Buying a SuperGrafx: five cards, and everything else it already plays

NEC sold about 75,000 SuperGrafx units. The machine arrived on 8 December 1989, stayed in Japan, and five HuCards were ever made that require it.

Most guides stop there, which leaves the person actually holding the auction page without the three facts that decide whether the purchase works.

The five cards are the famous part. The adaptor on the back is the part that will occupy your afternoon.

It plays the entire standard HuCard library

Every ordinary PC Engine HuCard runs on a SuperGrafx. The backward compatibility is complete, so the several hundred cards that make the PC Engine worth owning — the shooters, the Hudson platformers, the whole 1987–1993 run — are all available to this machine on day one.

Inside, NEC doubled the video hardware: two HuC6270 video display controllers instead of one, joined by a HuC6202 video priority controller whose job is to decide, layer by layer, which of the two chips wins each pixel. Main working RAM went from 8 KB to 32 KB. Video RAM went to 128 KB, split as 64 KB per controller.

Five HuCards use any of it. The extra silicon sits idle for everything else you put in the slot, and it is worth being clear-eyed about that before the money moves.

The five cards, and the one that is often counted as a sixth

The SuperGrafx-only library is short enough to list in full: Battle Ace, Daimakaimura (the home conversion of Capcom's Ghouls'n Ghosts), Aldynes, 1941: Counter Attack, and Madō King Granzört. Five cards. They do not run on a white PC Engine, a CoreGrafx, or a CoreGrafx II.

Darius Plus is the sixth title you will see mentioned, and it belongs in a different column. It is a standard HuCard that carries SuperGrafx enhancements, marked PC-SG on the card, and it plays on ordinary PC Engine hardware as well. If a listing describes it as a SuperGrafx exclusive, the listing is wrong, and that is usually a sign the seller is working from a spreadsheet and has never had the card in hand.

Those five cards were expensive when they were new — dedicated SuperGrafx HuCards are recorded at up to roughly US$110 at retail, against ordinary cards at a fraction of that.

This one reaches a modern television on its own

The SuperGrafx carries a 5-pin DIN AV connector with composite video and stereo audio, and the socket is on the side of the case rather than the back. With the correct cable it goes straight into the yellow-white-red inputs that most surviving televisions still have. Nothing is opened and nothing is modified.

This is the one area where the SuperGrafx is the easy machine of the family. The original white PC Engine of 1987 gives you an RF connector and asks you to solve the rest. The SuperGrafx was built after NEC had already accepted that a games console should hand you a picture.

The CD-ROM² connects through an adaptor, and the picture does not travel with it

The SuperGrafx does not fit the IFU-30 interface unit that the CD-ROM² system docks into. The case is too large. NEC's answer was the ROM² Adaptor, model RAU-30, released in Japan on 20 April 1990 — a shaped extension that presents a PC-Engine-sized profile to the interface unit so the SuperGrafx can sit behind it. With the adaptor in place, both the CD-ROM² and the Super CD-ROM² add-ons work.

Here is the part that catches people, reported consistently by owners who have assembled the stack: the RAU-30 does not carry video through to the interface unit. The picture has to come from the SuperGrafx's own AV socket on the side of the machine, while the audio comes from the interface unit. One console, one CD add-on, and two cables leaving from two different boxes.

So a complete SuperGrafx CD setup is four separate purchases — console, RAU-30, interface unit, CD-ROM² drive — and the RAU-30 is the scarcest of them by some distance. If a seller lists a SuperGrafx as "CD ready", the question to ask is whether the adaptor is in the box.

What thirty-five years show up on

The expansion connector on the back is the part worth examining in the photographs. Corrosion on those pins is a known complaint across the whole family — the white PC Engine, the CoreGrafx, and the SuperGrafx share the design, and hobbyists distribute 3D-printed covers specifically to keep dust and moisture off them. A clear, well-lit photograph of that connector tells you more about how a machine was stored than any description will.

Ask for the AV socket to be shown working, since it is the machine's only practical video output. Ask what power supply is included; NEC's original units are old, and the polarity on this family is not the arrangement most modern adaptors assume. And if the five dedicated cards are part of the deal, ask for photographs of the cards themselves as well as the boxes.

Who the machine is for

If you want Daimakaimura and Aldynes running on the hardware they were written for, this is the only machine that does it. If you want a PC Engine, the CoreGrafx does everything the SuperGrafx does for the other several hundred cards, at a fraction of the money and in a third of the shelf space.

The interesting position is the third one: people who buy the SuperGrafx because it is the machine NEC built when it still believed the PC Engine had another generation in it. None of this hardware carried forward. The Duo, the later CD models, the LD-ROM² PAC for the LaserActive — none of them inherited the second video chip.

The port matched. The signals matched. The console was simply too big to sit where the designers had left room, so a piece of shaped plastic had to be manufactured, sold separately, and kept for thirty-five years.