Hucard / SuperCD are NOT the same system...

[StarDust4Ever]

I learned something today.

When I play Gate Of Thunder, I'm not playing on PC Engine.

OK...

Heh.  Did you know Metal Combat isn't really a SNES game?

Yes, it is. I also have the bazooka shaped Super Scope for what it's worth, if that's what you're getting at. I have a handful of titles for it. Yoshi's Island is a nice diversion.

[StarDust4Ever]

You came here, exposed your point, and asked us our.

We answered.

We respect your noob point of you.

Please respect our 20years old PCE lovers' point of view too.

 And that's all this boils down to; noob point of view VS 20 year PCE veterans.

 I just wanted to say that I agree with what elmer said about technical side of things. I know that most members here don't have the luxury of really understanding what's under the hood of the PCE and to code for it, but CD games really are nothing more than Hucard games. Loading data from the CD does not change that. It's the same hardware, same cpu, same coding style, etc.

 There's this argument that hucards aren't large enough, or whatever, to handle CD games. Most CD games aren't that large, if you re-organized the data assets for redundancy (same code used over again per level, or sub level. Same graphics used over again, main sprites, enemies, etc, for levels and sub levels) - they'll realistically fit on a cartridge. If the CD format never took over at the dominant format, you would have seen an evolution of hucard technology. Those "bubbles" in SF2 and other hucards? There's nothing inside of them. There as lot of room for space AND advancement of hucard technology. Did you know that Street Fighter 2 could have fit under a regular hucard format? They extended the PCB only because they didn't want to use a single large rom (they used multiple roms). Anyway, the point is - is that you would have seen audio enhancements (either via hucard, or via backplace addon), you would have seen hucards with memory mappers, on board ram (populous already adds 32k of ram), etc. The CD format stopped this from happening. Any game on CD, is possible on hucard format (with the exception of FMV, but regular cinemas are fine). Obviously not Red Book audio. The CD audio part is an upgrade, the rest is just a format medium delivery mechanism.

Nothing inside the SFII bubble? That is news to me. I thought the bankswitch logic chip was too big for a glop top so they needed a "fat" card. I would definitely have liked to see have seen more bankswitched cards though.

= = = = = = = =

I still respectfully disagree that CDs and Hucards are the same format, however I'd like to take the opportunity to apologize for getting carried away with my trollish rebuttals. I think we can agree to disagree on the Hucard versus CD issues and appreciate that everyone collects different things.

[esteban]

A: They are different formats for the SAME PLATFORM/SYSTEM.  However, it is true that the user base was fragmented (since some folks had HuCARD-only consoles). Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge THIS VERY REAL PROBLEM: fragmentation. To argue otherwise is silly! IF I CAN'T play a CD format game, then it is a very real obstacle that no amount of arguing can overcome.

Period.

/end

[StarDust4Ever]

 As far as people new retro gamers coming to the PCE scene and trying to figure stuff out - they get the "buy a Duo" advance.. and what did they almost always do? Buy the hucard only systems because the Duos are too "expensive". Then complain about their upgrade options, followed by a defensive claim that CDs are a different "platform". Why? Because they bring their Sega/Nintendo centric views into the picture and think they know better or whatever. If you don't want to buy Duo on top of that TG16 or PCE that you bought, then fine. Don't enjoy the rest of the majority of PCE awesome titles. Limit yourself to hucards and division addon mentality. While you at it, slap a SegaCD sticker on your CD setup if you do eventually get one. I'm sure it'll make you feel right as rain.

I made this very mistake, albeit for different reasons. I A: never thought I would be interested in the CD library (no idea why), and B: knew of the caps issues after a little research and was just plain paranoid to buy one. That was all before I found this place and learned more about the CD library and found reliable folks who refurb duos. So the step-bro gets my turbografx for xmas and I am out a few extra bucks I didn't need to be.

I have since told at least two people seeking advice"just get a duo, I can point you to a safe place to find one" and what did they do....bought a Turbo. The circle continues....

Yep, sounds like my situation exactly. It's a legacy that won't die!

The fact that more Hucard systems exist in good working condition than CD systems means this legacy will continue for some time, at least until someone creates an Everdrive-like SuperCD expansion for the Turbo/PCe that uses SDXC cards for CD image storage. 

[StarDust4Ever]

Fact still remains there are a lot more working Hucard only systems floating about than working CD-ROMs so not everyone who wants one can have without paying a premium. Law of supply and demand. Some gamers will have to settle without the CDROMs. I unfortunately am one of them.

Am I missing something? I don't see any great shortage of realatively-affordable PCE systems that can play the CD games ... they're the Duo/Duo-R models.

