Can we fix a rare Japanese Games Console with a Celebrity History?

hello mark hello neil i have got here something very special and hello cave dwellers an nec pcfx released in 1994 and it's quite special because it was never released here in the uk this was a japan exclusive ever come across one before no but i did bring the gummy bears today i'd be pleased to know they are the snack of trees today so i'll swap you this for the gummy bears now this is really special not just because it's in near mint condition aesthetically because you might be getting a whiff of something there can you say i can't smell smoke there's a definite barbecue smell coming from the box it's nasty isn't it really nasty but this has come from the loft of one mike daley mike daly of dma design fame uh creator of lemmings creator of grand theft auto yeah big name in the games industry and he chose to send this to us and we are going to have a chat with him today to find out why it smells of barbecue and white came into his possession did he make anything for it did he have any intention to design anything for it and what were his impressions of the machine let's look inside the box quickly because this really is a mint example and you'll see as we unpack it here we've got all the original pollies all the bags the manuals everything and as we pull the console out there what do you make of the look because it's quite unique for the era um it's kind of like a pc but at that time we would have been up against what the playstation seem to be going in the opposite direction to this so i'm not sure how this would have fared against the competition yeah quite unique in its look but i kind of like it i'm not sure i would have at the time but now i do like it quite plasticky this doesn't feel like a quality product looks like a dev kit to me it does a bit it looks like a dev kit for another console yeah there's just the one joy pad included so no multiplayer gaming for us today six buttons looks like a good size i've got no concerns about using that they've evolved a little bit by the mid-90s and of course it's cd-based just like the playstation and the saturn of the era we're moving into the cd-rom drive era but this does have a reputation for fmv and movie based games doesn't it oh dear lord yeah yeah so we're gonna hopefully try some of those out if we get it working today but that's the big question can we get it working and also why did mike daly have this so do you want to take a look at that smell i'm guessing that the smell is the reason that we've got it yeah okay so if you want to make a start on that i'm going to go and give mike a call and we'll get a little bit of background on why we've got this and we'll go from there shall we sounds good let's do it before we continue let's have a very quick primer on exactly what the pcfx was the pcfx is the cd-rom-based 32-bit console by nec and hudsonsoft which was the follow-up to the pc engine the pc engine a fondly remembered system with some great games which was also the first to receive a cd-rom add-on it was followed up in 1989 by the pc engine super graphics which was more like a few tweaks than a full-blown follow-up to the pc engine and it flopped commercially a second attempt was needed at following up the pc engine success and that came in the form of the tetsujen console a japanese word meaning iron man with a release date slated for 1992 however delays and perhaps a reluctance to release a successor to the pc engine while it was still commercially successful saw that pushed back significantly with no sign of the console arriving in 1993 initially impressive tech demos started to look dated compared to the new kids on the block the atari jaguar and the 3do and the incoming sega saturn and sony playstation with time against them nec would be unable to create a competing platform from scratch and so revised the tetsu gen into a pc style tower case design with slots to allow for future upgrades upgrades that would be needed if it was to compete with consoles with dedicated 3d processing hardware as the pcfx had none it would finally be launched in december of 1994 complete with a dual speed cd-rom a 32-bit risk cpu running at just over 20 megahertz and an ability to display over 16 million colours a 2d game in powerhouse in an era when the 3d arms race was just taken off you can spot the problem its commercial failure saw it discontinued in 1998 with 400 000 sales and a games library of just over 60 games its legacy the departure of nec from the console gaming market we'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsors for this episode fan home fan home have a brand new street fighter figurine collection featuring all the iconic characters from the genre defining game series each figurine is accompanied by a full color brochure detailing the facts and figures of that character alongside stunning artwork that's sure to please die hard fans the figures themselves come muddled in their most iconic poses and by using the link below you can get a bonus gift a diorama of the fight between ryu and ken this was an early bird exclusive but it's now only available without special code retro this