Rhode (company)

**Rhode Company**(ろで会社, *Rode Company*) is a Japanese multinational video game developer and publisher headquartered in Funabashi, Japan, with offices around the world. Rhode restructured to have multiple offices only during the 80's, and avoided bankruptcy in the late 80's.

## History

Ronin Deon founded the company as Rōnin Kōjō Co. (Ronin Factory Co.) back in 1959. Based in Chiba, the company started out by making telephones. In 1961, the company got renamed to Rode Engineering Co. (**Ro**nin **De**on Engineering Co.) which was more often than not shortened to "Rode" which eventually became the company's own corporate name in 1969 (under the name of "Rhode.")

In 1970, Toshishiro Amano moved to Rhode becoming a CEO and bringing 10 senior executives with him (whom he nicknamed 都市袋, or literally "Toshishiro bag") from NDS. NDS filed a lawsuit against Rhode, to which the court then decided in NDS' favor in 1974.

During the early 80's, Rhode released Humble Prix for Arcade, which had moderate success. Later games were also released on the same arcade board, which didn't reach similar success, so the potential arcade career was left to rot away. CAS also sued them due to one of their games being too similar to theirs, and they decided in CAS' favor.

Later games of theirs were mostly on home computers, mostly on the MSX and TI-99/4A, such as Proteus Altirra and Avis Penguin, the latter would become the unofficial mascot before the 90's. Avis Penguin actually had significant success (i mean, it wasn't crazy but it was enough to remedy the near bankruptcy problem) because of its then unique gameplay.

In 1988 they released the Magisound, which was a peripheral which when plugged into the RS-232 would enable use of YM3526 FM sound for computers it supports and games it supports. It wasn't very successful and was only released in Europe and Japan, and was mostly a waste of resources on Rhode's part. Their sequel to Avis Penguin, AVIS 3526, wasn't as successful either but was also a unique game in that it parodied other Rhode series' and Japanese culture and was made to be ridiculous in general.

In 1990 they also released the Rhode Culpeo, which was a powerful handheld console that was only remembered by those who had it for draining batteries in minutes. Not very successful either.

It was only when Amber Gold was made in 1993. It was made initially by the US division of Rhode for the Amiga and DOS home computers, but was later ported to the PC Engine, Mega Drive and Super Famicom (or Turbografx 16, Genesis and Super NES if you wish.) It was a tremendous success, and it towered over the sales of any previous game. It actually had voiced and animated cutscenes (i mean barely, each individual voice is its own sample and the animations are kinda choppy) which was impressive at the time.

From now on their official mascot is Amber Gold.

## Arcade system

The Rhode Playsystem was an arcade board developed in 1982 with reasonable specs:

* CPU: 2x Motorola 6809 @ 1.536 MHz
* Sound chip: 2x POKEY (Humble Prix, Proteus, EmuTank), 1x VRC7 (Proteus II, Trial)
* Colors: 64 out of 256 colors
* Sprite capabilities: 127 sprite pixels per scanline, 4 color per sprite line, any size up to 127x280
* Resolution: 256x280
* Tilemap plane: 256x512 for both scrolling and fixed plane

## Rhode Culpeo

The Rhode Culpeo was a handheld gaming console released in 1990 released worldwide. It is mostly considered a failure, only 600k were actually sold.

* CPU: Hitachi 6309 @ 2.2 MHz
* Sound chip: SCC and DPCM
* Memory: 12K RAM, 48K ROM
* Colors: 16 out of 64 color
* Sprite capabilities: 16 sprites on-screen, 8x8 and 16x16 sprite sizes, 16 colors per sprite
* Resolution: 208 x 176
* Tiles: 4 colors, 32768 unique tiles in ROM, 4092 unique tiles on-screen
* Dimensions: 224 x 134 x 43 mm (no keyboard,) 345 x 134 x 43 mm (keyboard)
* Screen size: 3.9 x 3.3 inch frontlit screen (no keyboard,) 2.6 x 2.2 inch frontlit screen (keyboard)
* 139.95 USD (no keyboard,) 169.95 (keyboard + BASIC)

If it was booted with no game inserted, it would either boot to a "insert game cartridge" screen with a control test, or a version of BASIC called CULPEO BASIC if the Culpeo had an internal keyboard (cheaper Culpeos did not have keyboard, they are actually better because the keyboard is a flat membrane disaster that also makes the Culpeo bigger than it already is.) This version of BASIC is actually a pretty robust structured BASIC, sporting:

* built-in sprite editor and tile editor
* `IF THEN ELSE structures, REPEAT UNTIL loops, DEF PROC procedures and functions`
* inline assembler allows for creation of 6309 assembly programs
* long variable names
* others

The keyboard was a 79-key keyboard with a numeric keypad, with F1-F8, BS, RET, LINE FEED, ALPHA LOCK keys being unique at the time. You could essentially have a small portable computer in your hands. Unfortunately all of that wasn't very popular because I think got off-topic as this a handheld gaming console. And there was virtually no support for the keyboard Culpeo.

The Culpeo was actually divided into three generations: the Culpeo, Culpeo FX and Culpeo II. The first generation was just what I described. The second generation is merely a fixing of the first one, which replaces the sound chip with a SCC+ (the original SCC enforced that the 4th and 5th channel share the same waveform, those channels can now have independent waveforms) and shrunk the console slightly to 216 x 126 x 42 mm or 320 x 126 x 42 mm. The BASIC was slightly enhanced, with many bug fixes, offset assembly and added OPENUP and OSCLI commands. The screen lighting system was replaced with a backlit system, which allowed for more vibrant colors at the expense of eye strain and cost.

The third generation is slightly different, in that it was launched in early 1998, to compete with the Neo Geo Pocket and Game.com.

* Main CPU: Freescale 68HC12 @ 4.43 MHz/ 2.21 MHz (two modes)
* Sound chip: YM2203, SCC and DPCM
* Memory: 24K RAM, 64K ROM
* Colors: 16 out of 65,355 color
* Sprite capabilities: 16 sprites on-screen, 8x8 to 64x32 sprite sizes, 16 colors per sprite
* Resolution: 224 x 176
* Tiles: 16 colors, 8192 unique tiles on-screen (only 4928 visible, the rest is used as framebuffer)
* Dimensions: 216 x 126 x 42 mm (no keyboard,) 320 x 126 x 42 mm (keyboard)
* Screen size: 3.9 x 3.3 inch backlit screen (no keyboard,) 2.6 x 2.2 inch backlit screen (keyboard)
* 179 USD (no keyboard,) 219 USD (keyboard)

The BASIC was tinkered with again to take advantage of the 68HC12, resulting in smaller code, faster floating point and re-coded mathematical routines to get a roughly 30% speed advantage over the old routines. Besides that, there are other new features besides small bug fixes:

* `LIST IF and EXT# as statements`
* `EDIT, TIME$, ON PROC and | in VDU statements`

## List of video games

### Arcade video games

* Humble Prix (1983)
* Proteus (1983)
* EmuTank (1983)
* Proteus II (1984)
* Trial (1984)

### Home computer video games

* Proteus III (1984)
* others...
* Avis Penguin (1987)
* Proteus Altirra (1987)

#### Console video games

* Super Amber Gold (1993)
* Amber Gold (1997)
* Amber Gold 2 (1999)
* The Tail of Amber Gold (2001)
* Amber Gold: Fearful Harmony (2004)
* Amber Gold: Ghost Diamond (2007)
* Neo Amber Gold (2011)
* Amber Gold: Shattered Memories (2013)
* Amber Gold: Deep Meaning (2016)