The only real shortage is in North American CD-ROM2 and North American System Card 3.0 units to add onto a TurboGrafx.

If you choose to go that route, and pay the huge premium for those, then that's your choice. The Japanese units play the North American CDs fine without any modification. It's only the HuCards that have any region-protection.

And for that, then you can either region-mod the unit, or just "collect" whatever boxes you like and then play the game on the console with a TurboEverdrive, or you can keep your existing hardware.

I really don't see that you've got much in the way of grounds to complain about the $225 price for a recapped and working Duo when you've just blown a bunch of money on reproduction HuCards.

That's entirely your choice ... but IMHO it pretty-much undercuts your protestations of poverty when it comes to PCE CD units.

You got me there, I think. One can also argue about the space issue. My plate is full right now collecting Hucard games (both US and Japan games). And yes I've got the Everdrive but it's more fun to collect physical media. I've still got space considerations to think about but burning repros of CD games on CDR would be easy and cheap if the original game is unobtainable.

At this time I'm not looking to add a new system to my collection but may do so in the future. I really enjoyed getting the AV Famicom in addition to my NES so I didn't have to deal with adapters anymore. some day I'll get the Japanese Duo system (or an IFU briefcase).

I tend to jump from one system to another with my playing habits and right now I'm addicted to Turbo/PCe.

Knowing Stardust from Atari Age I believe this is the case.  Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Lay off the 7800 homebrews for a while Stardust my man. Your duo will be paid for in no time. 

LOL. Bob is one incredible homebrew factory! :p

And yes, my fiance does protest. Too much...

[Necromancer]

Yes, it is.

Not when using Sam's logic, which was obviously my point.  Duh.

[StarDust4Ever]

I'm surprised this became such a hot topic!  I'll throw my worthless opinion into this mix.

I kinda knew I was opening Pancora's Box when I started this thread. Just wanted to see where it leaded.

Some of the discusion has been really enlightening though, and I've made up my mind to drop the trollish vernacular. I was arguing a losing side of the debate, so agreeing to disagree rather than try to win over my POV seems like the high road for now. :oops:

[Bonknuts]

Nothing inside the SFII bubble? That is news to me. I thought the bankswitch logic chip was too big for a glop top so they needed a "fat" card. I would definitely have liked to see have seen more bankswitched cards though.

Nah. Here's a pic:


That the bottom side of the PCB (that faces down). The PCB is slightly longer, but there's nothing inside or under that bubble. You can clearly see the three rom chips (512k, 1024k, and 1024k, and the mapper which is the round blob). Just like the Arcade Card Duo, and that mapper is way more complex than this - still the same size (the round glop-top).

 The SuperCD ram was too little to handle a SF2 port (it needed to be at least 512k), and the arcade card wasn't finished yet (started development in 1992), so they released it on Hucard. Kind of a last huraah sort of thing.

[Black Tiger]

Most CD games are comparable in content size to Sega and Nintendo carts. The fact that you're using 4 meg cards as an example us once again exposing your true intention of taking a round about way to "prove" that CD games couldn't be done on stock hardware. SFC got 48 meg games + add-on hardware compression. The Legend of Xanadu II would be smaller than 48 megs if you dropped the few redbook tracks and streaming voice acting. Even if you kept all of the sound samples in as non-adpcm channel samples. The chip tunes still sound great. Dracula X is a <16 meg game without the crappy cinemas.

The SFC got precisely 2 48Mb(it) games, and 48Mb(its) is 6MB(ytes).

I've read that Star Ocean packs 13MB of graphics into 4MB, leaving 2MB for code and audio.

Xanadu 1 has approx 6MB of compressed files, plus 0.1MB code, plus 15MB of ADPCM, plus 527MB of CD audio.

Xanadu 2 has approx 9MB of compressed files, plus 0.1MB code, plus 1MB of ADPCM, plus 553MB of CD audio.

The software compression in the Xanadu games get approx 2.1-2.5x compression, and the hardware compression in Star Ocean gets approx 3.2x compression.

If you want to compare Star Ocean's 13MB graphics in 4MB, then Xanadu 2's 9MB of files decompress into 23MB of data (which mixes code and graphics).


The thing to me isn't that the basic size of the graphics is or isn't comparable, it's that from a developers POV, on the CD I can afford to do whatever I wish to do, and the cost-of-goods for the game isn't going to increase.

Cartridges cost a lot of money to make, and bumping up from one size to another could totally change the financial projections for the game.

