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

[kakutolives]

So I was checking youtube and found something very interesting and I was wondering how well known this
tidbit of information was:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/PME4T6RQT8I

you can check after minute 6:55 when they start talking about faster loading times (during cutscenes) and they even do a video comparison side by side. Any veteran PC engine expert know titles off the top of their head that take advantage of this?

Thanks

[SignOfZeta]

Well, first off, the Arcade Card does not have 17.5 megabytes of RAM. That would be awesome for sure, but...anyway, whatever. A byte is not a bit.

Also, its Gate of Thunder. Not Gates. That's a common and forgivable mistake most of the time, but when you have a video clip of the title screen that appears just as the guy says, "Gates", it's pretty dumb.

The 3x3 Eyes thing is unique. No other PCE game has a cut scene like the opening for this game. There are other games that are Super CDs with special features only accessible when running the AC, but they are nowhere near as impressive. Some are nearly impossible to detect.

As for faster load times...if you've actually run 3x3 Eyes on a real system you'd see that the load times for the AC version opening scene are HUUUUUUGE. Like, probably a minute or so. The SCD version loads way way quicker. The AC doesn't change the speed of the bus, the CDROM2, or anything else, it just gives you more RAM. If all of that RAM is going to be used, then its going to take more time to fill it. This is why most SCD games have pretty good load times; there just isn't that much to load. Compare this with, say, a PS1, which has about the same amount of RAM as an AC equipped PCE, and you'll see that the load times are still pretty horrific because the PS1 only has a 2x drive.

[Keranu]

Watching this and cringing a little on their history of the Turbo Grafx 16. Some if it sounds very sujbective: "Is actually an 8-bit machine.", "Has a 16-bit graphic processor", "In many ways looks better than a Genesis, but still feels like a NES."

[kakutolives]

Well, first off, the Arcade Card does not have 17.5 megabytes of RAM. That would be awesome for sure, but...anyway, whatever. A byte is not a bit.

Also, its Gate of Thunder. Not Gates. That's a common and forgivable mistake most of the time, but when you have a video clip of the title screen that appears just as the guy says, "Gates", it's pretty dumb.

The 3x3 Eyes thing is unique. No other PCE game has a cut scene like the opening for this game. There are other games that are Super CDs with special features only accessible when running the AC, but they are nowhere near as impressive. Some are nearly impossible to detect.

As for faster load times...if you've actually run 3x3 Eyes on a real system you'd see that the load times for the AC version opening scene are HUUUUUUGE. Like, probably a minute or so. The SCD version loads way way quicker. The AC doesn't change the speed of the bus, the CDROM2, or anything else, it just gives you more RAM. If all of that RAM is going to be used, then its going to take more time to fill it. This is why most SCD games have pretty good load times; there just isn't that much to load. Compare this with, say, a PS1, which has about the same amount of RAM as an AC equipped PCE, and you'll see that the load times are still pretty horrific because the PS1 only has a 2x drive.

Hey thanks for clearing that up. I learned something new today. quite a bit of good info there. Thanks

[SignOfZeta]

Watching this and cringing a little on their history of the Turbo Grafx 16. Some if it sounds very sujbective: "Is actually an 8-bit machine.", "Has a 16-bit graphic processor", "In many ways looks better than a Genesis, but still feels like a NES."

Yeah, there is no way I'd be able to watch this entire thing. I only skipped to the point the OP was referencing.

[Keranu]

"In the end these animations rival [referring to 3X3 Eyes] any animations for the Sega CD or any other console system until the Playstation and Saturn were released."

Yikes, bold statement. Sega CD had some titles that could definitely hold a candle to 3X3 Eyes, not to mention the 3DO, Jag CD, and other FMV-capable systems available before PS1/Saturn.

[Tatsujin]

Yeah, for example Urusei Yatsura on the MCD looks fantastic (I honestly have to admit).

[shubibiman]

"In many ways looks better than a Genesis, but still feels like a NES."

Yeah, I really feel like I'm playing an NES game when I play Art Of Fighting

[Tatsujin]

"In many ways looks better than a Genesis, but still feels like a NES."

Yeah, I really feel like I'm playing an NES game when I play Art Of Fighting

Let alone a sapphire or even non ACD game like Winds of Thunder..LOL. totally NES-a-Like!

Most peeps are not aware of the later SCD and ACD releases and rely for their statements on early Huey games experience only. I say "go back and play the right stuff again".

[Samurai Ghost]

Yeah, the early Hueys are just basically souped up NES style games because developers at the time didn't know how to take advantage of the hardware yet or hadn't thought about new styles of gameplay. Similar to how early PS2 titles were basically PS1 titles with better textures and a few more polygons. I see what he's saying, but it's pretty silly to judge an entire console by it's early releases alone, especially considering how much gaming progressed between the late 80's and early 90's...

