The SuperGrafx: That time when NEC made an amazing console with no games...

usually the fate of failed consoles is written not in the stars but in the machines themselves The Commodore 64 GS the amstrad GX 4000 the Mattel hyperscan they failed because they're a big crap but then there's the NEC super Graphics released in 1989 it was a dismal failure selling only 75 000 units and only saw five dedicated games but it really wasn't crap despite looking like a borg drones Underpants it was amazing it had loads of potential and must be one of the biggest missed opportunities in gaming history in fact when you mix it with another NEC product it becomes something pretty exceptional but I will get to that let's start at the beginning this is Dai Makai mura known in the west as Ghouls and ghosts the one and only launch title for this system and yes I am using obvious cheats to capture this footage it is a really hard game but well what is the super Graphics well it's an upgraded improved version of the NEC PC engine the same system released in the west as the turbo Graphics 16. A system that was pretty tough tier in the late 80s it had way more power than the NES but it did lose out in some major ways to sega's brand new Mega Drive AKA The Genesis the super Graphics then seems to be an EC's attempt to claw back the advantage and it does manage that pretty well although fully backwards compatible with original PC engine games the super Graphics had literally twice the graphical power thanks to having literally two of the original systems Graphics chips that was the upgrade the same thing again with some extra circuitry to mixed the output of the two chips plus some extra Ram that means instead of just one layer of background Graphics we've now got two the same as the Mega Drive allowing for True Parallax scrolling effects it also means double the number of Sprites or moving objects that can be on the screen going from 64 to 128 taking it ahead of the mega drives 80. even the original tg16 Beats the Mega Drive on color and the super Graphics inherits all those properties and adds a little more a color palette over 512 Shades in total and all of those can be on screen at once which is ahead of the Mega Drive which is limited to just 61 colors on screen most of the time comparing the same game on both systems the super Graphics definitely comes out better it's more colorful it's more detailed and looks really darn good for a Home console game from 1989. to be absolutely fair this doesn't put the Mega Drive in the best just like there are of course better looking games than this on that system but it does show up some of its weaknesses the super Graphics though can do even better so let's take a look at another entry from these tiny Library that's even more impressive but before I get on to that can I just insert a reminder here to subscribe if you haven't done already that would be amazing but I'm with the show and it's 1941 counter-attack another one from Capcom released in August 1991 this was the system's last game and maybe it's best at least it's best looking a beautiful old school shooter all the way through with insane amounts of action the screen bursting with enemies bullets and assorted scenery but the console doesn't seem to struggle at all if it ever dips below 60 frames per second I didn't notice it but that is one criticism that a lot of sources seem to have for the super Graphics they'll tell you that it's lonely 8-bit CPU was just not enough to handle it's two Custom Graphics chips but I'm not sure that's true it does have an 8-bit CPU that is correct the same as the original tg16a variant of the mos6502 especially created for the system based on the massively popular chip that appeared in the NES the 664 and many others it's souped up with a few extra features and a much higher clock speed of just over seven megahertz in its fastest mode that must be though much slower than the mega drives Mighty Motorola 68k a true 16 bit chip clocked at 7.4 megahertz well maybe but it is a bit more complicated than that these two chips are very different and it is hard to compare but the 6502 can be more efficient it can do with certain things in fewer clock cycles and in many situations may be faster than the Motorola chip in the Mega Drive in fact as I'm editing this I've come across an interesting Benchmark video from a YouTuber called hagops digital Studio that puts the super graphic CPU well ahead of both what's in the Sega Mega Drive and the Super NES cpu2 though that second one might not be so much of a surprise I feel like which is the best CPU might not have such a simple answer when you get down to it this is such a complex topic but I don't think that CPU power is what held the super Graphics back none of the existing games seem to be CPU bound even when they do bring a lot of action to the table like 1941 does there's so many Sprites so many things on the screen and not really any frame drops something you could never guarantee on consoles of this era in fact if you want to see what the super graphic CPU can do well here is a Homebrew 3D demo from someone called this I will link to their GitHub page below there's