Nobody Thought We Would Still Be Playing

Nobody Thought We Would Still Be Playing

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. By that measure the PC Engine Duo is a good-looking machine. It is black and flat, with the HuCard slot on the left and the CD-ROM drive on the right. The material has a sharpness to it. The controller's colours are well chosen, and the power and reset buttons match the shell. And there is not one unnecessary line on it anywhere. NEC released it in Japan on 21 September 1991, and that same year it received a Good Design award, under a scheme then run by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

The idea behind that shape goes back to the first PC Engine in 1987. Hudson designed the system around just three chips, with the sound built into the processor itself, and the result is often listed as the smallest major home console ever released. Four years later, the Duo built a CD-ROM drive into the same idea.

It is also a machine that almost always arrives leaking. NEC used surface-mount electrolytic capacitors in the Duo. The repair site 8bitplus describes the problem: this type "will look unchanged until it leaks out everywhere," and the capacitors "continue to work (just not as well) while at the leaking stage." The fluid can travel through the tiny holes in the board to the other side. The Duo-R, released in March 1993, used ordinary through-hole capacitors instead. In my experience, a Duo-R usually isn't broken. It just doesn't look as good.

So even when a Duo plays perfectly, every capacitor is replaced. I don't do repairs myself, and I would worry otherwise. A friend of mine, a certified engineer, does the work, and this machine gives engineers a hard time.

I don't think the people who built the Duo expected anyone to still be playing it thirty-five years later. Every Duo that leaves our shop gets new capacitors first.