ACD games... feasible?

[OldRover]

So I'm wondering how feasible it is to invest massive amounts of time in a game designed for the arcade card... do enough people have them to make it worthwhile?

[Bernie]

Im sure its worth while.  And for people that do not have them, is it possible to just make it bi-compatible like some of the PCE games?

[OldRover]

I've run the calculations many times now and it seems impossible with the regular system RAM if everything is included that I want in it... it'd be like trying to squeeze Sapphire into regular system RAM... just not gonna happen unless tons of stuff is cut from the design.

[Bernie]

I've run the calculations many times now and it seems impossible with the regular system RAM if everything is included that I want in it... it'd be like trying to squeeze Sapphire into regular system RAM... just not gonna happen unless tons of stuff is cut from the design.

ahhh, ok.    Not sure then.  For those of us with Arcade Cards, it would be awesome.  But, I suspect a lot of people arent going to want to buy a card AND the game.  Suck, cause that may leave you with a lot of extra product.  But then again, who knows.

[OldRover]

I'd really have to strip it down to make it work with the normal system RAM, and that would really suck. The big issue is graphics... it uses a lot of large sprites. If this was a hucard, it'd be at least 64mbit, if not larger, and would have to use banking a la SFII'. And yes, I'm talking about the monstrous RPG here... in case you were wondering. If I put all of those graphics in the ACD RAM banks, the game will work fine, well within spec.

[CrackTiger]

Arcade Cards are cheap and plentiful. There is no excuse for anyone not to have one. If a game is massive enough to require the Arcade Card, then people will line up to buy it. Plus, like half the sales of any game will be collectors who have no intention of ever unsealing the game anyway. Noobs are always complaining about how it's way too expensive to play PCE CD games at all. What's another <$50 on top of their $150 - $300 "investment"? It would be different if you were making a unique system card to go with a CD game (like Games Express) and the combo would retail for $200 or something.

[TheClash603]

Go for it!  All homebrew games should be ACD, lets boost the library!

[LostFlunky]

I think the demographics of people wanting homebrew would have a lot of overlap with people owning an arcade card. 

On the other hand, a good ACD homebrew game would possibly drive the price of the ACD through the roof, in which case it might not be a bad idea to develop homebrew ACD hardware.

[Nando]

It would be different if you were making a unique system card to go with a CD game (like Games Express) and the combo would retail for $200 or something.

Are there any Knock-off system cards around? That work for all games?

Pardon the ignorance here but would it be possible to create a compatible sys card with the Arcade specs? not taking into consideration costs or anything like that, just curious.

[BigusSchmuck]

Well before we get too carried away with this, two questions: Do we have any idea on how many arcade cards were made? Is it possible to reproduce them if we needed to have more?

[Arkhan Asylum]

Just going to throw it out there that no, its not worth fucking around.

For the amount of effort you would have to invest, you are limiting your target audience significantly...


assuming you get everything done and working.   

I don't advise blowing time on it

[CrackTiger]

Well before we get too carried away with this, two questions: Do we have any idea on how many arcade cards were made? Is it possible to reproduce them if we needed to have more?

I think that the more important questions are:

How many copies of any one Turbo/PCE game have been sold (or more to the point, how many single people bought copies since many by multiples)?

How many people who actually play homebrew games actually play them on real hardware exclusively?

If an ACD game is going to be sold for $30 - $40, then the cost of buying an Arcade Card if you need one only brings the overall cost near the rapidly selling retail price of Pier Solar. But if the hope is that as many as one thousand people will buy the game, I don't think that the supply of Arcade Cards will be an issue.

It would be different if you were making a unique system card to go with a CD game (like Games Express) and the combo would retail for $200 or something.

Are there any Knock-off system cards around? That work for all games?

Pardon the ignorance here but would it be possible to create a compatible sys card with the Arcade specs? not taking into consideration costs or anything like that, just curious.

They are unique and only work with one to a handful of games designed for them.