also this q08 mode 7 style Tech demo by Chris Covell it's actually for the stock turbo Graphics but the CPU is the same they can't quite do what the real mode 7 on the Super NES can but well it does look good let's move on again though to Aldi Ness I think that's how you say but well the way I pronounce it it ends up sounding like it might be a village near South End on sea but anyway to give it its full title it's Aldi Nest the mission code for rage crisis and that is a heck of a sentence made by a team of former Iran employees and yeah it's not hard to see the comparison with irem's huge arcade hit from a few years before our type this is the other candidate for best looking super Graphics game not that that's a huge field but it does look really good it's got some wonderful Parallax effects and this section here is particularly memorable and giant bosses and all the other stuff you'd associate with classic 16-bit Shooters it's also like 1941 very smooth despite lots and lots of actions with again lots of Sprites a good number of them generated by the player ship's own ridiculous Weaponry but that is what makes a good shooter and smoothness was something that even that the Super 8 yes sometimes struggled with but well speaking of the Super NES that does beat the super Graphics in many other key ways it can do more background layers it can do real transparency effects it's got mode 7 scaling and rotation a whole bag of tricks and that's not to mention what game enhancement chips like the super effects brought to the table we've seen that these super Graphics can show up the Mega Drive at times but I'm probably going to have a hard time convincing you that it can beat the Super NES in any meaningful way just going from the games that came out for this thing we've seen the best and taking a look at the other offerings in the library it's pretty slim pickings this isn't going to win the day the other two proper super Graphics games aren't terrible but they aren't that good either this console is nothing but an also around not that much of an upgrade up to anything not worth the cost of admission no wonder it sank without Trace that's what you may well be seeing at this point and well maybe but I do think it has a lot of untapped potential and could perhaps do things that the Super NES the mega drive or most other consoles until the 32-bit era would struggle with so let's talk about fighting games a genre where the super Graphics might have excelled if it ever had the gems this is a fatal Fury special on the Super Nintendo and it is a decent Port of the Neo Geo arcade game it's pretty responsive it looks good but it's not perfect there are things missing the characters are a bit smaller than the arcade original there's less animation it's all a bit downgraded so what is it that lets the Super Nintendo down specifically what is it lacking and how could the super Graphics perhaps beat it well first of all Sprite that is moving objects and Sprites like all Graphics in these systems are made up of tiles blocks of pixels arranged on the screen like a mosaic the Super NES can have up to 34 Sprite tails on any one line whether they're all next to each other or jumbled on top of each other that's the max you can have the super Graphics though can have 64 tails on any one row and the Super NES can cover the whole screen once completely with its Sprites with a little bit left over but the super Graphics can do it twice you might not want to literally cover the entire screen with moving objects but you could want lots of things to overlap lots of objects in smaller areas of the screen and the super Graphics lets you do more bigger character Graphics bigger enemies Fireballs Flames explosions deep Parallax effects there's loads of things you could do with these Sprites let's move on to Art of fighting whilst we think of another problem and that is video memory if you want to show graphics on the screen they need to be in the video memory and there's only so much space there in fact the Super Nintendo can only use 512 unique tiles to draw its Sprites with using emulator debug features we can see this Sprite data in memory as this game is running the Super Nintendo doesn't have anywhere near enough room for all the animation frames for both of these characters so new data is constantly streamed in the trouble is you can only do this so quickly there's only a small number of new tails you can load in for each frame of Animation that means in practice you need to keep the character smaller and less detailed and the super Graphics well it's got twice as much video memory as the Super Nintendo and it works in a slightly different way it can have up to 2048 unique Sprite tails and it can load in new ones more quickly too the Super NES can only load new graphics data at certain points in each frame of Animation but the super Graphics has much more time for this operation this means that the super Graphics could potentially have larger more detailed characters closer to the arcade Originals of these huge games and it wouldn't just be Sprites either there's more space for background Graphics too this is all about the abstract I know but