I’ve been working on a PC Engine emulator (aka TurboGrafx-16) after getting the bug to start looking at a new system, and I’ve found it to be pretty interesting hardware-wise. Originally released in 1987, its hardware is in a sort of awkward spot between the 3rd generation gaming conoles (NES, Sega Master System) and the 4th generation consoles (Genesis / Mega Drive, SNES), though it’s generally grouped with the latter due to featuring notably improved graphics over NES and SMS. It sold pretty well in Japan, but in North America it couldn’t really compete with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, and it never even released in Europe (officially). It’s historically notable for being the first gaming console to support CD-based games via its CD-ROM 2 add-on (aka TurboGrafx-CD). This post is specifically an overview of the PC Engine’s CPU, which I think is interesting in that it’s very fast for its time but has much more limited instruction set capabilities than its immediate competition .…