NEC PC Engine/Turbografx |OT| – No friends to bring controllers? No problem!

Looks like gamedoctorhk sells them.

http://gamedoctorhk.com/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&keyword=Gear&inc_subcat=0&sort=20a&page=1

There’s a guy on Yahoo Auctions Japan who sells them. I bought one from him myself to fix a unit about 2 years ago. Still working perfectly. Problem is, you can’t use Yahoo Auctions unless you go through a proxy service.

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Yeah I’m kicking myself because I got all of my PCE stuff through a proxy service. Shipping is murder so I typically combine a large amount of stuff and defray the shipping costs by selling a few bits and pieces locally.

I have never attempted to retrobright anything before, but I had two PC engine consoles that needed a bit of TLC and given it was a fine sunny day and I had the day off work I decided I’d give it a whirl. I gave them 45 minutes in the Australian sun using 40 vol creme peroxide developer in some zip lock bags and checked on them every 15 minutes to move the solution around.




I could have left them longer but out of caution (and the fact I could see it working before my eyes!) I brought them in before they went too far. Really impressed with the results on both the systems and the controllers. Especially since one of them had a considerable amount of nicotine staining.

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Yeah they come up pretty good, and seem to stay white too.

A controller I did yellowed again, but it took like 7 years.

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Would love to get back to my PC Engine but the price of software really has gone up so much that it’s hard to justify dropping the money on some of the games last time I looked a few months back.

Are there any affordable titles worth checking out? Er, which weren’t included on the PC Engine Mini.

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So the controversial PCE Works has fixed up and released a long-lost PCE game, Dinoforce

The ROM is free, and a Hucard release is now for sale.

Damn the TG16 got the best box and card art.

I’ve been playing it today, it’s still a bit wonky but is pretty decent and is nice looking and sounding. Feels a bit like a colourful Rayxanber II?

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Nice!

Where are the dinos, though? :nerd_face:

So I lost impulse control and now have a briefcase setup coming…

It’s going to need a lot of de-yellowing too. Anyone ever taken apart the CD unit?

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Yeah, I took mine apart years ago to replace the gear that always breaks on them. It wasn’t that difficult.

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I kinda also want to us the CD player stand-alone as as a kitschy 80s vibes player.

It arrived and works flawlessly!


Maybe I’ll keep this as a composite unit and keep my modded Duo RX for RGB? Or maybe get that Turbo Everdrive+RGB unit for RGB usage with the white unit?

The ridiculous thing is the original Duo is my favourite PCE model, it’s the one I first saw in a magazine (CVG) and the first one I got. But so many models are great!

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Well I had a scare this afternoon.

After playing around with the new toy, I decided to play some of the same games on my RGB Duo RX on my PVM. Damn they look so goddamn good. I left on for a few minutes and then came back and it was dead. No power, no picture. Doh.

Opened it up and found quite a bit of rust had developed on the screws and lower shielding. Not good, I guess just my humid environment over time had caused that?

Took it all apart, the rust didn’t seem to have gotten to the actual board much. Cleaned the power connections with deoxit, no change. This board has no fuse, it was recapped about 5 years ago, all looked okay. I reflowed the solder on a few key points, still not working.

I thought it could have been the power supply but unlikely (it’s an official Mega Drive 2 power supply and I have never had a problem with them), more likely one of the voltage regulators or something. I was going to buy a new power supply to check anyway, but then I remembered the PSOne power supply is compatible. The voltage is wrong (7.5 instead of 9v) but the console regulates that down to 5V anyway.

Plugged it in, bam, back to life. It was the power supply.

Well anyway, I discovered the rust issue and am treating it, used some rust converter and scrubbed and sanded off the rusty parts. So it was good to find that before it got worse.

Well I bleached the CD unit.

It’s actually pretty tricky to safely take apart. But all still working.


Now need to do the white parts of the IFU itself.

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Looks new

It’s not quite all the way whitened. Could do with another long blast.

But it was extremely yellowed and I ran out of sunlight for the day.

One weird thing with white PC Engine consoles (not the CD unit), they almost always seem to develop a darker brown/yellow stain around the seam. I assumed it was grot, but no it’s yellowing, scrubbing doesn’t get it off and peroxide does, slowly.

Finally got an opportunity to play the R-Type port to PC Engine tonight. I have the two HuCard version. Really impressed by the quality of everything. I can imagine that it was the bee’s knees back when it released!

Played it on the Analogue Pocket with the TG-16 adapter. Felt like TurboExpress!

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It would have seemed like a mini arcade at release, particularly on the tiny white PCE.

Any recommendations for a good PCE/Turbo Duo controller extension cable? I found this on eBay but not sure of quality:

Ah, for the Japanese PC Engine you can just use an old apple Mac mini serial din extention cable! It’s the exact same layout and they’re dirt cheap.
I use one for my PC Engine controllers. 2.5 meters long :+1:

This is exactly like the one I use.

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