"The PC Engine was a collaborative effort between Japanese software maker Hudson Soft (which maintains a chip-making division) and NEC. Hudson was looking for financial backing for a game console they had designed, and NEC was interested in entering the lucrative game market. The PC Engine was and is a very small video game console, due primarily to a very efficient three-chip architecture and its use of HuCards; credit-card sized data cartridges. "HuCard" (Hudson Card; also referred to as "TurboChip" in North America) was derived from Hudson Soft. The cards were the size of a credit card (but slightly thicker) and thus were somewhat similar to the card format used by the Sega Master System for budget games. However, unlike the Sega Master System (which also supported cartridges), the TurboGrafx-16 used HuCards exclusively. TG-16 featured an enhanced MOS Technology 65C02 processor and a custom 16-bit graphics processor, as well as a custom video encoder chip, all designed by Hudson. The HES logo found on the manual of every Japanese game stood for "Hudson Entertainment System".


The TurboGrafx-16 was the first console to have an optional CD module, allowing the standard benefits of the CD medium such as more storage, cheaper media costs, and redbook audio. The efficient design, backing of many of Japan's major software producers, and the additional CD ROM capabilities gave the PC Engine a very wide variety of software, with several hundred games for both the HuCard and CD formats.

The PC Engine was extremely popular in Japan, beating Nintendo's Famicom in sales soon after its release, with no fewer than twelve console models released from 1987 to 1993. It was capable of up to 482 colors at once in several resolutions, and featured very robust sprite handling abilities. The Hudson-designed chroma encoder delivered a video signal more vibrant and colorful than both the Famicom and the Sega Mega Drive and is largely regarded as the equal to Nintendo's Super Famicom, although that system was not released in Japan until 1990.



As graphics technology improved, gamers continued to stick to the PC Engine despite its shortcomings. Erotic games were a key factor in making the PC Engine popular, and this popularity was maintained far beyond the lifespan of a regular video game console. New games were released for the PC-Engine up until 1999.

Despite the system's success, it started to lose ground to the Super Famicom. NEC made one final effort to resuscitate the system with the release of the Arcade Card expansion, bringing the total amount of RAM up to a then-massive 2048K; a few Arcade Card games were conversions of popular Neo Geo titles. The additional memory even allowed the system to display rendered graphics like those used in the Donkey Kong Country series. The expansion was never released in North America." (Wikipedia)



What are Goodsets?
Goodsets are sets created by Cowering's GoodTools, a renamer program that has the ability to "see past" the headers attached to many console ROMs. These tools are fairly comprehensive but have not had many updates in the last year. File naming is not always accurate, but these are great "starter sets". They look to catalogue every known ROM of every game. Since each game can be packaged with goodmerge, there's is usually a very small increase in the collection size. Since No-intro uses zip, their sets tend to be larger than the 7zipped goodsets ( great example of this is the N64 set... the no-intro set is ~10gb where the goodset can fit on a dvdr ).

NEC - PC Engine - TurboGrafx 16 No-Intro

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