Nobody Thought We Would Still Be Playing

Nobody Thought We Would Still Be Playing

A PC Engine Duo came across the bench this week. Black, flat, the HuCard slot on the left and the CD-ROM drive on the right. I studied art before I sold games, and I worked in architecture, so I look at a console the way I look at a building. The Duo holds up. The material has a sharpness to it. The colours on the controller were chosen, not defaulted. The power and reset buttons sit in the shell as though the shell had been drawn around them. And there is not one unnecessary line on it anywhere. In 1991 Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry gave it a Good Design Award. I did not know that when I first admired it. I just admired it.

I only learned later where that shape came from. Hudson offered the chipset to Nintendo first, as an add-on for the Famicom. Nintendo said no. Hudson took it to NEC, folded the whole system into three chips — the sound went inside the CPU — and the machine that came out, the first PC Engine, is still the smallest home console ever built: 135 by 130 by 35 millimetres. Rejected, and then that. The Duo is where that thinking arrives four years later, with a disc drive inside it.

It is also, almost always, leaking. Open one and you find fluid from the capacitors sitting on the board. NEC used surface-mount electrolytics in the Duo — a newer technology at the time, and a poor batch of it. Two years later they shipped the Duo-R with ordinary through-hole capacitors, and those units mostly survive to this day. The Duo-R rarely needs a recap. It simply does not hold up next to the Duo.

Here is the part that decides what I do. A surface-mount capacitor does not announce itself. It looks unchanged. It keeps working while it leaks, and the fluid travels through the board to the other side. So when a Duo arrives and plays perfectly, I send it out for a full recap anyway. I do not hold the iron myself. A friend of mine does our repairs — he is certified, and this machine is not kind to him. Every capacitor comes out, including the ones still doing their job. I saw the same thing in architecture: a building that leans too far toward beauty costs more to keep standing. It goes this way with cars, too. The beautiful ones ask more of you, and there is no way around it. Even so, I love this design.

None of this was a mistake. I do not think anyone at NEC imagined people would still be playing this machine thirty-five years later. A capacitor that lasts a decade is not a failure; it answered the question it was asked. We are simply asking a different question now, and someone has to answer it — one board at a time, before the machine goes back out to whoever is next.