Some people have been working towards a "super" Arcade Card that would work on either region and do extra stuff, but it's still a ways off.

[ParanoiaDragon]

If we could get a new system card ala the AbCards, I would think it wouldn't be a problem, wink wink, nudge nudge Arky!

[Arkhan Asylum]

If we could get a new system card ala the AbCards, I would think it wouldn't be a problem, wink wink, nudge nudge Arky!

get an Arcade CD game completed in a timely fashion is the problem.   You could say "Oh i dont mind waiting" all you want, I personally wouldn't want to wait 5-10 years for one Arcade CD game when you can probably get 2 or 3 normal games done in in that timespan.

[Keranu]

How about Super Grafx Arcade CDs? 

[Arkhan Asylum]

That would be either

A) Never be completed

or
B) be complete garbage that is on SGX ACD "just because"

[RuninRuder]

Are there really all that many people out there who not only don't own an Arcade Card at this point, but also would be unwilling to spend a mere twenty or so dollars on one or simply play the game on an emulator?  Maybe there are a lot of people like that...  but if there are, then they're a bunch of tools.

From a player's perspective, I think Rover proved with Mysterious Song that he really knows what he's doing when it comes to programming RPGs, and if he has a vision for something lengthy and magnificent, I'd like to see him follow through on it.  I don't think he should compromise his vision or ditch the idea entirely just because a few people out there who don't own an Arcade Card are unwilling to take advantage of some very convenient solutions.

Someone mentioned the possibility that the project would take an extremely long time, but it's not like there aren't a few hundred other PC Engine games people can play in the meantime.  Mysterious Song took like seven years.  Everyone managed to survive, and everyone is happy to have the game.  The amount of time it would take is more a concern for Rover than for the people waiting: if he feels this project would be just as or even more fulfilling than a couple of "normal" ones that could be completed during the same span, I don't see why he shouldn't go for it.

[VestCunt]

Arcade Cards are cheap and plentiful. There is no excuse for anyone not to have one. If a game is massive enough to require the Arcade Card, then people will line up to buy it. Plus, like half the sales of any game will be collectors who have no intention of ever unsealing the game anyway. Noobs are always complaining about how it's way too expensive to play PCE CD games at all. What's another <$50 on top of their $150 - $300 "investment"?

+1

A few years ago, I would have said no, but some things have changed of late:
1) 150+ copies of Sapphire were recently given away and "new" copies are readily available. The Arcade Card has gone from the province of diehard fans to a must-have accessory for newcomers. No one has had any problem finding Arcade cards and prices have barely changed.
2) Region protection isn't a problem. Virtually everyone's system has needed repairs and many have opted for region mods in addition. The Chopsado has also changed the playing field. Sky-high prices for U.S. Duo's, U.S. 3.0 cards, and rare Turbochips have created an arena where all but the most casual gamers are PCE-capable, with region mods, Chopsados, Duo-R's, etc. And the casual gamers... well, they don't buy homebrew.

That said, Arkhan is right - it's probably too much work. I hate to say it, but it may be best to make a normal game and include a "bonus level" or something that uses the ACD.

[Bernie]

I seriously doubt this next project is going to take as long as MSR did. 

Far as the ACD option, I say go for it.  A lot of peeps do already have an Arcade Card, and I am sure others would pick one up to play this.  Sure, there will be those that will not go for it, so there will be sales lost there.  However, I'd rather see Rover give it his all, than reduce the game to fit into Super CD specs.

[Arkhan Asylum]

its mostly uncharted territory, and we already had enough CD issues with one homebrew RPG. 

Its also work/time investments on the artists who have to do all the doodlin' for it.   Lots of effort.

[RuninRuder]

its mostly uncharted territory, and we already had enough CD issues with one homebrew RPG. 

Its also work/time investments on the artists who have to do all the doodlin' for it.   Lots of effort.

