NEC TurboGrafx-CD (67 Games) (Shrunk) (No Duplicates) (No Hacked ROMS) (Extras)

Before anything and everything; I have a slow connection and at times it even drops for moments. Whoever does not like slow connections, then please avoid this torrent, at least until the helpful community members of Kickass that seed, get them!

Ok this Romset is a bit (or quite) different than the others that I shared. I have mentioned on the other ones that I try to not have duplicates and have 1 rom for each game that exists for the console, with priority being the English releases ones and then anything else. This Romset is an exception! PS: In case you will not read more than this, then I suggest you download the Japan Romset too, even if you do not like or know Japanese!

There is no large single romset distributed for TurboGrafx-CD, which is normal, since each games is in CD form, so it is less likely many people would get them all. I have went through the Emuparadise pages and a couple of other rom sites and got any American CD image I could find, so this torrent has the complete English TurboGrafx-CD gameset, that I could find!

I decided to get this and spend time on compiling it, because the TurboGrafx-16 has some awesome games and then I watched a couple videos about it's CD part and I just really wanted to get some games for the CD too. What a shame this technology never reached where I live, because It feels like it combines the 8-16 bit era, with the newer 3D era, that for me came with PSX.

At any rate, some might realize there is something weird with this Romset and that is the size. Normally the smallest games you can find are around 150MB compressed and then largest up to 600MB. Even if all the ones I had were the 150MB kind, the Romset would be at least 10GB.

These games are altered and shrunk, so they take less space. The reason they have become so small, is because the normal games come with WAV audio, which means uncompressed sound that takes a lot of space. Without exaggeration, sometimes ALL the space of the CD was JUST the audio. For example ShapeShifter's game part is 5MB and the audio is over 600MB!

The process was me downloading them, then mounting them, extracting the audio, re-encoding all audio files, altering the .cue file (it will be what you will be using to run the games) so it will work with the new ogg files and then testing to make sure the game works normally and with sound and finally packing them back.

I have compressed the audio using ogg format, which is a form of audio that at least the Emulator I used accepts, but it seems a handful of emulators, even ones on consoles, accept ogg.

I was planning to shrink them a lot, but ended up using a less aggressive compression, thinking that it is ok to keep these files a bit large. For people that will wonder if it is worth to get these games that their audio has been compressed, there is only one way I can show you that the loss should be fine for the size difference.

In this set of pictures you can see an extreme case, when the quality of the Wav audio has some loss.
http://imgur.com/a/NGidA

The top one is the original wav, under it is the ogg quality I used, under it is an 160kbps mp3, under that an 128kbps mp3 and on the bottom a 0 quality ogg. I will just point out that most of the people that hear music, listen to it at 128kbps and at times I look to find 160kbps music. I am not though a picky audiophile, but just a normal person, that likes to listen to music.

With that said, the audio quality I used for these games, is higher than the high quality mp3 music I listen to. Down to the 0 quality ogg compression tests I did, I could NOT hear any audio difference. Of course I own normal speakers, so I do not know if someone that has high quality and sensitive speakers could hear a difference. Only when I went under 0 quality, the audio indeed became muffled.

Like I mentioned, that is an extreme case or quality loss. I have seen quite some audio files that the WAV might have been large, but it's quality was not. Here is an example.
http://imgur.com/a/W6i46

As you can see the quality loss on this one is 0, since the WAV did not have a high quality audio to begin with. The only reason I wrote all this, is because I want people that get these games, will not feel they have a much lesser version of the game. If you do not like the quality loss, you can always visit Emuparadise, Theisozone and DopeRoms and get the originals from there.

To further explain the size-quality difference;
First of all, I will talk only about the 62 games found in the USA and Japan Romsets and ignore the 5 that are inside the Video Games folder.

The normal uncompressed size of the ogirinal files, which you will require to have in your roms folder (since they cant be compressed) is 28GB. Even if you just keep these compressed with 7zip, their size will be 12.5GB

The uncompressed size of the altered files I made, is 4GB and compressed as it is now, is about 2.5GB.

It is the 22GB reduction is size that brings the quality loss.

Welp, I did my best to explain in detail, about what I did and how it will affect the games. It is up to you to decide if you want them or not. Time to move on to some details about the Romsets.

Main ROMSet
Like I mentioned, I gathered all the USA roms I found but as you can see there is a Japan romset too. The reason is that first these Japan roms are really really awesome and second, it does not matter if you know Japanese!

All the Japan roms I chose are either arcadish sidescrollers, space shooters, fighting, puzzle games and whatnot. I sadly do not know Japanese, so I skipped anything that seemed to require me knowing Japanese. The ones I put in the romset, sometimes even have English letters on the interface. Well I will leave it up to you to decide if you want them.

The 5 separate roms I have placed in the Video Games folder, are in there because they were very large and if anything, they might be games people will not want. I wanted to be nice and not force people to download them. Their compressed size is 770MB and the uncompressed 2GB. Compared to the rest 62 games, which are 2.5GB compressed and 4GB uncompressed, I think their are quite large. The reason I put them in a folder called Video Games, is because more or less their large size is because they have videos... and they are games... so they are video games... Ok bad joke, but you will have to live with it. I mean, I can see people wanting to play the two Sherlock Holmes games, but for example It Came from the Desert's videos are horribly putrid, and the Magical Dinosaur Tour seems like a "video" like game for kids. Either way, I just decided these to be separate.

