Why No TG-16 Knockoffs?

[turboexpress]

I should buy up all the $1 and $2 Gameboy carts on ebay.

yeah, I got what you are saying celery. You are most likely right. Hidden gems are dug up and polished. Well said man.

[Tanooki]

Gameboy is handheld. There's a good many of people who won't deal with them just because they're bound to a tiny screen and considered fairly basic, even by NES standards. Combine the fact that there's a huge mass of games for it both in quantity of releases and quantity of copies of the games and most of them will never slide up the insanity scale which is a good thing. As I see it, it's a weird insurance policy for much of the library because the prices keep staying way down, even on notable franchise titles, so at least in the long run there will be one last affordable Nintendo cart based system from the last century.

[Edmond Dantes]

Snobbish and incorrect looking how expensive the stuff has become.

Besides that, releasing a clone would not drive up the prices. If anything it would do the opposite. High prices happen due to scarcity. If something is being bootlegged, it is no longer scarce.

On that note, some PC-Engine games have actually been bootlegged--Sapphire being one example--so clearly there's a market.

[Tanooki]

I'm not one for it normally, but I would totally endorse tg16/pce bootlegging at this rate for anyone and everyone who didn't want to eat it that bad. Look at the price of the games known as fairly universally poor on hucard for instance in the US and see what they get hucard alone let alone complete. When even the turds get to that point, unless you just have a deep wallet and don't care, you might as well...right? Ultimately it's not about the collectors and their puffed up self inflicted values in the end, it's the games and the quality and variety they have in each. People should be capable of experiencing each and every one of them without having to resort to back alley kidney surgery donations. I think I'm being pretty consistent as I've said for probably 3 or more years now I'd still pay someone $50 to fire up a kazoo writer, put Little Samson on one of their cheap boards that supports it, throw it in a new shell and print off a nice like for like copy of the label. It's a great game, but pushing $1000 to hell with that.

[bb_hood]

If anything it would do the opposite. High prices happen due to scarcity. If something is being bootlegged, it is no longer scarce.

On that note, some PC-Engine games have actually been bootlegged--Sapphire being one example--so clearly there's a market.

Bootlegs will not affect prices at all. All hu-card games can already be played on a 80$ flash cart. All the cd games can just be downloaded, burned and played.
All these games can be played without buying the actual copies of the games themselves. The appearance of more bootlegs wont decrease the market value for the rare games. Collectors dont care at all about fakes, bootlegs, or repros.

You can burn a million copies of Sapphire and it wont make an original authentic copy any easier to find.

People should be capable of experiencing each and every one of them without having to resort to back alley kidney surgery donations..

Um, they dont have to.
These games can obviously be played by much cheaper means, so constantly complaining about 'collectors ruining everything' is silly.

[Tanooki]

I'm not being silly, and read the rest I wrote. Clearly it can be done cheaper. Piracy using a flash kit and burned discs. Just pony up for the system and you're good to go. That's what I was saying and would back entirely because of cost. This way you can enjoy the games and let the scalpers just hurt each other and those who don't do a little research first into alternatives.

[Gameguy]

Bootlegs will not affect prices at all. All hu-card games can already be played on a 80$ flash cart. All the cd games can just be downloaded, burned and played.
All these games can be played without buying the actual copies of the games themselves. The appearance of more bootlegs wont decrease the market value for the rare games. Collectors dont care at all about fakes, bootlegs, or repros.

You can burn a million copies of Sapphire and it wont make an original authentic copy any easier to find.

Burned copies don't mean anything, but Sapphire and other games had factory pressed bootlegs made. With Sapphire no attempt was made to distinguish the bootlegs from real copies so plenty of collectors would have been buying them before anyone realized they were copies. You'd only know if you had a real copy to compare it to. If a flood of copies start floating around and people think they're real, the prices would drop.

Here's a site selling more factory pressed "repros". Some games weren't released here so are grey market, others were and are clear pirates. They look good too, no mention to their legality though. I'm sure plenty of people just love them and don't think of them as fake, they just think of them as reprints the same way books are later reprinted.

https://pceworks.wordpress.com/

[Gentlegamer]

Burned copies don't mean anything, but Sapphire and other games had factory pressed bootlegs made. With Sapphire no attempt was made to distinguish the bootlegs from real copies so plenty of collectors would have been buying them before anyone realized they were copies. You'd only know if you had a real copy to compare it to. If a flood of copies start floating around and people think they're real, the prices would drop.