Those might all be fine points, but they're not what's specifically being asked about here.  Certainly, it's up to Rover and the people he'll be working with to decide if they're willing to take the risks and devote the time.  If they are, I'd hate to see the issue asked about in this thread get in the way of them trying to achieve their goals.

[Arkhan Asylum]

He asked two things, one of which was:

"So I'm wondering how feasible it is to invest massive amounts of time in a game designed for the arcade card..."

Even if the entire world had an arcade card, I personally don't think it's suitable to waste that much time on it.

Given things that have been said in chat before, I can only assume an ACD game would involve an RPG larger than Mysterious Song from Rover, or some sort of multidisc or hybrid game.

Taking into account the problems with Mysterious Song, the length of time the project took, and the now current list of projects from Rover, I don't think it's a good idea to add another project that will undoubtedly take a great amount of time and effort that will ultimately just take away from the current projects that people are already interested in.


Maybe 5 years from now, if all the other stuff is out/almost out, I'd say go for it.  but right now?  Hell no.  Monolith or GTFO.

[OldRover]

This isn't something that's going to be done right now... but it is something that will be done. I already have a working prototype, based on a fusion of the MSR and Monolith game engines. Utilizing the ACD will limit the market, but it will allow me the opportunity to really make the game the way it's supposed to be made. This isn't about the money anyway, it's about making good games, so the marketability is more of an afterthought than anything else (I'm not Watermelon ). Don't forget that a good portion of MSR's development time was finding people willing to do the work, and plus the learning curve of the system. We also had a lot of real-life issues to resolve along the way. None of that is an issue anymore... I know the system very well now and can produce working game engines very quickly by simply improving on what's already done (Monolith and JB are both based on VM's game engine, for example), I've got assets already in place, and I even have a local apprentice who will be lending a hand in making it. JB is at a standstill at the moment for technical reasons which I'm still ironing out, and Monolith's just waiting for me to fill in some details so Paul can finish the tile graphics work. Dragon Arm is also now an active project, as we have a dedicated character artist for it. That game engine will take less than a month to code since a lot of things from previous projects can, again, be reused... some of Monolith's code can be directly ported over, and writing finite state machines is something I've become quite experienced in.

[SamIAm]

Further food for thought:

If a future translation project is made more feasible by depending on the ACD, should they go with it?

LoX2 looks like it will all fit, but that's because it uses dynamic loading. Emerald Dragon, Tengai Makyo II, and a few others, by contrast, load up almost everything in an entire sub-continent at once and run the whole thing from the system card, so there's very little room to spare for an English script.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Don't forget that a good portion of MSR's development time was finding people willing to do the work, and plus the learning curve of the system. We also had a lot of real-life issues to resolve along the way. None of that is an issue anymore...

You just jinxed the whole thing, lol


I personally would rather see all the other stuff get squared away before another cock tease project gets shown and shoveled under the rug for awhile. 

[Arjak]

My advice is that you do NOT sacrifice from your vision of the game. Make it an ACD if that's what it will take to get it done right. I will gladly buy an Arcade Card if it means being able to play an awesome new RPG.

[OldRover]

I personally would rather see all the other stuff get squared away before another cock tease project gets shown and shoveled under the rug for awhile.

...which is exactly why I'm only jawing about it right now rather than showing it off. Frozen Utopia has two active projects, and Eponasoft has one... taking on four projects at once isn't a smart idea. Three at once is my limit.

[TurboXray]

@ 'Ol Rover - Screw the naysayers and do it!!! If given enough exposure, I can imagine the majority of ACD owners would buy it just for being an ACD soft. If you need support for ACD, I can help. If you're using that old ACD lib I wrote, it doesn't support all features of the ACD. Probably not even half. I just wanted to see generic ACD support in HuC. Of course, you could probably just write your own too.

