Last Updated on: 5th January 2024, 12:30 pm
Web site: www.zeograd.com
Category: Emulators
Platform: Linux, DOS, Windows, BSD, BeOS, MorphOS
License: GNU GPL
Interface: GUI
Wikipedia:
First release: 1999 (?)
Hu-Go! – a PC engine emulator of 8-16 bits console. It is a free software and it runs on several operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD, DOS, Microsoft windows. It is able to run games as roms, real CDs or several kinds of dump from them.
It’s a wonderful little console with plenty of hits. We can estimate the number of games to 300 on cartridge (called HuCard because Hudson was very involved in this machine, however distributed by Nec) and about 400 on CDs.
Indeed, although this console is pretty old, it already featured a cd drive. Even if only x1 speed, this extension was enabling ADPCM sound (for hi quality digitized sound/speech), cd sound, obviously, and very hi capacity for games, allowing anime sequences and even digitized video at the end (Huvideo, very impressive).
The raw console was featuring 6 PCM voices, with an instrument of 32 samples of 5 bits for each, a 8-16 bits processor called Hu6280, which is a boosted 6502 with 16 bits shortcuts for video registers and extra addressing modes. It had also an addressable size of 64 kb among which could be fitted 8 bank of 8 kb each. A whole bank were devoted for RAM (which was 8 kb).
Concerning the video, it was handled by a pure 16 bits processor with 32 kb of RAM. Able to handle directly 64 sprites on two planes and a 8×8 pixels tiles plane, it was perfect for creating hi speed shoot’em ups (the predilection domain of the pc engine). Furthermore, it could handle 16 palettes of 16 colors for sprites and another 16 palettes of 16 colors for tiles. Each color could be chosen among a 512 color palette (3 bits for Red, 3 bits for Blue and 3 bits for Green).
