The Luxury All-In-One PC Engine from 1988 | Tech Nibble

on release in 1987 the NEC PC engine packed a huge punch in a tiny gaming package awesome ports of arcade Smash Hits such as r-type propelled it to stardom in Japan where it became the main rival to the super famicom and while attempts were made to replicate that success in other areas such as North America with the restyled turbo graphic 16 console lightning didn't strike twice and sales paled in comparison to the Sega Genesis Omega drive and the Super Nintendo but that's not to say we didn't look on with curiosity at the punch this thing packed being fed tidbits of information from far off lands in our gaming magazines and teased with screenshots that belied its physical dimensions but how did those who were invested in the PC engine and I mean fully invested in the PC engine as their games console of choice enjoy it what was the luxury way to play on a PC engine well it may well have been this this is the NEC PC KD 863g and we're going to find out all about it in today's Tech nibble as soon as I've given it a clean [Music] foreign [Music] we'd like to thank pcbway.com for supporting our episode today they aren't just about pcbs although they do do a tremendous job of that they also offer CNC Machining sheet metal fabrication 3D printing and injection molding if you're creating then pcbway.com can help you bring your project to life get an instant quote now over at pcbway.com and we thank them for their support hello cave dwellers welcome to the cave another example of exotic and rare Japanese piece of vintage Tech on the table here dating back to 1988. at first glance it just kind of looks like a bit of a beige dull standard PC monitor but there's a lot more to it than that when this came out in 88 you would have paid 138 000 Yen for it or just over 800 pounds and in today's money that's two and a half thousand pounds 2 800 or about 2 800 Euros so I think it's fair to call it a luxury item but why would you make the decision to throw that kind of money at this games console back in the day when so many other options were available well let's take a look the PC engine portion of the whole Affair sits down at the bottom of the screen here the games were distributed on Hue cards about the size of a thick credit card and they just slot into the slot on the right hand side here next to the power switch next to that is a switch which we'll come back to shortly I'll tell you what that is then we've got the joypad port in the middle you might think one joypad port there is a bit stingy but that's exactly the same as a normal PC engine you just have the one port for one joypad and then you would plug in a multi-tap like we have over here to expand that and play your multiplayer games in this example up to five joypad boards and then there is a flap here and well like so many vintage monitors that flap is missing unfortunately and in there are things like your your volume control your brightness your contrast all of those kinds of controls tucked away in there there are no speakers built in they would come with it as standard unfortunately we're missing the speakers but they would clip onto these screws here and just sit there like a pair of little ears and plug into the back and that you might think is that that's what it's capable of playing PC engine games well not quite so because this switch here will switch you between the PC engine and you can see as I turn it it locks the Hue card into place so you can't unplug it when it's on and then to the left is computer mode because if we look at the back of the monitor here we've got a 15 pin monitor Port so if you plug a computer into that switch it over to computer mode it elevates the whole thing into more than just an all-in-one games console it becomes infinitely more useful it's supported by nec's own range of personal computers so you might be doing your spreadsheet one minute flick it over to the PC engine mode the next minute and play some games business around the back and gaming around the front just to give you an example here it is plugged into our shop x68000 expert now I should point out that the sharp x68000 has a tri-sync monitor 31 24 and 15 kilohertz video modes it kicks out this only supports 15 kilah so to demonstrate it I've had to load up some games in 15 kilohertz mode it's not really practical to use but it's a nice example of this monitor doing something other than the PC engine now that's all well and good but you're probably asking yourself why would I buy this thing when I could just buy a standard PC engine and plug in a decent television to it well the big selling point of this was image quality this thing is taking the RGB signals direct from the console and putting them on this crisp display there's no interference there's no cable quality issues to think about and there's absolutely no RF interference because remember the original PC engine out of the box is standard add an RF video out and you tune your television into that and we all know that RF is bottom tier for image quality when it comes to gaming so in a nutshell this is the highest quality out of the box PC engine experience money could buy and that's where things get really interesting because this then was not only desirable to hardcore games players it became very desirable in the magazine industry because if you wanted to take a screenshot of the latest and greatest games to put in your magazine you wanted the crispest clearest display that you could take a photo of and that's exactly how they did it they would position a camera in front of the television take a picture and then put it into their desktop publishing package whatever it was of the day or even printed it and did it all by hand back in the late 80s depends who was publishing it anyway that's why this was so desirable and I think we should try and prove that point by replicating the kind of magazine screenshot setup that would have been used back in the day so let's do that right now [Music] right let's build our 1988 screenshot capture system now once I've seen in the past and I mean professional ones not ones made out of flimsy cardboard essentially had a hood that would go