I can give you some Clues as to what might be possible with the original PC engine Port of art of fighting already this looks better than the Super NES version even with only one of the two Graphics chips the PC engine turbo Graphics can still restore more Sprite data and load Graphics more quickly now in every case but an awful lot of Turbo Graphics fighting games do look better than the Super NES equivalents and the super Graphics could have gone even further than that and come up with even better looking games it couldn't compete with the Super NES in a lot of ways but I really think it could have done better with dense 2D Graphics now you might point out that art of fighting runs on the PC engine CD a another upgrade to the original system and that is true but whilst it does add more storage space and some more work around it doesn't really increase the graphical capabilities by themselves and this is where things get interesting because the super Graphics is also compatible with the PC engine CD the same add-on will plug into both consoles it can run PC engine CD games at no problem but it could also combine the features of both the twin Graphics chip of the super system and all the storage and extra Ram of the CD system but the trouble is sadly no one ever made use of this combo no one ever did anything with it with these two together you've got what must have been for a while at least the most powerful console in the world and not one game came out for it yeah this situation does seem very strange to me but even just the plain cartridge games on this thing could have been exceptional with all that vram and all those Sprites look at Street Fighter 2 a PC engine cartridge release it's a brilliant arcade Port but the super Graphics version could have been even better than that and what about Strider another fantastic Port this time for the CD system but again these super Graphics could have done it even better and yeah possibly if you really get to pushing it that far the CPU might actually become a problem here but well there really is some power in this one of the problems often with failed systems is that they were hard to program for the Sega CD the Atari Jaguar but I really can't see this would have been the original console was built to be a better NES one that developers could make the jump to without a steep learning curve the super Graphics adds some complexity but not loads more and developers who could cope with the Super NES could cope with this I would guess so why did these super Graphics fail so badly and why did NEC ditch it so quickly well it's hard to find info about it it really is but price seems to have been a factor because the equivalent of just under 300 at launch which doesn't sound too bad Until you realize that both the Super Nintendo on the Mega Drive cost less than half of that in Japan and the PC engine CD was a huge huge success too Against The Yards because console Adams usually never work NEC had a viable upgrade path for their console and they probably weren't bothered that the super Graphics fell by the wayside but ignoring the super Graphics might have been a mistake the PC engine's home turf was Japan and that's where it sold in big numbers but as the turbo Graphics 16 it didn't do so well in America and that's putting it mildly but if NEC had pushed on with the super Graphics maybe trying for a price cut and focused on bringing action games to the system they might have done better in America and might even have been able to expand into Europe it might have been the place for really great arcade conversions these sort of things that sold systems over here but that never came to pass maybe these slightly cheaper but still fairly awesome Junior Neo Geo so that's the super graphics and underutilized failure bought a major gaming Powerhouse that remained so obscure even the company that made it didn't seem to realize it existed yes it would have been a pretty expensive to actually put the super Graphics together with the CD system at the time which was certainly it's gonna be pretty expensive now but you could say the same thing about the Sega 32x and the mega CD and that kind of happened with a small handful of games though not any good ones and actually someone did make one game for the super Graphics CD combo and yes it's a modern Homebrew by developer Nicole Express who has my endless admiration just for throwing their hat in the ring it's called space Ava 201 and I will put the appropriate links down below if you'd like a go on this yourself it will run on an emulator it does run on these dark PC engine too but the super Graphics version is enhanced and I'm Gonna Leave This here for now because I might feature this game in another video but that is the end of this one thank you to my wonderful patrons thank you as always if you too would like to join them there is a link below that would be great it really would and I will say farewell and I do to you fair Spanish ladies [Music] foreign

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 121,462

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Id: tzreF97_tNI

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023