NEC
From NEC Retro
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| NEC |
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| Founded: 1899-07-17 |
| Merged with: Renesas Electronics |
| Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan |
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NEC (Nippon Electric Company; 日本電気株式会社). also known as NEC Corporation, is a Japanese electronics firm, specializing in IT services and products. Before its merger with fellow Japanese electronics company Renesas in 2010, it was one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, ranked #1 from the 1980s to 1991, #2 from 1992 to 1999 (surpassed by Intel), and in the top ten during the 2000s.
NEC Corporation's earliest contributions to the video game industry came from making computers like the PC-8800 series and the PC-9800 series. All trademarks related to them are currently handled by NEC Personal Computers.
NEC Home Electronics (NEC-HE), the home electronics division of NEC, co-created the PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 console and its successors with Hudson Soft. Although NEC-HE actually manufactured and distributed the PC Engine line, Hudson was the first to actually start making games for it - NEC-HE's first release happened 5 years into its life. The PC-FX was the last console from NEC-HE and Hudson, and after its last release, NEC-HE would release a few games for Sega's Dreamcast and then close down. Its PC Engine-related assets were transferred to NEC Biglobe, and Biglobe later split from NEC.
NEC Avenue, the entertainment division of NEC, began releasing games for the PC Engine line before NEC-HE did. Parts of Avenue were later merged with other NEC divisions to form NEC Interchannel, and eventually, it gained all of Avenue's assets before Avenue was dissolved. NEC Interchannel was the last NEC division involved with video games, and it published a number of games even for non-NEC consoles like the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation 2. NEC Interchannel was eventually sold by NEC to Index, and it took its game library with it.
In addition to the above, NEC also manufactured a number of parts for competing game consoles - their first commercial DSP, the NEC µPD7720, was a common sight in SNES games that utilized pseudo-3D effects like Super Mario Kart, and the first two generations of VideoLogic's PowerVR graphics accelerator hardware that was used by Sega's Dreamcast.
NEC was formerly a subsidiary of Western Electric, until it was spun off in the aftermath of World War II.
Hardware
Computers
Consoles
Processors
- 780C (version of Zilog Z80 CPU)
- µPD8255A (Programmable Peripheral Interface)
- µPD9004G (VDP graphics processor)
- µPD7759 (speech synthesis sound chip)
- μPD70616 (CPU)
- µD65654GF102 (sound chip)
RAM
- µPD4168 (XRAM)
- µPD41264 (VRAM)
- µPD4504161 (SDRAM)
- µPD481850 (SGRAM)
- µPD4811650 (SGRAM)
- µPD432232 (Syncronous SRAM)
- µPD4564323 (SDRAM)
References
 Sega Retro has more information related to NEC
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