@ SamIam - The ACD has a the drawback that it lacks memory that you can execute code from. So you still need to find free areas in the original CD ram layout, etc. It would have been nice if they had added something like 8k of direct accessible ram, if only for us translators/hackers. I've been wanting a new system card with more direct code accessible ram for a while now, for translations. Tail Chao's hucard can do this. Its specific mapper can allow 512k of ram easily as well as the original system card 3.0 ram. It's a real card and mednafen started adding support for it. That would be extremely ideal for translation hacking. Though a card made from the ground up would work as well (no mapper needed, just a few discrete chips to handle memory layout. Also mirror the first 1k of the ram to open bus space of bank $ff. That would allow the hooks to be static/fixed in memory layout and code to map in new banks of hook code from there).

[OldRover]

Oh and yes, btw... it will be multidisc. Like PS1 Final Fantasy 7, it's three CDs in size. I do believe that it will be the first multidisc PCE game ever. I have already implemented its disc swap code. It's broken into three large chapters; one per disc. Discs are only changed once a chapter ends, and they're never revisited, so there's no back-and-forth crap like some other old multidisc games. It will cost about $3800 to manufacture it.

Bonknuts, yeah, I'm going to use a version of your ACD lib for it, but I think it already has everything I really need... iirc, it does disc-to-ACD and ACD-to-VRAM, and that's all that's required.

[sirhcman]

My advice is that you do NOT sacrifice from your vision of the game. Make it an ACD if that's what it will take to get it done right. I will gladly buy an Arcade Card if it means being able to play an awesome new RPG.

I feel the exact same as Arjak!

[TheClash603]

Yeah, you definitely need to make an awesome ACD RPG!

...and by awesome ACD RPG, I definitely mean co-op beat-em-up.

[Bardoly]

Far as the ACD option, I say go for it.  A lot of peeps do already have an Arcade Card, and I am sure others would pick one up to play this.  Sure, there will be those that will not go for it, so there will be sales lost there.  However, I'd rather see Rover give it his all, than reduce the game to fit into Super CD specs.

I completely agree with you Bernie.
I don't have an Arcade Card yet, but it's already on my wish list, but if it weren't already, it for sure would be if Old Rover's proposal became reality.

[ParanoiaDragon]

We could probably make things easier to conquer in regards to some of our projects, if we were able to go ACD on em'.

[OldRover]

Dragon Arm would be totally sick as an ACD game, and JB's current space problems would be annihilated as an ACD game.

[lord_cack]

I know what this is saying, out here in the open, but JB would be awesome as an ACD. There are soooo many things I would love to be able to do with it that just seem to be, well not possible.

Also, if we are talking about it not being worth it because of the time invested, who is going to take that step and try and work this thing out? If no one takes the initiative then it will ALWAYS just be there, taunting us with its goodness  

[EDIT]

Also, there are loads of other ideas I have that will most likely require that little extra to make it extraordinary   

[OldRover]

Using the ACD would cut out quite a bit of the stored data in JB, allowing us much more code room, thus allowing for more things to be done. It wouldn't reduce subsequent load times by a whole lot, as we'd just fill in that freed space with whatever code is missing right now. If MSR had used the ACD, the load times would have disappeared entirely, as both major programs could have been in executable memory at the same time, and everything, right down to the maps, could have been pulled from ACD RAM rather than hardcoded into each execoverlay. The ACD is there... we should use it.

[ParanoiaDragon]

In regards to extra time spent to make our games to take advantage of the ACD, we've already been doing that without trying!  JB has so many dang frames of animation, that we'd probably have to cut alot just to make it a SCD.  That's the problem we're up against right now, but if people are favorable to the ACD, then that should in theory, solve our problem, atleast with that particular game.

[Edmond Dantes]

Sorry I'm late (and also that I disappeared from these forums for like a year), but my two cents is...

The way I see it, another ACD game justifies owning an arcade card.  So I'd love to see it.

[esteban]

Question: ACD?

Answer: Yes. As long as someone sells me an Arcade Card, CHEAP.