Castlevania is inside the main USA romset, because even if it is Japanese, it is a translated version I found. The creator said 100% and fixed too. Keep in mind the the opening video is in German language. That is not because of the translation, but that is how the normal Castlevania is, even in the newer PS2 port.

There are two games I did not include in the Romset. The games are Implode and Meteor Blaster DX. No matter what I tried, I could neither extract them to shrink them, or even play them as they were, without changing them. They are marked with bad toc tag, but I do not per se know what that means. I just guess that's why I could not get them to work. Since I could not, I did not include them in the pack.

I am a bit confused about the 4 in 1 Super CD (Bonks Adventure + Bonks Revenge + Gate of Thunder + Bomberman). I have downloaded it from any rom site I could, and yet even if it says it is 4 in 1, when I reach the menu, I only see three games. What is even more weird, is that there is a 3 in 1 Demo, that just has Bonks Adventure, Bonks Revenge and Gate of Thunder, which is what I see in the 4 in 1. Either way, You can play Bonks Adventure, Bonks Revenge and Bomberman on TurgoGrafx-16 and Gate of Thunder is inside the Japanese Romset, so even if this 4 in 1 is a Demo, don't worry much about it.

I did not alter Addams Family at all. It was 7MB when I got it. In case the audio on it is bad, please do not accuse me

Extra
I have included some BIOS inside the extra folder and also an uncompressed BIOS file named syscard3.pce. This is the BIOS I use with my emulator to play. If you want some info about the Emulator, read bellow.

Uhhhh.. I included the 3 unofficial roms or the Girls in bikinis in really low quality pictures....... seriously, check ebay.. Not only these are being sold right now for over 150 euro, but also their original price was 150$.. I have no words.. But lol this is why they deserved to be included in at least the extra folder I have AVGN quotes floating in my mind right now.

Games List
I have compiled a list of the Main Romset games in different formats, from normal text, to rtf and two different type of excel formats. The txt and rtf obviously can be read by the default Windows document readers, Notepad and Wordpad. The txt is simple where the rtf looks like a nice list in boxes, looking like an excel.

The Excel ones, ods and xml, are for either OpenOffice or Microsoft Office and they have filters to filter out versions and regions. If you download more than one of my romsets, you can always combine the Excel pages, by copying them all in a single Excel file. Just suggesting that for people that do not want to have a lot of different excel files.

I am only suggesting the Emulator and Frontend. I do not include them in the pack!

Emulator
For Emulator I tried a handful of them, but none worked. In the end, MedGui Reborn finally worked. It kind of seems complicated, but that is because it has many tabs that are not needed, but it is after all a Multi-Console emulator. It also requires you to get Mednafen AND it requires the BIOS I mentioned above syscard3.pce.

Ultimately though, I ended using Mednafen by itself. All I need to do to make the games work, is to drag and drop the .cue on the Mednafen executable and the game starts. If you hit F1, it will show you what options it has and how to trigger them. If anything, all I did was to use Alt+Shift+1, which initiates the configuration of the 1st player controller. Keep in mind that when you push the button you want, it will ask you to push it again. You will see it counting 1,2 and then changing to the next button. If you won't press the same button twice, it will keep counting to 3,4,5 etc. Personally I am using now Mednafen through LaunchBox, so I do not need to actually drag and drop the cue files every time on the Emulator. For anyone that wonders how to set up LaunchBox with TurboGrafx-CD .cue files, you can check this video, from the team for LaunchBox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgaLkTGEA0s

Frontend
Finally I want to suggest LaunchBox. Launchbox is a frontend for multiple emulators and if anything it is the best I have found out there. It is easy to import games in it's interface, it suggests the best emulator to get when for each console, when you try to add an emulator and it has the best interface I have found. Weirdly, I like the free UI it offers (LaunchBox) and not the paid one that people that buy it can get (BigBox). The LaunchBox UI shows every game in a list with a picture of the cover or a screenshot from in game and that is really nice for me. The paid UI it offers just shows a list and only when you choose the name you can see any pictures of it. It can automatically look into picture databases and download pictures for a lot of the games. You can check the screenshot to see what I mean.

You can follow this tutorial, which will help you combine the ultimate emulator, with the ultimate frontend :D This Video might be for RetroArch, but it has a quick tutorial about Launchbox in it too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oeozvnb_-eI

Retroarch is more or less a multiplatform frontend, that can internally use emulators from all systems out there. It is a bit intimidating, but if you combine that with Launchbox, you will have a single Emulator (with made different internal ones) and a really nice free frontend for it :)

Personally I use separate emulators and Retroarch only when it is about using emulation for older systems, like atari for example.

One more Romset down. Now my Launchbox has 9998 games... what an amusing number Either way, I wish you all have a nice day / week!