Manufacturer: NEC / Release Date: 1988-1991
NEC was the first to the console market with a CD-ROM peripheral with its December 1988 release of the CD attachment for the TurboGrafx. This would be supplanted by the more powerful SuperCD in 1991, and the release of the TurboDuo which conveniently combined all the most advanced hardware into one system. Ex-ci-ting!
Recommended Emulator: Mednafen
Minimum System Requirements: Basic Emulation
Mednafen is an excellent TurboGrafx / PC Engine CD emulator, and thank goodness as after all these years it's still the only really complete and free one.
The one weakness is that it's not intuitive to run right out of the box. You have to do some Read The Manual to get it running, but we've condensed the most important steps here. It is possible to also use a frontend, with Mednaffe and MedGui appearing to be the two most popular ones, but I found that they actually just confused the process even more for me - I had an easier time just getting barebones Mednafen running.
So here's how you do that. The first thing to do is run the main executable after downloading. Seemingly nothing will happen, but this creates the "firmware" directory you need to populate with BIOS files. To play absolutely everything available you need following .pce files placed in this folder (though just the three syscards will run most stuff that isn't unlicensed or a SuperCD title):
- gecard
- gexpress
- syscard1
- syscard2
- syscard2u
- syscard3
- syscard3u
Once that's done, you start the emulator by dragging your CD image file to the executable. But wait! It's a little fussy about file formats. It ideally likes BIN files, preferably started with a CUE. It is able to run IMG files, but they need to be accompanied by a valid CCD that you drag to start. I think ISO files have to be converted to one of these formats.
If all has gone well and been done right, that should get any game going. But there's one more thing - once in the emulator press SHIFT+ALT+1 to configure your controls. The "1" in that means pad 1, if you want to configure other pads just change the number as needed.
If it still isn't running, check the logfile (stdout.txt) to see if it tells you what it's missing or tripping on.
This wiki has more detailed technical information. Here's a link to a list of the hotkeys such as save and load states, screenshots, cheats, netplay and so on.