advantages of loading times during cutscene on arcade card pro/duo over 3.0 card

[Sadler]

I didn't release my tools, but I did release the HuVideo file format spec - so anyone could make their own Huvideos and converter.

Any chance you could provide a link to that?  I checked romhacking.net, but couldn't seem to find anything; either that or I'm looking in the wrong place.

I'd really like to see this too. I did some googling last night and couldn't find it. I have a sneaking suspicion I've asked you before and you already hooked me up, but I can't find any copy on my computer so maybe that never happened.

[Tatsujin]

Dragon's Lair and Space Ace should have been released as LD-Rom² games. It would have made sense.

Sense yes, but not a fraction as cool as they would have been released on the pce in Huvideo tech.

[Bonknuts]

I didn't release my tools, but I did release the HuVideo file format spec - so anyone could make their own Huvideos and converter.

Any chance you could provide a link to that?  I checked romhacking.net, but couldn't seem to find anything; either that or I'm looking in the wrong place.

I'd really like to see this too. I did some googling last night and couldn't find it. I have a sneaking suspicion I've asked you before and you already hooked me up, but I can't find any copy on my computer so maybe that never happened.

I didn't release my tools, but I did release the HuVideo file format spec - so anyone could make their own Huvideos and converter.

Any chance you could provide a link to that?  I checked romhacking.net, but couldn't seem to find anything; either that or I'm looking in the wrong place.

http://www.pcedev.net/huvideo/huvideo_format.txt

 A quick explanation of the ... explanation ;>_>  The tiles are uncompressed normal 4bit 8x8 BG tiles (15 colors + BG color 0). They are stored/setup in linear horizontal raster order (left to right). The palette data is the whole BG block (256 colors) - uncompressed. The 'tilemap' only has the palette association data. It doesn't have the tile number because that's redundant, since the tiles are stored in sequential fashion. There are only 16 BG subpalettes, so you only need 4bits to represent 0-15. Thus the subpalette map entries are bit packed as 4bit chunks. So the first 4bits is for tile 0, next 4bits for tile 1, next 4bits tile 2, and so on. The sound data is straight PCE compatible ADPCM (you can use the SOX utility to convert wave or other sound files to this specific ADPCM format. Beware, there are other ADPCM formats out there that are not compatible with the PCE CD ADPCM chip). The rest of of the frame packet is garbage. They game never reads from it.

 So each frame is 0x3000 bytes. The huvideo player has a custom CD read routine (it bypasses the system card) and reads in a 122k a second for 10 frames per second video. The system card bios CD_Read function is too slow (~96k) among other problems with it, so they bypass it (a number of other later gen CD titles do this too). Ah.. what else... oh, the header is easy to identify inside the 'cooked' ISO file. But you *can't* change the frame size for Gulliverboy and Luna by changing the header. The players are hardcoded to the frame size *and* packet frame format, so you'd have to hack the player itself to make any such changes to those attributes.   

[shawnji]

http://www.pcedev.net/huvideo/huvideo_format.txt

 A quick explanation of the ... explanation ;>_>  The tiles are uncompressed normal 4bit 8x8 BG tiles (15 colors + BG color 0). They are stored/setup in linear horizontal raster order (left to right). The palette data is the whole BG block (256 colors) - uncompressed. The 'tilemap' only has the palette association data. It doesn't have the tile number because that's redundant, since the tiles are stored in sequential fashion. There are only 16 BG subpalettes, so you only need 4bits to represent 0-15. Thus the subpalette map entries are bit packed as 4bit chunks. So the first 4bits is for tile 0, next 4bits for tile 1, next 4bits tile 2, and so on. The sound data is straight PCE compatible ADPCM (you can use the SOX utility to convert wave or other sound files to this specific ADPCM format. Beware, there are other ADPCM formats out there that are not compatible with the PCE CD ADPCM chip). The rest of of the frame packet is garbage. They game never reads from it.

 So each frame is 0x3000 bytes. The huvideo player has a custom CD read routine (it bypasses the system card) and reads in a 122k a second for 10 frames per second video. The system card bios CD_Read function is too slow (~96k) among other problems with it, so they bypass it (a number of other later gen CD titles do this too). Ah.. what else... oh, the header is easy to identify inside the 'cooked' ISO file. But you *can't* change the frame size for Gulliverboy and Luna by changing the header. The players are hardcoded to the frame size *and* packet frame format, so you'd have to hack the player itself to make any such changes to those attributes.   

