If I remember right, for Vasteel 2 it adds ADPCM sound fx...I wonder how that worked, maybe the 64k ADPCM memory was used for code/graphics, so when the ACD was used the 64k was freed up to add cool ADPCM sndfx,
When ever talk of bi compatable games come up, im always made sad that the fact Macross 2036 is only a 64k regular cd game, even with a puny 64k memory, its able to put out levels with 3 or 4 distinct BGs, 4 huge beautifully animated bosses, player ship with 2 distinctive sprites each one very well animated, a large number of distinct and impressive ADPCM sndfx, and ingame cutscenes, where the cartoon is pasted on top of the action.....that's only one meg of memory, think if you had 5 megs of fu##ing memory, kinda gets me thinking, I cant think of a single optimized cdrom side scrolling action game, like rondo of blood,(2 load times per level) so I wonder what a optimized cdrom rondo of blood would be like.
Yeah, it does seem like developers rarely manged to max out the system... particularly for platformers. Most don't even bother with trying to pull off parallax, for instance, and the ones that do only seem to do it sometimes. Of course, there just aren't anywhere near as many platformers on the system as there are on the SNES or Genesis, so there's a relatively small sample size...
I seem to recall reading something a long while ago about Princess Maker 2 actually being slower loading with Arcade Card than with a Super System Card.
Is this for cinematics or regular gameplay? If it's for cinematics, it's most likely to add CD quality music along with voices. Usually, a PC Engine game is unable to have both CD voices and music at the same time unless you merge them together(which means you wouldn't be able to use that music track for other situations) but the Arcade Card's huge amount of RAM allows a bi-compatible game to store the voices on there and stream the music. This does add longer loading times though.
When ever talk of bi compatable games come up, im always made sad that the fact Macross 2036 is only a 64k regular cd game, even with a puny 64k memory, its able to put out levels with 3 or 4 distinct BGs, 4 huge beautifully animated bosses, player ship with 2 distinctive sprites each one very well animated, a large number of distinct and impressive ADPCM sndfx, and ingame cutscenes, where the cartoon is pasted on top of the action.....that's only one meg of memory, think if you had 5 megs of fu##ing memory, kinda gets me thinking, I cant think of a single optimized cdrom side scrolling action game, like rondo of blood,(2 load times per level) so I wonder what a optimized cdrom rondo of blood would be like.
Macross 2036 is kind of a strange case. It was technically a 64k CD game, but why slap the Super CD logo on there? Is it a CD/SCD bi-compatible game? If it isn't, it's up there along with Spriggan as the most impressive 64k CD games.
It's a bi-compatible game, much like the third Ranma game. I'm not sure what they improve; probably load times. I think they're longer without the Super CD card.
Yeah, mostly it loads a bigger bunch of graphic data into the AC to obtain longer, uninterrupted and smoothened cut scenes.
Ah, I was hoping it added more frames of animation to in-game playing or something. But it does sound like cut scenes are the easiest to improve.
Some games have improved cutscene animation with the Arcade Card... haven't heard of any that improve ingame animation with it, though.
