With the innovative design and power of the PC-FX, the face of videogaming has changed. Sporting a 32-BIT V810 processor, millions of colors, and one of the highest quality FMV in any home video game system, the PC-FX is definitely the system to get your hands on for some great gaming excitement.
It all started with the joint collaboration of NEC Home Electronics and Hudson Soft of Japan that spawned the PC-FX on December 23, 1994...
The PC-FX is one of the most unique video game systems ever made. Instead of the usual "flat & square" designs associated with video game systems, NEC decided to use a different approach when designing the PC-FX. One main factor was making the system expandable. In the PC market, this concept was already in full swing. Basically, if you compare a desktop PC to a tower PC, the latter will almost always have more expansion room. So, breaking away from the common console design, it was decided to create a tower video game system that offered (in the final design) 3 expansion ports for additional upgrades, and peripherals.
In addition to playing PC-FX games, the unit could also play audio CDs (with an expansive CD menu control screen), CD+Gs, and Kodak CDs for viewing your home photos. This option allowed you to zoom in/out and rotate the photo at will.
The PC-FX had 3 expansion slots. The front expansion slot was primarly used for the FX-BMP, a memory expansion module that allowed you to save games to it, rather than the FX internal memory. The rear and bottom expansion ports were available for connections to the PC-9800 series of computers made by NEC. One of those connections were used for a PC-FX-to-SCSI adapter which allowed the FX to be used as a SCSI CD-ROM drive. To the rear of the unit, you can also find direct A/V, S-VHS connections, and the power cord. Voltage and other power information can be found to the top of the rear panel.
The PC-FX control pad should be familiar to anyone who has played the PC Engine. It is composed of 6 action buttons, run/select buttons, and 2 mode switches. The mode switches would give the 6 action buttons special features in games that supported them. For example, in Kishin Doji Zenki: Vajura Fight, when you turn on the mode option, the top 3 action buttons become special moves, when regularly you would have to do a D-pad movement to execute the moves. Additionally, NEC also released the PC-FX Mouse which was supported in most of the Anime Freak FX series of games and in some RPGs for faster control.
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NAME
PC-FX
MANUFACTURER
NEC
ORIGIN
Japan
YEAR
December 23 1994
CONTROLLERS
Control pad with 6 buttons
CPU
NEC V810 RISC (32 bit)
SPEED
21.5 MHz
CO-PROCESSOR
Graphics CPU (9 parallax scrolls, cellophane, fade, rotation, and priority effects)
RAM
2 MB + 32 KB (backup RAM)
VRAM
1.25 MB
ROM
1 MB
GRAPHIC MODES
640 x 480
COLORS
16,777,000
SOUND
16-Bit Stereo with 2 ADPCM channels and 6 sample channels at 44.1kHz.
SIZE / WEIGHT
132 mm (w) x 267 mm (d) x 244 mm (h)
I/O PORTS
3 expansion slots, Audio output (left & right), Composite video output, SVHS video output, 2 controller ports, DC out 5v 40 mA
MEDIA
Standard CD-ROM media, 2x speed drive, 256KB CD Buffer
POWER SUPPLY
consumption : 16W
PERIPHERALS
FX-BMP (memory expansion module), PC-FX-to-SCSI (allows the FX to be used as a SCSI CD-ROM drive), PC-FX Mouse