Thank you sir!  You're a gentleman and a scholar.

So, maybe this is a stupid question, but is there a set allocation of space for the cutscenes in something like Gulliver Boy?  In other words, is there a cap for how many minutes of footage you can insert in place of a cutscene?  Do you have to match the time exactly or is it more free-form (depending on the available space on the disc naturally)?

[soop]

That was a really good explanation.  I understood it, and I haven't been paying attention to the rest of the thread.

[geise]

Dragon's Lair and Space Ace should have been released as LD-Rom² games. It would have made sense.

Sense yes, but not a fraction as cool as they would have been released on the pce in Huvideo tech.

Holy hell Tats!  That would've been amazingly awesome!  In all it's grainy glory.  Would've been better than the Sega CD ones.  I do need to pick up the whole collection that's on Blu-ray.

[Sadler]

http://www.pcedev.net/huvideo/huvideo_format.txt

 A quick explanation of the ... explanation ;>_>  The tiles are uncompressed normal 4bit 8x8 BG tiles (15 colors + BG color 0). They are stored/setup in linear horizontal raster order (left to right). The palette data is the whole BG block (256 colors) - uncompressed. The 'tilemap' only has the palette association data. It doesn't have the tile number because that's redundant, since the tiles are stored in sequential fashion. There are only 16 BG subpalettes, so you only need 4bits to represent 0-15. Thus the subpalette map entries are bit packed as 4bit chunks. So the first 4bits is for tile 0, next 4bits for tile 1, next 4bits tile 2, and so on. The sound data is straight PCE compatible ADPCM (you can use the SOX utility to convert wave or other sound files to this specific ADPCM format. Beware, there are other ADPCM formats out there that are not compatible with the PCE CD ADPCM chip). The rest of of the frame packet is garbage. They game never reads from it.

 So each frame is 0x3000 bytes. The huvideo player has a custom CD read routine (it bypasses the system card) and reads in a 122k a second for 10 frames per second video. The system card bios CD_Read function is too slow (~96k) among other problems with it, so they bypass it (a number of other later gen CD titles do this too). Ah.. what else... oh, the header is easy to identify inside the 'cooked' ISO file. But you *can't* change the frame size for Gulliverboy and Luna by changing the header. The players are hardcoded to the frame size *and* packet frame format, so you'd have to hack the player itself to make any such changes to those attributes.   

Thank you sir!  You're a gentleman and a scholar.

So, maybe this is a stupid question, but is there a set allocation of space for the cutscenes in something like Gulliver Boy?  In other words, is there a cap for how many minutes of footage you can insert in place of a cutscene?  Do you have to match the time exactly or is it more free-form (depending on the available space on the disc naturally)?

Thanks Bonknuts! As far as length of a clip, the number of frames is specified by 2 bytes in the header, so that would mean up to 65536 frames. Both Yuna and Gulliver are at 10 frames a second, so thats 6553.6 seconds, or a little over 109 minutes. If my math is correct, each frame is about 12KB, so if there are 700 MB on a CD, that means about 59733 frames. Again, at 10 frames/second that's about 99.5 minutes.

Another thought: this appears to only use background tiles, so presumably sprites could be overlaid on top of huvideo?

[Bonknuts]

So, maybe this is a stupid question, but is there a set allocation of space for the cutscenes in something like Gulliver Boy?  In other words, is there a cap for how many minutes of footage you can insert in place of a cutscene?  Do you have to match the time exactly or is it more free-form (depending on the available space on the disc naturally)?

 The player goes by the frame length in the huvideo header. So yeah, you can change the length of that video by changing that in the corresponding header. (I tested that)

Another thought: this appears to only use background tiles, so presumably sprites could be overlaid on top of huvideo?

 Correct.

[shawnji]

Thanks guys!  Very helpful information.  Hopefully I'll be able to put it to use at some point down the road...

[grahf]

I wonder what Hudson was charging to license HuVideo back then...
Or if they even did. All the games that used it were published by Hudson, weren't they?

[shubibiman]

Yes, they were all published by Hudson.