The TurboExpress

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Released in 1990, the Turbo Express was unique among portable systems in that it was the only portable system that consisted of the same basic hardware and played the exact same games as their main console. Nevertheless, this was not enough to save it from failure and relative obscurity. There are a variety of reasons but they essentially come down to cost and available games.

The TurboExpress featured the same HuC6280 (a variation of the 65C02) running at 7.16 MHz as the TurboGrafx-16 and the same 16-bit HUC6270 graphics processor with 64KB VRAM. It also played the same HuCard games (though obviously not CD based games that event he TurboGrafx-16 needed an add-on for). The screen has a resolution of 400×270 and just like it’s big brother the TurboGrafx Express could display 481 out of a pallet of 512 colors. All pretty impressive for its time.

So what was the problem? Well, the biggest problem was lack of good games. While the TurboGrafx-16 and by extension the Turbo Express came out of the gate pretty strong as far as quality games go, for most of their commercial lives the games came at a trickle and were hit and miss in terms of quality. At least outside of Japan. In Japan, the TurboGrafx-16 was one of the most popular consoles that ever was. But there was an order of magnitude more games released there, many of which were very good.

The next problem was price. The Turbo Express was introduced at $249 and rose quickly to $299 before eventually dropping to $249 again. After inflation, that’s the equivalent of $500-$600 today. Pretty steep for a handheld especially given that the Game Boy could be had for less than $100.

Battery life probably played a role too. Driving a powerful console with a color back-lit LCD took its toll on batteries. 6 AA batteries would only last 3 hours. By contrast, 4 AA batteries powered the Game Boy for up to 40 hours. That’s a massive difference.

So how does the Turbo Express stack up today? While I think the TurboGrafx-16 is an incredible system, I don’t think the screen on the Turbo Express holds up well today. This is really true of all those other early color handhelds as well like the Nomad, Game Gear and Lynx. No doubt there are a variety of projects to replace those LCDs with more modern equivalents but unless you want to undertake such a project you are probably better off finding an emulator for your android device instead or buying one of the various modern portable retrogaming systems.