Mad Stalker - Arcade or Super System game?

[Psycho Punch]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

[Artabasdos]

Of course it's different. The CD can hold 500MB+ of data, and load it into RAM when required. A HuCard/cart can only hold a few megs in total. IIRC SFII on PCE is 20 megabits, or 2 1/2MB!

The only appreciable difference there is cost.  20 megabits isn't the max allowable rom size; with the right mapper, a huey could be made to hold just as much as any cd game made....

I think the issue here is how you phrased this. If you're chopping the sound data to chiptune then yeah, it's going to work. 8 or 9 MB would still be a pretty fat cart too.

Pier Solar can also use the MegaCD to play the OST in-game. The MDCD's hardware is considerably more powerful than the PCE's in terms of audio.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Actually it's 2MB. All chips would likely be powered. They are in the SFC and MD.

[CrackTiger]

Sapphire's data track is only 118 megabits.

Spriggan is 6 stages at <.05 megabits each and like all stage-based CD games, is loading redundant code and assets each time . Add in a 30KB chiptune soundtrack and superfluous cinematics and it would be a whopping <4 megabit HuCard, just like Musha.

Nevermind what all the people who are intimately familiar with programming the hardware have said over the years about how this stuff actually works. Lets just interperet the specs as though the PCE is the Vita.

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Games like digicomics and some RPGs use a lot of space for streaming adpcm dialogue.

Otherwise, PCE CD space is used up no differently than audio CD space. It's 99% redbook.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

[Psycho Punch]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Actually it's 2MB. All chips would likely be powered. They are in the SFC and MD.

Of course I'm not counting audio. JB Harold probably has the disc full of ADPCM samples... which you cannot play without CD hardware anyway.

[Artabasdos]

Sapphire's data track is only 118 megabits.

Spriggan is 6 stages at <.05 megabits each and like all stage-based CD games, is loading redundant code and assets each time . Add in a 30KB chiptune soundtrack and superfluous cinematics and it would be a whopping <4 megabit HuCard, just like Musha.

Nevermind what all the people who are intimately familiar with programming the hardware have said over the years about how this stuff actually works. Lets just interperet the specs as though the PCE is the Vita.

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Games like digicomics and some RPGs use a lot of space for streaming adpcm dialogue.

Otherwise, PCE CD space is used up no differently than audio CD space. It's 99% redbook.

I think you well know that I'm not comparing it to the Vita outside of how larger Flash can affect seek time.

Like I said above, the poor phrasing by Necromancer gave the wrong impression. A 1:1 data copy of CD to Flash would be fucking slow on a machine of that era, especially with the limited address space and low bus bandwidth.

[Psycho Punch]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

Thanks, I'll need it someday, as a person who actually can and has produced PC Engine software. God bless you, random Internet late 80's videogame connoisseur.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.
[/quote

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Actually it's 2MB. All chips would likely be powered. They are in the SFC and MD.

Of course I'm not counting audio. JB Harold probably has the disc full of ADPCM samples... which you cannot play without CD hardware anyway.

Yes, yes you can. You change it to the container and combined bit output of the first 2 combined PCE channels. It's sampled sound, just like voice samples in any game. The quality probably wouldn't be great though.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering fuck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

Thanks, I'll need it someday, as a person who actually can and has produced PC Engine software. God bless you, random Internet late 80's videogame connoisseur.

So you used 80's era ROM chips in excess of say 300MB using the PCE's MMU eh? Don't think so.

 Or, more likely, you used an Everdrive with modern components, and a complex MMU to handle the SD card data.

[elmer]

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

I don't understand your point either. What programming limitation are you trying to describe?

The PCE bus does one 8-bit memory access in 140ns ... the SNES does one 8-bit memory access in 280ns (best case) ... the Genesis does one 16-bit memory access in 520ns.

The 68000 CPU is so darned-slow at accessing memory that both the Amiga and ST ran the memory at twice the speed and used the alternate access-slots to display the video without affecting the CPU speed.

The Genesis just wastes that potential-bandwidth ... except for the DMA hardware ... which has its own horrible limitations.

What is this terrible PCE bus-limitation that you're talking about? 

[Artabasdos]

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

I don't understand your point either. What programming limitation are you trying to describe?

The PCE bus does one 8-bit memory access in 140ns ... the SNES does one 8-bit memory access in 280ns (best case) ... the Genesis does one 16-bit memory access in 520ns.

The 68000 CPU is so darned-slow at accessing memory that both the Amiga and ST ran the memory at twice the speed and used the alternate access-slots to display the video without affecting the CPU speed.

The Genesis just wastes that potential-bandwidth ... except for the DMA hardware ... which has its own horrible limitations.

What is this terrible PCE bus-limitation that you're talking about? 

I've already stated it multiple times.

This shit is beyond retarded. Time to get myself banned and outta here.

