Lamenting the SuperGrafx

[dshadoff]

I'm not aware of any specific information from anybody at either company at that time, other than what was published in the magazines (which was always upbeat).

However, given that NEC Avenue published only one of the 5 SuperGrafx games (in 1990), and Hudson Soft published all 4 of the others - from the first in November 1989 to the last in August 1991 - I'd be inclined to think that Hudson Soft thought the machine was a good idea.

[gilbot]

Nov 16, 2020 0:25:34 GMT dshadoff said:

However, given that NEC Avenue published only one of the 5 SuperGrafx games (in 1990), and Hudson Soft published all 4 of the others - from the first in November 1989 to the last in August 1991 - I'd be inclined to think that Hudson Soft thought the machine was a good idea.

Consider the fact that the only game published by NEC Avenue (Dai Makaimura) was also developed by Hudson (more accurately, with 2 programmers subcontracted from Alfa System to work in Hudson's office, which was the pattern of a lot of PCE games), so it's safe to say that Hudson was involved in ALL the SG games.

...errr... except Darius Plus, as long as you consider it a SG game.

[a]

I think NEC always had the idea of having different levels of hardware, from low to high end. SuperGrafx seems to have been born out of that idea.

[Black_Tiger]

Nov 16, 2020 3:15:07 GMT a said:

I think NEC always had the idea of having different levels of hardware, from low to high end. SuperGrafx seems to have been born out of that idea.

The PC Engine belonged to Hudson and they got license fees from every game sold.

They teamed up with NEC as a hardware manufacturer., who didn't make anything from PC Engine games that they didn't publish themselves.

So NEC put out as much hardware as they could. They were also a huge company at the time, so it wasn't as risky as it would have been for many others.

[spenoza]

I do wonder why the SGX was as expensive as it was. It didn't have that much more in the way of components and logic, and coming out when it did some of those parts costs should have been lower than when the PC Engine first released.

I also wonder if the Hu6280 had headroom for clock speed increases and if so if an additional clock speed mode could have made it easier to coordinate the additional capabilities of the SGX.

[SignOfZeta]

If you look at a lot of the other late 80s electronics being made in Japan you’ll see that a “premium” game system that’s double priced for no explainable reason fits right in. The high end CD players of 1989 were pornographically overbuilt to the point where people pay good money for them even now, when there are way better sounding players. They are scrumptious. They wanted the Pioneer PD-93 of video games.

[SignOfZeta]

Nov 16, 2020 0:25:34 GMT dshadoff said:

I'm not aware of any specific information from anybody at either company at that time, other than what was published in the magazines (which was always upbeat).

However, given that NEC Avenue published only one of the 5 SuperGrafx games (in 1990), and Hudson Soft published all 4 of the others - from the first in November 1989 to the last in August 1991 - I'd be inclined to think that Hudson Soft thought the machine was a good idea.

Well they’d be fools not to sell software to a known captive audience like that. If you look at the titles in question though...were any of those greenlit after the SGX went on sale? It seems to me like they probably sat around for a while and probably took so long to come out because they were never priority projects. That’s all theory on my end, but it makes sense.

My point in asking that question was,...”was NEC more interested in the SGX existing than Hudson was?” Compared to the enthusiasm shown to the CD system, I think maybe so. I think NEC wanted the $150-200 margin on the one time sale of the thing and Hudson didn't care. They certainly didn’t flood it with games.

[Black_Tiger]

Nov 16, 2020 19:05:13 GMT SignOfZeta said:

Nov 16, 2020 0:25:34 GMT dshadoff said:

I'm not aware of any specific information from anybody at either company at that time, other than what was published in the magazines (which was always upbeat).

However, given that NEC Avenue published only one of the 5 SuperGrafx games (in 1990), and Hudson Soft published all 4 of the others - from the first in November 1989 to the last in August 1991 - I'd be inclined to think that Hudson Soft thought the machine was a good idea.

Well they’d be fools not to sell software to a known captive audience like that. If you look at the titles in question though...were any of those greenlit after the SGX went on sale? It seems to me like they probably sat around for a while and probably took so long to come out because they were never priority projects. That’s all theory on my end, but it makes sense.

My point in asking that question was,...”was NEC more interested in the SGX existing than Hudson was?” Compared to the enthusiasm shown to the CD system, I think maybe so. I think NEC wanted the $150-200 margin on the one time sale of the thing and Hudson didn't care. They certainly didn’t flood it with games.

They were also looking forward to that sweet Power Console money.

[SignOfZeta]

Don’t forget the RAU-30!