CDs are cheap to make, and I can get my 59MB of uncompressed Xanadu 1 voice overs, plus 527MB of CD audio voice overs and music, and I can make the player's experience more immersive.

So I've got to both agree and disagree with folks ... while the basic gameplay isn't going to be really any different if I'm limited to a HuCard ... it's all the extra details that enhance the "experience" that developers could deliver when the CD medium freed them from worrying about cartridge sizes that makes the most difference to me.

That's why the PC Engine is so special. It's the very first time that developers could afford to deliver that kind of enhanced experience.

It's still the same darned machine that's delivering the experience, it's just the medium of the game's delivery that makes the CD an affordable way to manufacture/distribute that game.

This is something I've talked about for as long as I've been online. The actual technical differences and potential of what could be practically done and make good business sense for various formats and various consoles is quite a bit different from how it actually manifested. What made early CD games and the PC Engine library in general so special is that developers just happened to look at game development differently and with so much more variety of approaches.

SNES games tend to suffer from what I've called "cart syndrome" in the past, but it's just so much more noticeable and problematic in SNES games specifically. Too often assets are tiled poorly, excessively mirrored and painfully reused. A different balance could have been struck to achieve much less uncomfortably feeling aesthetics. Like designing the assets better for tiling and mirroring first. I've heard stories of how difficult it was developing under the shadow of Nintendo and how you had to send your samples to them to be converted and when you finally got them back after too long of a time, the results were random and you just had to base the size of the rest of the game around them. Looking at the extremes developers took to reduce sample space (speeding up and removing vowels), it really seems like the burden of all sample-based sound combined with pricey carts and the whole official Nintendo process had a heavy influence on the mindset of SNES game design.

It stands out most because of different Genesis cart games tend to be. Comparably sized games look and feel more like CD, computer or arcade games. By this I mean how fluid assets flow together and much less obviously repetitive they are, regardless of cart size.

But CD games cover the entire spectrum of how one might approach balancing assets within a set space. They're more like Japanese computer games up till that time, but still go off in different directions because of more bottlenecked segments, but unlimited potential quantity of superfluous sequences. Legend of Xanadu II has lots of superfluous elements that most people don't notice* and the redundancies would bring things down in size quite a bit. A HuCard version ported from the actual game we got could be extremely faithful with minor alterations, but I agree that without the atmosphere of PCE CD development, neither of those two versions would have wound up being made. But it doesn't matter how things turned out in an alternate reality because PCE CD games are real PCE games and we really have them, regardless of what collectors and console war enthusiasts say.

*The PCE/MD/SFC screenshot comparison thread revealed how much people miss extra details and take the SNES approach for granted. We continue to have people matter of factly say that Parodius Da! for SNES has everything in the PCE version, only better graphics and extra stages. But we've seen how much more animation and extra assets the PC Engine version has. The same has happened with so many games when we take a closer look.

If you need some money to buy a Duo, sell the TG-16 along with some of that Atari garbage.

Or just go back in time a week and buy a Duo instead of Soldier Blade.

HuCards are so much more expensive compared to CD games today that the logic of "price of entry" making CD games too expensive and therefore a separate console, just makes it impossible to take any of someone's arguments seriously.

[crazydean]

While we're on the subject of systems and their CD add-ons, does anyone know how the Jaguar CD relates to its base?

[SamIAm]

Most CD games are comparable in content size to Sega and Nintendo carts. The fact that you're using 4 meg cards as an example us once again exposing your true intention of taking a round about way to "prove" that CD games couldn't be done on stock hardware. SFC got 48 meg games + add-on hardware compression. The Legend of Xanadu II would be smaller than 48 megs if you dropped the few redbook tracks and streaming voice acting. Even if you kept all of the sound samples in as non-adpcm channel samples. The chip tunes still sound great. Dracula X is a <16 meg game without the crappy cinemas.

I am honestly stunned that I am reading this from you of all people. It is tantamount to saying that the things made possible on the PC Engine by a CD drive are actually superfluous.

This means that all those CD RPGs could have been every bit as good on the Super Famicom.

Sam, my friend, you're really hung-up on the cost of the CD-ROM2 add-on when it came out. 

Yeah, I do think the price matters, especially for the vast majority of gamers at the time i.e. kids. It's one valid perspective on the situation.

It's the old "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."

You pay 25,000 yen, get a Super Famicom, you can now play a large library of Super Famicom cartridges, when you play them you're playing Super Famicom.
You pay 25,000 yen, get a PC Engine, you can now play a large library of PC Engine cards, when you play them you're playing PC Engine.
You pay 50,000 yen, get a Super CD, you can now play a large library of Super CDs, when you play them you're playing...Super CD?

