The TurboExpress is an 8-bit handheld game console by NEC Home Electronics, released in late 1990 in Japan and the United States, branded as the PC Engine GT in Japan and TurboExpress Handheld Entertainment System in the U.S. It is essentially a portable version of the TurboGrafx-16 home console that came two to three years earlier. Its launch price in Japan was ¥44,800 and $249.99 in the U.S. The TurboExpress was technically advanced for the time, able to play all the TurboGrafx16's HuCard games, featuring a TV tuner and a backlit, active-matrix color LCD screen. The TurboExpress primarily competed with Nintendo's Game Boy, Sega's Game Gear, and the Atari Lynx. However, with 1.5 million units sold, far behind its two main competitors, NEC failed to gain significant sales or market share in the handheld market. History The TurboExpress's codename was Game Tank. A working prototype was revealed in the April 1990 issue of VG&CE. It was eventually released in December 1990 in both Japan and the U.S. Its price in the U.S. was briefly raised to $299.99 in March 1991 due to higher costs of the display, before dropping back to its launch price of $249.99, and lowering the price again to $199.99 in 1992. Regardless of its technical advantages upon its release, the TurboExpress was not widely recognized or adopted by consumers. In addition to NEC's marketing issues, the handheld was initially released for $299.99, significantly higher than popular competitors. Because of this price tag, it was labeled as the "Rolls-Royce of handheld systems". Hardware The screen is sized 66 mm (2.6 in.), the same as the original Game Boy. It can display 64 sprites at once, 16 per scanline, in up to 481 colors from a palette of 512. It has 8 kilobytes of RAM, and it runs a HuC6280 CPU at 1.79 or 7.16 MHz, same as TurboGrafx-16. The TurboExpress had a backlit display. Handheld market leader Nintendo did not have a backlit handheld until the release of the Game Boy Light in 1998. Its keypad layout is similar to that of the original Game Boy, with the unique addition of two "turbo switches" that engage two levels of high-speed controller button re-triggering to assist the player. Due to a problem with cheap capacitors (an industry-wide issue in the early 1990s), sound failure is a frequent problem with the TurboExpress, sometimes even in new systems. The screen