all the way around the monitor fill in these gaps down here as well and then you would Nestle your camera in there so we're going to try and improvise a little bit I've made this Hood out of cardboard it's all very blue Peter Pop that on there and then I'll Chuck some thick black material over here it's almost like we're creating a hide only we're not watching Birds we're watching video games and we're going to get the camera in there we're going to wrap that around to block out all light and it'll just be the camera and the screen and let's see what we can capture [Music] here's some footage of our tape and I think that's come out really well I'm really happy with how this works now to get an insight into the challenges of game capture from back in the day from a games reviewer's perspective I wanted to quote an article by Jazz rignal he's a reviewer that many UK Gamers would be familiar with from magazines such as Mean Machines Jazz wrote an article in 2017 on usgamer.net and I'll put a link in the video description if you want to read the whole thing but here are a few Choice quotes from it screen glare was the number one enemy of the screenshot even the slimmest shaft of light could reflect off a CRT or TV set ruining the picture so screenshots had to be taken in the dark that meant having a dedicated room preferably with no windows that was completely blacked out in which game systems and TV sets and monitors were located these rooms were often not ventilated and will get very hot especially in the summer because of that they developed their own peculiar Aroma that would assail your old factory organs until you mercifully developed nose blindness and he's quite right screen glare just destroys any picture that you try to take and it's another area that this monitor excels at if we just flip back now to the sharp x68000 and its monitor you can see that it's quite reflective and I've got a polarizing filter on this camera but even with that you can see a lot of the cave lights reflect in there if we switch over now to the NEC monitor there is of course no stopping all Reflections on this thing without our blackout Booth but even in normal conditions this screen has I guess more of a matte quality to it it reflects a lot less and for that reason it's an absolute pleasure to use and it makes it even better for taking those screenshots back to Jazzy's article he goes on to say screens had to be kept pristine since fingerprints and smudges would show up on the photographs so they were religiously cleaned before every screenshot taking session and the camera was always put on a tripod so that it could be placed directly in front of the Monitor and be kept steady because screenshots had to be taken at a very slow speed with old-school British pal CRTs refreshing at 24 times a second you had to take your shots at a shutter speed slower than 1 25th of a second otherwise you'd end up with a big black refresh line across your picture now Jazzy is of course referring to screenshots and not videos which we've been showing here so let's try some screenshots foreign you can clearly see that the banding that just referred to the refresh lines with darker areas on the screen at the top and the bottom suggests that the timing on the camera is off and that's something we need to avoid if we're going to get a usable picture this next attempt we've circumvented the refresh problem but if we look at E Honda the fighter on the left he's displaying some motion blur and you probably don't want that in a screenshot what we're looking for is nice crisp pixels to go in our magazine notice also the curvature of the screen is captured it wasn't uncommon to see this in magazines back in the day if you cropped it to a rectangle you could lose important parts of the game screen sometimes so sometimes you would see a slightly curved screenshots other times they'd be cropped Third Time Lucky here's an image that I'm happy with now there's some action going on on the screen E Honda has taken a yoga flame to the belly but we've got none of the motion blur around him and we don't have any problems associated with the screen refreshing I can then take that image I could drop it into our PC engine magazine there it is and in this instance I have cropped it to have straight edges of course this is really easy to do with today's powerful tools that we have right here at home but back in the day a high-end machine would have been needed to achieve this a fancy Apple Macintosh for example with a nice high resolution Monitor and a copy of a desktop publishing program like Quark Express and in the modern day you might be tempted to use an emulator and just capture the screen straight off of your computer but there is I must say for all of the variables that make this impractical screen glare the curvature of the screen making sure the camera is in the exact right position if you get it all right there's something really satisfying about capturing images in this way well I think with our new capture system we could set up a new pc engine magazine in no time but it's not all good news we've raved about the quality of the picture on this but it does have its failings later in the very same year that this system came out was launched the PC engine CD-ROM ROM ROM the first ever commercially available CD-ROM add-on for a console there was a lot of Buzz about it naturally everybody wanted to try out their games on compact disc and enjoy the additional capacity that the new format offered installation of the CD-ROM involved sliding the PC engine into a briefcase style system this is known as the interface unit and then the CD drive slides into the second Bay on the left great for owners of PC engine consoles but impossible to use with the monitor based PC engine because there's just no way of plugging into the interface unit there's just nowhere to put that CD ROM so as flash as you think you might have been with this version of the PC engine buyer's remorse might be starting to kick in and even more absurdly this wasn't even the most expensive way to enjoy the PC engine that Crown I think probably goes to the Pioneer laser active this one had a series on the channel where we fixed