Hudson HuC6270

Hudson Soft (manufactured by Seiko Epson) · 1987 · Hudson Soft HuC6270 Video Display Controller

The video chip that gave the PC Engine its arcade-quality 2D: 64 hardware sprites, up to 16 on a line, designed by the game developer Hudson Soft rather than a chip company.

The HuC6270 was developed by Hudson Soft — better known as a game developer and publisher — and manufactured for it by Seiko Epson. It was the video display controller of NEC's PC Engine, released in Japan in 1987 and in North America as the TurboGrafx-16, and the upgraded PC Engine SuperGrafx used two of them. Its strength was sprites. The HuC6270 can display up to 64 sprites on screen, with as many as 16 on a single horizontal line — double the eight-per-line limit of the NES and four times the TMS9918's four — which is a large part of why the PC Engine was so well suited to faithful conversions of arcade shooters and action games. Resolution starts at 256 by 224 pixels and can go as high as 512 by 240. The HuC6270 does not produce colour on its own. It outputs pixel data with palette indices, and a companion colour encoder holds the palettes for the background and sprites with 9-bit RGB colour depth. Its video memory is external, reached over a 16-bit address bus.