[exodus]

Sometimes I think about whether a supergrafx duo would've made sense. The obvious answer is no, of course, and this is total fantasy. But the idea of integrating it once you made an "all-in-one" console seems appealing, because as a dev you could still reasonably make hucard games for longer, costs would've been lower for NEC by the time they released the duo, and with the compatibility you wouldn't really have to worry about whether you were fragmenting the market. Obviously there were some good reasons they didn't do it (I assume cost), but I would love to see the economics of how much less the supergrafx chipset cost by the time the duo came out. Looks like my dream is finally coming true with the analogue duo (not that I'm gonna be able to get one), so it'd be interesting to see if any homebrew devs make use of the power advantage. Technically this person already has, though even they can't test it on hardware:

[SignOfZeta]

Well, yeah. How more much did it *really* cost to make an SGX? $50 maybe? And by the time the Duo came out that would have been less so it does seem like they could began the Duo range with SGX compatibility and unified two dead-ends in their hardware tree of life.

However...why? Why spend one cent? Let’s consider that by the time even the Japanese black Duos came out (late 91 in Japan) the SGX had already seen it’s final release. Out of five total. There were two SGX game in 1991, the last ones. There were dozens of other non-Super HuCARDs released that year as well as many CDs. They were $25 more than the earliest CDROM titles like Ys I&II. (...seriously....compare 1941 to Ys...) You want to spend $1M raising the cost of 100,000 systems by $10 just to ensure compatibility with games no longer for sale? Games that are “Super” in ways even now I personally can’t even detect unless some maniac like Black Tiger points them out to me and afterwards I’m totally unimpressed? Just so Vasteel 2 can mention it on boot up?

The SGX was unique in game history for its near total lack of support. Even for a terrible idea (not Super enough, too soon, too expensive, too big) it was a total dud compared to other extremely bad ideas like the 32X. You can say, “Well, if they had put it in the Duo then maybe someone would have used it.” but I’d say they almost certainly never would. I say this based on the fact that ONE game so far had done that, a HuCARD, and a lot of HuCARD games came out between the SGX and the Duo, maybe 80 or more, that made zero use of SGX features. Why doesn’t, for example, Bonk 2 use the SGX extra features? Or Power League IV, or Final Solider?

The worst SGX related idea NEC had was making the thing in the first place. Cutting their losses by killing it off was brutal but it was the only smart choice after launching such a stupid system.

EDIT: I have to say, I fully support “SuperDuo” techniques in current day homebrew! My comments apply to the theoretical rationale of guys who are probably dead now.

[exodus]

The "why" wouldn't be for backward compatibility but for forward compatibility. Basically allowing devs to make use of the supergrafx tech by ensuring the audience was large enough. Or using supergrafx tech in CD games. I mean, it would fragment the market a bit!! But it would've given them a stronger machine to move forward with. Of course nobody was using the "optional" SGX stuff when it was only available on supergrafx, but if it were integrated into the Duo that extra power would've been a lot more appealing. They made arcade card games after all, why not SGX CD games?

Again though, very unlikely scenario, plenty of reasons not to do it, it's just a thought experiment about something I've have liked to see. The way the supergrafx deals with parallax is super impressive (talking about aldynes here: youtu.be/vvBctR39Rd0?t=495). The supergrafx itself was doomed to the scrap yard for sure, but I wonder if the idea of re-use of the tech was ever even entertained.

[spenoza]

Here's the way I look at this: the SuperGrafx wasn't a bad idea, necessarily. The timing was bad and the pricing was bad. Had the SuperGrafx been sat on for another year and then released without such a price markup there may have been some hope for it. I do question the complaints about the extra CPU burden, though. The SNES struggled at times to handle its own 128-sprite limit. Now, it also didn't have the same overhead from managing audio (something the PC Engine could also partly mitigate on CD titles), but the PC Engine was generally more proficient as moving things around on screen. If lesser developers ran into the same problems as those on the SNES that wouldn't necessarily be a black mark against the system itself, because there would still be more effective and talented developers putting out strong titles. Even the PC Engine had a lot of dud titles from poor or under-resourced/under-equipped developers. You see that on any platform.

Either way, this thread is indeed a lament for the SuperGrafx, a machine that didn't have to be such a failure and that could have had a future.

[Black_Tiger]

Nov 17, 2020 1:10:11 GMT SignOfZeta said:

Don’t forget the RAU-30!

If NEC did any advertising for the RAU-30 bitd, the tag line must've been "It works".

[a]

Does anyone want to talk about the SGX’s crazy hardware design? I dont mean the internals, but the look of the console itself. I wonder how many people were put off by that design in the face of the extremely beautiful coregrafx...