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PC Engine CPU

https://jsgroth.dev/blog/posts/pc-engine-cpu/
27•ibobev•1h ago

Comments

nicole_express•35m ago
The PC Engine CPU is highly underrated. People like to go "haha, it was the TurboGrafx-16 but its CPU was 8-bit" like that makes it a joke, but that clock speed boost on top of the 6502 architecture is a big deal. (The S-CPU on the SNES still has an 8-bit data bus too, so the 16-bit advantage isn't as strong as it seems)

The Arcade Card add-on was designed specifically around using the transfer instructions to rapidly transfer graphics into VRAM, something it was very good at. Made some really good Neo Geo ports possible.

snvzz•12m ago
>"haha, it was the TurboGrafx-16 but its CPU was 8-bit"

Amusingly, TurboGrafx-16 is a US-specific name, so is the huge shell.

In Japan, the console was called PC Engine and was really compact. Later revised as CoreGrafx and CoreGrafx II, both still the same fundamental hardware.

I own the later variant. Very solid little box that sips power and produces stable a/v output.

ndiddy•2m ago
The PC Engine's CPU is probably its strongest aspect, Hudson did a great job here. Going with a really fast 8-bit CPU makes much more sense than Nintendo's choice of going with a slow 16-bit CPU, especially when the screen is 256 pixels wide so most of the calculations a game would be doing are only 8 bits anyway. Even when you have to do 16-bit calculations, the SNES CPU still has an 8-bit data bus so it doesn't have much of an advantage over the PC Engine (all 16-bit operations take extra cycles compared to their 8-bit counterparts). In practice, fast action games like shooters play a lot more smoothly on the PC Engine than on the SNES.

Where the PC Engine ends up weaker is in the video processor. That generation of consoles was able to do more with the video hardware than previous generations (like the NES and Master System) due to faster RAM becoming available. The PC Engine used the additional bandwidth to make it possible for the CPU to access video memory while the screen is being drawn, while the SNES kept the restriction that you can only access video memory during vblank and instead used the additional bandwidth for more background layers. Being able to access video memory all the time is definitely a useful feature, but the result is that SNES games often look less flat than PC Engine games.

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