series really packs a punch whilst neil sets up a call about the console's history i grabbed a screwdriver and got to it it really is a symphony in 90s plastic engineering with just four screws holding on the faux pck sides with so many push fit plastic tabs it can be a struggle to get open working carefully we get to the internals of the pcfx the smell of charred components is quite overpowering even after all these years but i follow my nose and track down the problem this power supply let's see how neil's getting on so mike thank you very much for donating your pcfx my first impressions were of course the smell of barbecue coming out of the box it was pretty pungent uh just tell us how did you come into possession of this machine in the first place um i got it from ebay i have no idea when it was a long time ago it's been in the loft for years and years um i think go on a kind of retro machine purchase spree at one point right and so it was just one of these ebay things and it was piece because it was an nec thing and it was pc engine i thought oh that's maybe the follow-up so it's maybe after the super graphics and along the same kind of lines okay so this one was just it wasn't during the life cycle of the machine no no no no no so you're a retro fan in general are you you like to go back excellent that's what we like to hear so i mean it looks pretty brand new did you ever actually use it um i mean especially ordering had an aussie but i didn't sit down and play anything the games that i got with it were pretty poor so i didn't really bother uh i messed about there wasn't that many games out for it so um when i kind of went looking um so yeah it didn't really the reason it stayed in the loft for five or ten years or however long i had it yeah yeah so we know that you're pretty familiar with its predecessor the pc engine which you mentioned there you put a huge amount of time into i think it was a port of shadow of the beast that you did a lot of work on on the pc engine um using the cd drive the cd-rom rom just considering the pcfx is it what you expected of a pc engine follow-up or would you have liked to have seen something different no i mean it's completely different um i think it's like a 32-bit thing yeah it's a 32-bit risk cpu yeah yeah so no i thought it would have been more along the lines of a follow-up to the super graphics so more of the same kind of the old-school kind of hardware sprites play fields um and what kind of cpu maybe six eight thousand or something but it's just such a departure um yeah there's nothing like i was thinking it was gonna be so i kind of almost immediately lost interest oh okay it was that quick just using some of your own work for an example let's just take say gta would it have been capable of running do you think the original gta i mean at that speed possibly i don't know much about the hardware because never actually got into fiddling about or programming it um but 20 odd negatives possibly something yeah yeah it was lacking any kind of 3d hardware i think yeah yeah yeah the original gta is software anyway yeah so um probably but that's a finger in the air do you know because i haven't looked this up was there ever a lemming sport for it because there was a mouse available for it no okay one of the few platforms i don't think it lived that long so you just didn't really get to that point yeah and coming on to the phone itself um did this machine did it arrive out i could see that you're getting no no no was that yeah it was um it came fine and it was a american on japanese i have no idea um so when i got it i knew i had to plug it into a step down transformer on it um american mine would have to be not one minute um but then when i was raking it out and pulling it out um i couldn't remember that and i didn't really care just like i'd plug it in and see what happened um that was only after the fact i thought maybe it was an american one oh okay so you may be plugged into a euro plug or something like that i think you just plug it straight in because it was just it's a kettle lead or something on it isn't it right so i think i just plugged straight in and just went pop so i think i was pleased it was just the power supply not taking the machine with it yeah i wasn't really fast because it had been sitting up in the law for so long yeah i knew i wasn't going to do anything with it so i was just curious to see if it was working really helpful to not be working no you'd have lost sounds of it and you didn't try and fix it at all you just put it straight yeah i had to look well i had to look and see what what what it was because it was the power supply it's one of one of the things i'll i'll steer clear of is actual power supplies um i can tinker with a lot of bits and pieces but i ain't playing with big votes so sure okay well um hopefully it's in a slightly more loving home here we'll take good care of it get it up and running um do you have any tips for us any recommendations in terms of the games uh i only had those two that i think was two games that came with it that's all i ever saw in it and like say they weren't particularly good so i just lost complete interest in it and