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Post by soop on Apr 17, 2018 13:54:17 GMT
so, kind of an experimental idea here, let's see how it goes. In the year 22XX, the world is in the grip of three warring megacorporations; Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. They dominated the world via VR, and hooked and enslaved humanity. As the sole surviving member of Hudsonsoft, you are humanities last hope. Using an experimental time machine and knowledge gleaned from Internet forum posts of the early 21st century, you must travel back in time and correct one thing from the past that prevented the PC Engine/Turbo Duo from gaining the foothold it needed to compete with Sega and Nintendo.
First comment on the reason the post above failed to change the timeline in any meaningful way, (the funnier the better) and then suggest an alternate change. I'll start things off.
In the new timeline Mortal Kombat was released on HuCard in North America.
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Post by lukester on Apr 17, 2018 14:26:45 GMT
Monkey paw thread?
If Mortal kombat wasn’t exclusive on turbo then it didn’t matter.
Changing the past: Hudson used cartridges instead of hucards. Allows larger games for better prices?
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Post by Black_Tiger on Apr 17, 2018 15:51:55 GMT
A new timeline is just that, running in parallel with what you know as the original timeline, which is impossible though, given the existence of time travel.
In soop's first, second and third new timelines, Nec Interactive fared much poorer than in this one because in his first bastardization, nobody wanted to play such an inferior port of Mortal Kombat. In the second, no one was willing to pay $250 for such an amazing port and in the third NEC was forced to shutdown their North American operations altogether, after taking a $200 loss on each of the 3 million copies they sold of that amazing port that they retailed at a normal game price.
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Post by sunteam_paul on Apr 22, 2018 10:56:08 GMT
Monkey paw thread? If Mortal kombat wasn’t exclusive on turbo then it didn’t matter. Changing the past: Hudson used cartridges instead of hucards. Allows larger games for better prices? (skipping BTs post because I can't make sense of it) Why it didn't work:Hudson used cartridges, but found that this had no effect of the actual storage abilities of the hardware, also the PC Engine itself was bigger to incorporate this. Lacking the 'hook' of a small, powerful console, the public viewed this as just another NES and completely skipped it in favour of the upcoming Mega Drive. NEC's CEO became depressed and pulled out of the electronics market completely, switching the track of the company to exclusively produce novelty sweets full of bean curd. Unfortunately, a bad crop ended up poisoning 20% of the Japanese population and all exports were banned. Nations battled to fill the manufacturing void, and the resulting trade disputes cause World War 3 to break out. Changing the past:Capcom, Konami and SEGA are forced to sign an exclusivity deal to release titles only for the PC Engine.
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nando
Gun-headed
Posts: 97
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Post by nando on Apr 23, 2018 4:43:09 GMT
Disney corporation wanting a bigger share of the gaming market injects money into the American TG16 project. Opening up exclusive rights not only to Disney games but to many other American main stream franchises.
Castle of illusion Aladdin Quackshot Batman & Robin And many more see first releases or in the case of Final Fantasy franchise exclusive release.
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Post by spenoza on Apr 23, 2018 14:28:19 GMT
I think the best alternate history for the PC Engine involves the system having just a tad more system RAM, a second tile layer, and a larger cartridge address space. Hell, even without the second tile layer, 32 KiB of RAM and a larger cartridge address space (16 Mib) alone would have made a difference. Oh, and NEC America not blowing their entire budget on manufacturing more units up-front than anyone would have forecasted them selling.
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nullity
Gun-headed
Posts: 50
Fave PCE Shooter: Silent Debuggers
Fave PCE Platformer: Silent Debuggers
Fave PCE Game Overall: Mario
Fave PCE RPG: Silent Debuggers
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Post by nullity on Apr 23, 2018 16:20:00 GMT
Spenoza's idea would fail because Nintendo would become even more defensive and institute even more unfair/illegal business practices. Sega would respond by targeting NEC with their edgy smear ads and make Johnny Turbo's Feka agents a real thing. Also, with all the extra horsepower, devs would get sloppy and the system's library would never be as charming.
Ok, I defy anyone to explain why this wouldn't work:
I would go back in time with a printout of eBay's sold items listing for turbobs. I would provide this to NEC's American marketing team so they could let the world know that tg16 would be the best/safest investment of all time ever. Stores wouldn't be able to keep tg16 in stock!
