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For a Change Several incarnations of the PC Engine were made in Japan: CoreGrafx, CoreGrafx II and the Shuttle Core. All contained the same guts as the PC Engine, but differed cosmetically. The Shuttle Core offered no expansion port at all. 1991 brought about some new changes for corporate NEC. With the PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16 and their CD units still selling respectably well, NEC and Hudson Soft, a major software manufacturer, teamed up and became Turbo Technologies Incorporated or TTi for short. TTi brought out a sleek new unit called the PC Engine Duo in Japan and Turbo Duo in the states. The Duo was basically the PC Engine and CD-Unit all in one, but had a built-in Super System3 card and a revised BIOS, allowing for a marginal speed increase with load times. 1992 brought the Turbo Duo to North America. While selling relatively well in Japan, the Duo did not fair well in the US, lasting only a few years on the market. TTi just couldn’t match Sega’s marketing campaign. This signalled the end of NEC’s foray into the video game console market in the United States. For now, anyway. |
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Index: The Competition Gets Stronger |