just didn't go looking for anything more and i think they're all quite hard to get hold of yeah okay well we'll do our very best for you mike to get you running return it to its former glory well it's a nice unit to sit on the shelf it looks pretty it really does look pretty yeah and it's quite exotic for people to come and try isn't it yeah okay well great thanks very much for your time mike back over at the workbench i've liberated the power supply from the main console it smells a bit bad but that's actually a good clue as to what's happened to this console this is a japanese power plug and we're in the uk am i on the right track neil yes that's right mark it needs a step down transformer and as mike just told us he plugged it straight into the uk mains power that will explain the smoky musk that we've got the high voltage side of the power supply has a varista as a protective measure yes the fuse is gone but the big clue here is the varistor itself when excessive voltage like a spike runs across the varistor it clamps the voltage to protect the rest of the circuit with constant excessive voltage it fails and it will force the fuse to blow saving the later parts in the circuit this metal oxide varistor has failed venting all the way under this coil and up to the bridge rectifier we'll check the capacitor just to make sure but it should have been protected all the rest of the components in the primary side of the psu will likely be fine as well [Music] we're going to go like for like and fit the equivalent new part and of course we'll need a new fuse let's get that failed varista out of the board [Music] this component definitely had a bad day at work let's hope that it did its job first though mark and we do have to get rid of that smell so let's remove the affected parts for a clean and for a quick test let's get the fuse out looking at this more closely this fuse doesn't look like the original it's a slow blow type if i'm not mistaken yes with a wound core curious the decelerating gun makes short work of removing the coil and i'll give that a quick test before replacement just look at the mess we'll never get rid of all of it but we'll get rid of most of the smell we should clean up this capacitor as well [Music] i think this is as close to a cleaning montage as we'll need to get today because this is such a minty fresh console mark the board is actually stained i'll get the fiberglass pencil onto it later i'm pricing up the capacitor to read the values before testing 200 volts and 270 microfarads a quick in-circuit test with the esr meter will be fine here we're just looking for the right value give or take 10 and that is well within specification okay let's get on and clean up the rest of that mess i was hoping to avoid removing the bridge rectifier but it's mucky underneath [Music] this part is rated at 600 volts and one amp so it should have easily survived that hit of uk voltage the coil took the brunt of the varista gassing out so we'll give it a quick clean to try and get rid of some of that soot and by extension reduce the charge grilled aroma okay mark hurry up and get those components back in and working i'll go and find some software for testing no pressure [Music] after the clean the psu should smell a lot better and this new varistor should bring it back to life [Music] just a rectification bridge to solder in [Music] now and after popping in the fuse i'll test if this is working and supplying the proper five and nine volts dc then put it back into the pcfx well neil oh i think i'll have cracked it yeah yeah there's still a whiff of barbecue yeah there's only so much i can do i'm afraid well why you've been doing that aside from speaking to mike i found this this is the fx bmp or backup memory pack so all right like a memory card yeah apparently there's 32k of storage inside just to back up your saved games and then for additional storage you put this in this 128k i think is in here but there's something quite funny there's a couple of aaa batteries in there and i wanted to check there'd been no leakage naturally and there are these extremely cute japanese batteries take a look at these oh was that an otter um i think that might be a beaver i don't know i've never seen one of those and they are just starting to leak but um no damage done on the inside uh we've got away with it there so we'll put a couple of new batteries in there and we'll make sure we can save our games speaking of games yeah i've got one original here this is called battle heat um it looks suspiciously like a very fmv heavy game that looks like the back of a vhs mango it really does it really does but thankfully there's no copy protection on the pcfx so i've managed to download and burn a few games and one of which is returned to zork that's really good favorite of mine uh heavy on the fmv but perhaps it will play to the machine strength apparently this can churn out 30 jpegs per it's really tough being like yeah and it doesn't even have an fmv add-on so yeah i'm looking forward to that so i'm excited could this be the best version of return to zork ever let's find out let's go and set it up uh we need to dig out a 60 hertz television