it up and got it working now the Pioneer laser active is a LaserDisc player primarily designed to watch LaserDisc movies but you can also slide what are called packs into it so here for example is the Sega Mega Drive pack that just slides into the front and you're Pioneer laser active becomes not only a Sega Mega Drive but also a mega CD and it can play a very small selection because there are not many in the library of Mega Drive based games on LaserDisc and although I don't have it you'll just have to use your imagination here there is another pack which is the PC engine pack so you'd slide that in just like the Mega Drive pack and then you can actually play PC engine games on Hue cards on CDs and like the ultra LaserDisc library of Omega Drive games there are also a select few number of PC engine games on LaserDisc the Pioneer laser active was pretty late to the party it arrived in 1993 it would have cost you about 530 pounds but then you'd buy the PC engine back on top of that at the same price again or thereabouts so you're looking at about 1060 to 1 100 pounds or 2 550 pounds in today's money so that makes it just a little bit more expensive than this was back in the day but then of course you'd have to buy a display to go on top of that so you're getting into some Mega Money when it comes to the Pioneer laser active and to top it all off that laser active only gives you a composite video output it doesn't give you that crisp RGB display so once again we come back to our KD 863g if we want the crispest absolutely best picture quality that's not to say that the PC engine base unit can't give an RGB output many people composite mod it and there's also if you're not using the interface unit you can get a cable that goes into the back to get the RGB signal out into scart so it's possible to do it this isn't the only way but um combine the RGB signal with the quality and the Christmas of the Monitor and that lovely matte finish to the display and I've yet to see a better PC engine display anywhere the more I use this the more I got to thinking are there any other examples out there of consoles built into televisions and sure enough there are plenty out there one of the earliest that I can find is this it's the solora playmaster from 1977. so Laura are a finished manufacturer and what they've done here is put a pong clone into one of their TVs pong being the the game of the 70s clones being absolutely everywhere for it so why not build it into a TV another example comes from sharp who indulged Us in TVs with built-in consoles such as this the C1 which has a Nintendo NES built right into it they then evolve their sets with various models before progressing to the sf1 this time containing a super famicom to take us into the 16-bit era and then the prize perhaps for the quirkiest and maybe even arguably best looking although that's all subjective is the Sega divers 2000 CRT with a built-in Dreamcast heaven knows what they were thinking when they designed this thing but just look at it it's certainly a one of a kind and finally another example we have right here in the cave this looks like a nice bang Olufsen TV with a built-in CD player but there's more than meets the eye to this that CD player also plays CDI discs yes this is a TV with a built-in Philips CDI console it's high on my list of things to fix because it currently doesn't read CDs but I'd like to sort it soon because it'd be a really nice way for people to enjoy let's be honest the much maligned Philips CDI console here in the cave anyway back to our NEC on the desk here convenience cost and future proofing are the balance that any piece of consumer technology has to find whether it be a games console a television a radio any piece of technology that we bring into our home that's the balance that we're looking for and this is no different a tightly integrated system with a high degree of convenience such as this can often Drive the price higher people are prepared to pay for convenience but at what cost well often the prospective expansion options as we saw with the inability to add the cd-rom-rom or here's another example this is the PC engine 10 noco2 I'm probably saying that completely wrong but what this is is an expansion unit that would sit in the back of a standard PC engine uh you put a couple of batteries in there and it allows you to save your games at least in games that support that where would you put this there's just nowhere to put it on the monitor this then I think was for the affluent gamer somebody who could throw money at it and if something new came along in two weeks time well they'd probably throw money at that too it wouldn't be a problem or it was for the magazine Studio who could uh pick a couple of these up and just write it off as an expense a necessity to get the job done and that's in no way a criticism NEC obviously felt there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled and this is what they filled it with I guess the only question it poses to me now is uh well what happens if that PC engine portion of the system breaks what happens if that monitor breaks I end up with a completely useless PC engine such as the cost of convenience but while it does last five minutes or five years whatever life it's got left in it I'm going to enjoy it to its fullest as always thank you for watching I'll leave you with a little bit more footage of that glorious display in motion and we'll see you next time take care bye [Music] thank you foreign [Music] thank you if you enjoy what I do here in the cave and you'd like to support it head on over to patreon.com forward slash RMC retro where you too can become an official cave dweller just like all the names on the screen here thank you everyone for your support of the channel foreign ERS welcome to the Dave Dave hello cave dwellers welcome to the Dave let's start that again we haven't even got off the first line right

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 109,260

Keywords: nostalgia, computer history, tech history, nec pc engine, console in a TV, console built into a TV, luxury retro gaming, rare japanese tech

Id: h3hWEzHDxjo

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022