[Tatsujin]

Absolut right. The world and developers were not ready for games like winds of thunder or sapphire back in '87. those were just still an unknown, non-developed and unevolutioned kind of games back then, hence most stuff WAS FORCED to look like polished NES or were at best good adaption of the that time popular arcade games (R-Type, Galaga '88, Monter lair etc.). The SFC in the other hand came out when games like street fighter II was about to hit the market. a quite different era of games compared to back in '87. There were a lot of changes in terms of games, gameplay, graphics (but not so much graphical capability) within this short but yet long 3 years.
the pce did damn well for the time when it came out, and did even much better in its later years.

[Black Tiger]

It's one thing to talk about the PCE as being unimpressive or being 8-bit like when completely ignorant of the games. But it's kinda dumb to do so while showing games like Gate of Thunder.

Even the earliest PCE HuCard games weren't all NES like, only some were more more basic. Many hold up well compared to later 16-bit console games. The thing to keep in mind is that Mega Drive and Super Famicom games were much more basic back then in that they didn't exist at all.

The way that the Arcade card can shorten load times in Super CD games is when it preloads several areas which you'd be traveling to and from repeatedly for a while. Like the fight scenes, tiwns, dungeons and map of a zone in a RPG. Bicompatible CD2/SCD games can do the same in theory, but I've never seen what exactly the difference is in SCD mode for any of them.


EDIT: Aw man, I just watched that video. I seriously think that it may be a parody video. I've considered doing something similar. I think that literally every sentence contains either wrong facts or terribly misguided musings. It's pretty bad when you're only about 20% as accurate as wikipedia. When they started out name dropping NEC as though it was to the PCE what Sega and Nintendo are to their consoles, with no mention of Hudson Soft during the entire video, it wasn't a good sign. It's cool when someone posts a thread on a forum or does an article for a site that is quickly corrected by others, but videos like this are what people like the video's authors (if it is indeed not a joke) rely on when learning about console they aren't familiar with. Even if the PCE is before your time, I don't know how you can get pretty much everything about it wrong... and say that it's your favorite system. You never hear Keranu talking out of his ass like that.

[SignOfZeta]

"In the end these animations rival [referring to 3X3 Eyes] any animations for the Sega CD or any other console system until the Playstation and Saturn were released."

Yikes, bold statement. Sega CD had some titles that could definitely hold a candle to 3X3 Eyes, not to mention the 3DO, Jag CD, and other FMV-capable systems available before PS1/Saturn.

Well...this is complicated.

When you are talking about actual FMV, the traditional video recordings of actual anime created in the normal way and shot to film before being converted to Sega CD...that stuff is pretty impressive since there is no technical limitation to speak of, its just pure (shitty) video. You could put Akira on that or you could put Crayon Shin-chan there, its not different to the game machine.

However, if you are talking about sprite/background based digital art like the cut scenes in Ys...that's another thing entirely.

The cutscenes in 3x3 eyes are sort of in between these two (as are the ones in Aim for the Top! 1&2). If you view them as sprite/background based digital animations they do beat the Sega CD stuff, but looking at them it seems to me that they aren't actually that. Its pretty obvious this stuff was made by TV/OVA animators and manually turned into what is essentially half way between FMV and real-time digital animation. It doesn't have the constant grainy haze of FMV, but it more or less was made the same way.

Its a grey area. It really wouldn't be a sustainable method of making cinemas (as proven by 3x3 Eyes itself, which only uses this technique for the intro). After the Mega CD and PCE era, cutscenes almost disappeared from games completely, and when they did come back they were usually FMV, sadly usually from pre-rendered CG animations. Sometimes you get something like Sakura Wars but usually its more like FFVII type shit.

[Black Tiger]

Popful Mail for Sega-CD renders cinemas in realtime and is very impress, but it's also streaming and the art is simplified and low color. Lunar EB has very nice realtime cinemas that is OVA/TV quality, fully detailed and colored/shaded very well.

Gunbusters for PCE have anime quality animation in realtime, but it's kinda like stop and go fmv.

Tengai Makyou The Apocalypse IV was one of the last console games to go all out with quality real time PCE-style cinemas... Except they were reserved for the battles.

[esteban]

Concerning the video (Retroware TV): At least he uses Dungeon Explorer PSG tunes! I appreciated that aspect.

As for the entire video...well, contrary to what folks have said here (about it being garbage), it certainly wasn't complete drivel. I've seen truly horrendous garbage out there, and this "Retroware" wasn't nearly as bad. Flawed? Yes. Entertaining to watch? Yes.