Here's a site selling more factory pressed "repros". Some games weren't released here so are grey market, others were and are clear pirates. They look good too, no mention to their legality though. I'm sure plenty of people just love them and don't think of them as fake, they just think of them as reprints the same way books are later reprinted.

https://pceworks.wordpress.com/

That site is the same guy who made the Sapphire bootlegs and deliberately passed them off as authentic.

[bb_hood]

Burned copies don't mean anything, but Sapphire and other games had factory pressed bootlegs made. With Sapphire no attempt was made to distinguish the bootlegs from real copies so plenty of collectors would have been buying them before anyone realized they were copies. You'd only know if you had a real copy to compare it to. If a flood of copies start floating around and people think they're real, the prices would drop.

Here's a site selling more factory pressed "repros". Some games weren't released here so are grey market, others were and are clear pirates. They look good too, no mention to their legality though. I'm sure plenty of people just love them and don't think of them as fake, they just think of them as reprints the same way books are later reprinted.

https://pceworks.wordpress.com/

Thats a big 'IF' though, if any very rare expensive game were to surface in any large quantity it would have to be nearly indistinguishable to fool people.

Reprints serve a purpose but they wont devalue a truly rare or valuable item.

[MetalFRO]

I'd like to see a universal PCE/TG16 clone that could natively use BOTH TurboChips and Hu-Cards in the same slot, w/o the use of an adapter, through perhaps some kind of switching system, or software trickery. Ideally, it would have good output (i.e. HDMI or at least an option for an RGB signal of some kind), 2 controller ports (as mentioned before), support for original controllers (both US & Japanese), and also a built-in CD drive. The Japanese aftermarket for PCE stuff isn't nearly as terrible (for the most part) as the US market, mostly because the PCE was huge in Japan, so any US games that originated in Japan are going to be far more common, and way more copies would naturally be on the market. I've often considered getting a PCE and just importing games, because they're still cheaper than buying most US releases, even with international shipping. And like the Sega CD, the PCE CD and/or TGCD will play CD-R copies. NOT THAT I'M ADVOCATING PIRACY, but if I ever want to play Syd Mead's Terraforming or something like that, it'll have to be a burned copy, because I'll never be able to afford the genuine article. Unless someone saw fit to re-release it, then I'd consider going that route.

[turboexpress]

if you tally up all the responses most people are pro-clone and think that clones don't drive prices up on original stuff.

ok, cool.

I really hope you are right!

[bb_hood]

if you tally up all the responses most people are pro-clone and think that clones don't drive prices up on original stuff.

ok, cool.

I really hope you are right!

I am anti-clone because Ive never met a clone that diddnt seem like a cheap-quality system.
I think that if wal-mart and gamestop started selling TG16 clone machines that only played original hu-cards, then yes ebay prices on original hu-cards would go up. There is still alot of room for the more 'common' TG games to increase in value. US Turbo Grafx games are hard to find.
This really wouldnt bother me because Ive got all the turbo/pc engine games I need. I have japanese versions of all the rarer stuff like cotton, terraforming, Super Air Zonk, Bonk 3; all were like 30$ each.

[BlastProcessing402]

It was only really popular in Japan, and a lot of the best stuff there was on CD-ROM. So a knockoff would have to include a CD drive (and somehow account for the system cards) to really be complete, and they'd still only have one market to sell the thing in. Even if they did sell it elsewhere, they'd then have to account for the different pinouts on the TG16 turbochips from the PCE hucards.

Seems like a lot of hassle for such a cult system. Easier to just knock out another NES, Super Nintendo, or Genesis clone, and almost certainly a better return on investment.

[Steve W]

if wal-mart and gamestop started selling TG16 clone machines that only played original hu-cards, then yes ebay prices on original hu-cards would go up. There is still alot of room for the more 'common' TG games to increase in value. US Turbo Grafx games are hard to find.

But I'd imagine that, because the Turbo didn't do so great over here, they'd either have a bunch of the more popular Hudsonsoft games built-in, or they'd maybe re-release a bunch of the better titles to accompany it, maybe even multi-carts. They couldn't just put it out like the retro NES/SNES/Genesis consoles in stores now, since the games aren't common.


Here's a good question... do you think anybody would ever design a PC Engine/TurboDuo plug-and-play? In the past decade we've had NES, Atari, Genesis, Commodore 64, and MSX on-a-chip technology - do you think NEC might do the same with the PC Engine? I'd like to say yes, but as cheap as used PC Engines are in Japan, I don't think it would be likely. There's plenty of cheap ways Japanese people can play their old PC Engine games. And since the market in Europe and America never took off, there'd be no reason to develop it for over here.