes or multiple layers, so how did developers manage
to make it do this? The first method is relatively straightforward, which was to draw the HUD part on
the background then use the scan line counter to split it the same way we previously looked at when
investigating the parallax effects, except in this case it's only scrolling the playable area of the
background while not scrolling the HUD segment at all. But that wasn't always feasible and developers
needed to get a lot more tricky than that. This was especially the case if the game needed to scroll
vertically or if they wanted to change what was displayed, because they couldn't do a scan line
split as the segmented parts of the background could only scroll horizontally. The answer here
is still using the scan line counter but using it in a specific way. There is only one background
tilemap - they haven't somehow created more than one background - but not all of it is drawn to the
screen at once. Yeah it's actually a lot larger than what's currently shown on the screen. The
console is told to draw one part of the to tilemap to the screen by referencing its specific memory
address until it hits a defined scan line, then draw another part of the tilemap to the rest of the screen
starting from a different memory address. As you can see from this example, as the scan line moves
down the screen, it starts by drawing the right side of the tilemap until it hits a defined scan
line - in this case it's scan line 47. From that point it switches to drawing the left side of
the tilemap for the rest of the screen height. Once again it's about making really good use of
the system's of limited resources. As for switching what was displayed, they still only drew some of
the tilemap at once to the screen, but the different parts were put in different places. So the HUD for
example will be placed at the top all the bottom and text boxes might be drawn to the background
in another offscreen location on the tilemap, then used to temporarily replace the HUD using the same
memory swap technique, like this example. This kind of thing was sometimes done on older consoles like
the original Nintendo Entertainment System, but in those cases it couldn't really be done without
utilising enhancement chips in the cartridge. The PC Engine or TG-16 didn't need any enhancement
chips to do this because it had hardware already built in for it. Sometimes they even split the
screen multiple times too; what you see here is the console actually splitting the background
into four different segments. It initially starts drawing the score, then splits to show the top
of the main background, then splits a second time to show the health bars, then a third
time to show the rest of the main background. You can also see some funky sprite priority going
on here as well, as the character sprites are not only behind the character names and timer, which
are sprites themselves, but they're also appearing in front of the main background but behind the
health bars, which remember are on the same single background layer. And while all of this is going
on, there's individual scan lines scrolling at different speeds on the floor to create that depth
effect that you might have noticed. Witchcraft! A witch! A witch! A witch! We have found a witch! May we burn her? So there you go, that's about all I wanted to
cover on this subject. Hopefully you've gained an appreciation of the tricks that were employed
to work around the limitations of the PC Engine or TurboGrafx-16 and got a taste of exactly
what it could do. Who knows, maybe in an alternate reality, it was as successful internationally as
it was in Japan, and we could have had a genuine three-way fight during the fourth generation. As
it stands though, I think it occupies a small but important part of video game history. Give me
a thumbs up if you liked this video, it really helps a lot, leave a comment if you like,
and don't forget to subscribe to stay up to date with my content. Thanks for watching
and see you next time!