Cya!

[elmer]

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

I don't understand your point either. What programming limitation are you trying to describe?

I've already stated it multiple times.

I'm sorry ... I'm a programmer ... I need to hear a logical argument before I'll agree to it.

Your point about the HuCard slot not providing enough power for 128MB of 1990s-era ROM chips is actually a perfectly valid one, and even if there was enough power, the capacitive load of all the ROM chips would probably have brought the down the bus ...
... but that wasn't your point (from what I can see).

Instead you talk about some magical limit of "bankswitched calls across the PCE's MMU" ... which appears to be total BS, and seems to betray a spectacular misunderstanding of how the hardware works, and how the software works, and how game-developers actually organize their game data.

If you wish to run away rather than engage in a discussion, then that's up to you.

I don't see that you've been flamed, or personally attacked ... just that you've made a bunch of woolly pronouncements, and have received some rebuttals in response (some of them definitely equally-as-woolly).

[Psycho Punch]

His argument about power was OK, but I'm still wondering if is there any way to cut off the circuit to unmapped ROMS in a board via an intelligent mapper package. Aside from warm-up times (is this even significant on mask ROMs?) and some weird amperage variation during "switches" I don't see why it cannot be possible. Then again my electronics experience is very limited.

This was one odd thread. I'm still amazed at how someone could be so sure of himself by knowing so little, which seems to be mostly from reading wikipedia articles or something similar since he just LOVES to throw  numbers and terminology around in his posts (which aren't searchable anymore ). In fact he was so much sure of himself that his last post was basically "you're all fucking dumb, bye".

This shit is beyond retarded. Time to get myself banned and outta here.

Agreed.

EDIT: I didn't saw his meltdown thread until now, guess he wasn't so sure about himself after all. Wow, good riddance.

[elmer]

His argument about power was OK, but I'm still wondering if is there any way to cut off the circuit to unmapped ROMS in a board via an intelligent mapper package. Aside from warm-up times (is this even significant on mask ROMs?) and some weird amperage variation during "switches" I don't see why it cannot be possible. Then again my electronics experience is very limited.

Where there's a will, there's usually a way ... but you'd be dramatically complicating the circuitry in order to get that power saving.

Easier just to ship this crazy mythical monster cartridge with its own power supply.

Some buffer chips could take care of the capacitive loading on the PCE's cartridge bus, and then it would probably just be a case of using enough of the right ROM chips (the largest N64 64MB cartridges were 64MB), and providing an 8-bit upper-bank-select instead of the 2-bit upper-bank-select on the SFII HuCard.

I suspect that it could be done ... but it would be totally uncommercial and insane.

But that wasn't really the point from what I see ... everyone here was just arguing that there's no major conceptual difference between HuCard games and CD games ... which is absolutely correct from my POV, it's all just memory, and the difference is only a case of how much of it you have access to at one time.

Artabasdos was sprouting nonsense about seek-times on larger memory, stuff about flash memory, and SD cards, that all have absolutely nothing to do with how the PCE hardware actually works.

[Sarumaru]

Hi everyone,

While updating the review of Mad Stalker on my site, I bumped into something very interesting I would like to discuss here. I've always found weird that Mad Stalker was an Arcade Card game - I feel that it could have totally worked with a Super System Card (and many people seem to share that idea). Anyway, I noticed that there are two hidden screens in the game, and one of them looks like a Super System Card v.3.0 warning screen - was Mad Stalker originally designed as a Super System Card game? And was maybe changed at the last minute for technical or marketing reasons? The current system warning screen in the game feels really cheap and that hidden one would have been much better - could it be because the Arcade Card move was a last minute decision? What do you think?

Here's the review page with images of what I think is the Super System Card v.3.0 warning screen:

Mad Stalker - PC Engine

There is a demo of Mad Stalker on PC Engine CD-Rom Capsule 5. The Capsules are all Super-CD's, makes me think the of arcade card was simply to load cutscenes and stuff quicker.

[lkermel]

Wow! my thread went on a long tangent and some drama while I was away ;)

@Sarumaru
So cool! I didn't know MS was on the Capsule 5! I'll definitively look at it this evening! Which totally shows the game could run on a SCD without any issues.

@esteban & @Koa Zo
I also assumed for the longest time that the AC was used for the cinemas and cutscenes in MS. But finding this hidden screen got me to think... why scrap such a cool warning screen and only use a simple and obviously rushed screen instead? This is why I tend to share the same opinion as Koa Zo, I have the feeling that MS was bumped to AC fairly late in the dev process so that there would be more product supporting that format... but it's just a wild guess.

[Psycho Punch]

That game feels like they only use the Arcade Card during boot (the syscard check), really, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a SCD game in disguise, similar to how some games are "hybrid" CD-SCD for marketing reasons only.