to play this on oh i'm sure we can find one and we'll see how it plays cool slot this in and let's go [Music] [Music] with our power issue sorted now it's time to try out some games the joypad port is a bespoke affair so third-party controllers are probably non-existent first impressions are that these games certainly look very pretty but before long i became bewildered at the lack of any actual gameplay so is that the game then is it just those cutscenes i think so it's like a dvd where you just have a scene selection of various ways you can have your butt handed to you like dragons love about the dragons but worse was to come my hotly anticipated game of return to zork turned out to be a blocky muddy mess it's a game i spent hours playing back in the day and i'm well aware that there's a hardware accelerated fmv version for pcs with high quality footage and this machine can handle it but it almost looks like they put a camcorder up to a pc screen and just re-recorded the footage such as the blurry mess that we're faced with i found a shoot-em-up to tax my sloth-like reflexes it was quite enjoyable but i can't imagine that it was a massive incentive to fork out for a pcfx back then naturally i'm much better at games than mark although that's not saying a great deal but i do agree with this amateur assessment it's bog standard it's not a bad game it just doesn't really highlight any of the strengths of this system beware the japanese cutscenes they're very japanese sometimes and completely unrelated to the game which turned out to be a nice little platformer with a familiar feel talking of cutscenes there is an insane amount of them it's almost like they were trying to fill every cd game to the brim regardless of whether they needed to or not is there even a game here but there was a game there which looked nice if unoriginal of course it's our problem that we don't read the japanese language though we also found a side-scrolling beat-em-up which had so much between level dialogue that it was an absolute chore to play shame [Music] well on the positive side it's up and running it is a history restored yeah a great fix there so well done on getting that up and running um but on the negative side return to zork i was expecting so much more i'm so annoyed with that i don't think it could have given us anything less awful you can even read the text you can even read the text and it was like they've taken the lowest res macintosh version quicktime files and recompressed them over and over and over upset a lot of mac fans there but i know full well that there were fmv versions of the game made for fmv add-on cards for pcs which were much higher quality and this is perfectly capable of playing them anyway let's move on from return to zork lots of fmv based games lots of games we didn't understand because they were only in japanese lots of games that ended up being games which were just fmv my thumb is so sore i swear you pressed that button three to four hundred times to get to what we thought was the game and when we got to the game what was it just more and more and more cutscenes it was shocking and shocking but we did find a couple of really playable games one was a shooter one was a kind of rainbow island style platformer yeah played really well had lovely cd streaming sound but i've got to say there's nothing that would have stopped those games aside from the music from playing on a pc engine and there's nothing that would have stopped those games even with the music playing on a pc engine cd rom rom yeah yeah exactly exactly so it didn't really excel not great at playing movies but 1994 those types of games were outdated the platform games the top down shooters it was all about the 3d games and this is just lacking that 3d chip transplants you know the playstations 3d chip in here and you've got a pretty good console i think yeah it was the wrong thing at the wrong time just fell short however i'm really glad that we've got it working it's really quite exotic and i hope some of you will get a chance to come here and play it we'll make sure it's set up with a with a 60hz crt not a flat panel so you can get even blurrier text in return to zorya and uh i've got to say a real special thank you to mike daley for sending it in and forgive giving us the chance to play with this and to hear his thoughts on the console if you happen to own one and there are some games in the library that you think we should check out let us know in the chat if we've given it a raw deal then let us know in the comments below do let us know we'll come back and visit it and as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch take a moment to like and subscribe to the channel if you're not already a subscriber and also check out mark's channel and thanks for watching take care see you next time bye bye [Music] just don't touch the hair

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 31,673

Rating: 4.9344263 out of 5

Keywords: PC-FX games, PC-FX console, NEC PC-FX, Fix PC-FX PSU, PCFX Power Supply repair, Rare Japanese Consoles, Japan Only Video Game Systems

Id: srk4bvRWmdM

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 01 2021