Originally Posted by
A Black Falcon
The SMS benefits from having sold okay in Europe and Brazil, other Western nations. And the SMS sold about 2 million in the US, too. Who knows how many Power Base Converters and Master Gear converters sold to play the games on the GG and Genesis, but those could add a little to the numbers as well.
Meanwhile the TG16 was only released in Europe in miniscule quantities as a test-market thing, and only 900,000 systems were produced for all of the Americas. That doesn't include Duos, but the Duo is thought to have sold only in the tens of thousands. (Same for the Turbo CD addon.)
The end result is, the TG16 sold worse than the SMS, selling less than half the number of systems, and games for the TG16 are similarly less common. SMS games are not common, but they're definitely a lot easier to find than TG16 games. There are some areas where the TG16 did better than others, particularly in cities where NEC apparently focused some of its early marketing, but overall games and hardware are much scarcer. And if the games are so hard to find, where would the demand for a clone system be? People only want clone systems if they actually have real games for the system that they want to play, after all.
And of course, the issue that a lot of games are on CDs and doing a clone of the Turbo CD would be tough is also an issue; no Genesis clones also have a Sega CD for instance, but so many of the better Turbo/PCE games are on CD that it's kind of essential, even more so than the Sega CD or 32X are (though clones of those would be nice, sure, for people who want to play those games without relying on old hardware).
That said, we well may see a Turbografx clone system sometime, but I can understand why we haven't so far. The system is fantastic, but it just didn't sell at all, sadly.