[VestCunt]

You don't have an ACD, Esteban? This needs to be remedied.

[SamIAm]

PM Sent

[esteban]

You don't have an ACD, Esteban? This needs to be remedied.

I had one (or two?) years ago, but I must have lost them at some point (possibly during one of my moves...sadly, I can't find a few other items, either...)

You have no idea how much I've wanted to play through some games again--only to remember I don't have the damn system card.

[esteban]

_{► /Cyber_Cross/Song_of_Victory.mp3}

[SignOfZeta]

Anyone who buys PCE homebrew and doesn't have an AC is...an idiot, probably a mythical idiot. Don't let mythical idiots hold you back.

At the same time...if the ACD makes it easier for you to make the game you want to make (if having the extra memory helps) then by all means go ahead. It seems pretty quixotic though. That is, do you have even close to the kind of huge resources needed to fill an ACD? One of the reasons the ACD died a such a sad death was that nobody could utilize it well without losing money hand over fist. Like...not even Hudson could make it work so...good luck!

[seieienbu]

I've had an Arcade Card Pro for about 12 years, I got it off of ebay for $20 iirc.  I didn't get a super system card until earlier this year.  I did things kinda backwards, I guess.  Just looked on ebay a minute ago and there's 1 reasonably priced arcade card with a few days left and a bunch for $100.  That's way more expensive than I thought it'd go for.

I'd be interested in new ACD games.  I think an RPG that made good use of all the additional space could be interesting to play.  Also be cool if an ACD Supergrafx game existed, but as I don't have a supergrafx I don't care too terribly much about that idea other than as a curiosity.

[Nazi NecroPhile]

Anyone who buys PCE homebrew and doesn't have an AC is...an idiot, probably a mythical idiot. Don't let mythical idiots hold you back.

At the same time...if the ACD makes it easier for you to make the game you want to make (if having the extra memory helps) then by all means go ahead. It seems pretty quixotic though. That is, do you have even close to the kind of huge resources needed to fill an ACD? One of the reasons the ACD died a such a sad death was that nobody could utilize it well without losing money hand over fist. Like...not even Hudson could make it work so...good luck!

My thoughts exactly - scary, eh?  What kind of ijit would pony up $30-50 (or whatever) and yet balk at paying $20 for an Arcade Card and gaining access to its small but quality and mostly relatively cheap library?

And I don't give a hoot if going ACD just makes things easier and isn't absolutely necessary either; I've yet to see homebrew that rivals the likes of Dracula X or Xanadu (graphically speaking obviously, as I know jack shit about the underlying mechanics), but there's little reason to jump through hoops to shoehorn a bunch of goodies into a tiny little box when there's a great big box just waiting to be put to use.  Just don't do it because you can or to be the first (also applicable to multi-disc).

[OldRover]

When it comes to JB... we've done just about everything possible to fit it all into 256KB and we just keep coming up short every time. That's why stuff has had to be cut from the design temporarily. Masterpieces like Dracula X were made by much more experienced programmers who could really exploit the machine at the bare metal level. There's not a single programmer in the PCE scene with that level of experience, skill, and dedication all at once. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, as we simply find alternate ways to do things to accomplish the same overall end result. So if we can't make a game that can hang with Dracula X in 256KB, we'll use the ACD to make one that comes close.

[TurboXray]

What compression schemes have you tried? Both for tilemap and tile/sprite cell data.

[OldRover]

None yet... wouldn't make much difference to compress stuff in JB since most sprite frames are uploaded on-the-fly. I cut some space out by loading the tile graphics from a different program, which helped, but we still have the issue of the 50KB Plantie enemy that would consume almost a quarter of the system RAM, not to mention all the other enemies and utility graphics. The tilemap is about 10KB, so if push comes to shove, we might be able to save some space there using compression. But that'd still only give us about a bank of additional space.

[sirhcman]

Sorry for the dopey question.. what is "JB"? is there a thread or link about this project?