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Post by Arkhan on May 2, 2018 4:06:13 GMT
Solution: When Tony Hawk becomes involved with the TurboGrafx-16(he actually did), I convince him that we need to make skateboard video games for the machine.
They're exclusive to the TurboGrafx/PC Engine.
Skateboarding in the 90s takes off (it does) and the games become cult classics, better than Skate or Die, and 720 in terms of popularity.
PC-FX releases with *actual 3D hardware*
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater becomes a NEC exclusive.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a PC-FX game.
NEC wins.
Cross over skateboard titles happen.
Keith Courage in Rippin' Zones RadZonk ThrashingZone
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2018 18:27:16 GMT
I think the best alternate history for the PC Engine involves the system having just a tad more system RAM, a second tile layer, and a larger cartridge address space. Hell, even without the second tile layer, 32 KiB of RAM and a larger cartridge address space (16 Mib) alone would have made a difference. Oh, and NEC America not blowing their entire budget on manufacturing more units up-front than anyone would have forecasted them selling. You know the 16 max scanline sprite limit the PCE has? I remember seeing a thread @ pcefx where it was stated that the video chip has much more bandwidth than it is used for sprite retrieving per scanline, but the internal chip memory (sprite registers) are only enough for 16. Basically it's a very disappointing hard limit for something that could have had handled much more (24? 32?). Imagine a PCE with double sprite-per-scanline limit, all complaints about not having a second tile layer would have been irrelevant when your machine is doing a 2nd layer Neo-Geo style without breaking a sweat.
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Post by spenoza on May 4, 2018 18:41:52 GMT
Yeah, I consider some of the PC Engine cost compromises similar to some of Sega's compromises with the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast's GPU was quite capable but was CPU-limited. Had the system been equipped with a more powerful CPU the polygon counts could have easily climbed upward a decent bit higher.
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Post by soop on May 5, 2018 22:59:34 GMT
I think the best alternate history for the PC Engine involves the system having just a tad more system RAM, a second tile layer, and a larger cartridge address space. Hell, even without the second tile layer, 32 KiB of RAM and a larger cartridge address space (16 Mib) alone would have made a difference. Oh, and NEC America not blowing their entire budget on manufacturing more units up-front than anyone would have forecasted them selling. You know the 16 max scanline sprite limit the PCE has? I remember seeing a thread @ pcefx where it was stated that the video chip has much more bandwidth than it is used for sprite retrieving per scanline, but the internal chip memory (sprite registers) are only enough for 16. Basically it's a very disappointing hard limit for something that could have had handled much more (24? 32?). Imagine a PCE with double sprite-per-scanline limit, all complaints about not having a second tile layer would have been irrelevant when your machine is doing a 2nd layer Neo-Geo style without breaking a sweat. Holy shit! Did not know that!
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2018 23:17:10 GMT
You know the 16 max scanline sprite limit the PCE has? I remember seeing a thread @ pcefx where it was stated that the video chip has much more bandwidth than it is used for sprite retrieving per scanline, but the internal chip memory (sprite registers) are only enough for 16. Basically it's a very disappointing hard limit for something that could have had handled much more (24? 32?). Imagine a PCE with double sprite-per-scanline limit, all complaints about not having a second tile layer would have been irrelevant when your machine is doing a 2nd layer Neo-Geo style without breaking a sweat. Holy shit! Did not know that! I need to find the source of this comment before people start atributing this to me lol. I didn't find the original statement but I found this: (please excuse the ultra wide print, that's how PCEFX is now lol)
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2018 23:24:22 GMT
Oh, and another semi-useless trivia: The PC Engine can only have 14 sprites per scanline exclusively in 320 horizontal resolution. Why? I have no idea, but you can download Chris Covell's Screen Dimension Test and run it in your PCE/Duo to check it out by yourself.
It's extremely dumb (especially since higher res (512?) still allows 16 sprites) but it's there for god knows what reason.
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Post by soop on May 5, 2018 23:52:14 GMT
Man, I love this stuff. Love talking to Rover about it too, he's kind of a celebrity to me
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