*WHAP!*

Forgive me, sensei! I should have known that since it plugs into my PC Engine, I am still playing PC Engine. 

This, by the way, is why I don't think more moderately priced peripherals that only work with a few games and usually come with them anyway cause anything remotely like the bedrock fracture that the PCE CD system did.

If NEC/Hudson had been clear with their vision (and you know after the SuperGrafx/Power Console that those guys were half out of their minds), they would have at least had the sense to either call the Hucard system "Core Grafx" from the beginning and the brand umbrella "PC Engine" or stick with "PC Engine" from the beginning and call the whole thing "HE System".

Actually, HE System is the most logical name for everything. It's not like they never used it, either. How come we don't call it that? The warning on the first track of every Japanese CD game says "This is an HE System CD-ROM disc".

That's it, elmer. You and I are translating Xanadu 1 and 2 for HE System.

[StarDust4Ever]

Nothing inside the SFII bubble? That is news to me. I thought the bankswitch logic chip was too big for a glop top so they needed a "fat" card. I would definitely have liked to see have seen more bankswitched cards though.

Nah. Here's a pic:


That the bottom side of the PCB (that faces down). The PCB is slightly longer, but there's nothing inside or under that bubble. You can clearly see the three rom chips (512k, 1024k, and 1024k, and the mapper which is the round blob). Just like the Arcade Card Duo, and that mapper is way more complex than this - still the same size (the round glop-top).

 The SuperCD ram was too little to handle a SF2 port (it needed to be at least 512k), and the arcade card wasn't finished yet (started development in 1992), so they released it on Hucard. Kind of a last huraah sort of thing.

So we basically only got this wonderful Hucard gem based on a technicality. It seems like it must have been a very good seller, as the price was not high for a CIC despite being extremely popular with collectors.

Also the bankswitching works with the Everdrive v1 which presumably doesn't have extra RAM in it. How can the SFII ROM function on Everdrive if it needed 512kbytes of RAM to work on CDROM? Or are all those needed assets handled by bank-switching? The SFII ROM is 2.5Mbytes so I'm guessing it has the capability to swap out four 512kbyte banks worth of assets on the upper ROM while leaving the other 512kbyte program bank in a fixed location on the lower ROM. This all fits conveniently within the 1mbyte footprint allotted by the card bus.

This is something I've talked about for as long as I've been online. The actual technical differences and potential of what could be practically done and make good business sense for various formats and various consoles is quite a bit different from how it actually manifested. What made early CD games and the PC Engine library in general so special is that developers just happened to look at game development differently and with so much more variety of approaches.

Nice writeup on the pros and cons of asset reuse. I was watching a youtube longplay of Gates of Thunder, and I noticed they seriously went all out on the intro scenes. Normally with limited storage it is the gameplay that counts so all efforts are focused there first. Compared to most Hucard games, the intros were very short or only consisted of a static or briefly animated title screen combined with short gameplay segments on the demo loop.

If you need some money to buy a Duo, sell the TG-16 along with some of that Atari garbage.

Or just go back in time a week and buy a Duo instead of Soldier Blade.

HuCards are so much more expensive compared to CD games today that the logic of "price of entry" making CD games too expensive and therefore a separate console, just makes it impossible to take any of someone's arguments seriously.

LOL on the Soldier Blade. I ultimately got Super Star Soldier as well (imported the Japanese version) and SSS seems to be a closer spiritual sequel to Blazing Lazers / Gunhed compared to Soldier Blade anyway. Since it didn't come with a case originally, I settled for a loose card + sleeve.

And is it just me or does anyone else find it odd that US Soldier Blade appears to be going for cheaper than it's Japanese counterpart? That flies in the face of all logic.

Given the TG-16 upward pricing trend, if I decide I don't want SB anymore, I could easily wait a few months and flip it. The inflation is getting stupid. Sometimes it's a whole "buy now while you still can or forever hold your peace" type thing. Still kicking myself for letting Neutopia slip away.

Finally, it's not necessarily the money issue although Turbo/PCe collecting is kind of hurt on the wallet a bit. It's more an issue of "Am I ready to add/invest a new console/platform to my collection? Someday I will probably get that Japanese Duo or IFU Breifcase, but as I said, my plate is full.

Also Atari is not "garbage."

[Bonknuts]

So we basically only got this wonderful Hucard gem based on a technicality. It seems like it must have been a very good seller, as the price was not high for a CIC despite being extremely popular with collectors.

Also the bankswitching works with the Everdrive v1 which presumably doesn't have extra RAM in it. How can the SFII ROM function on Everdrive if it needed 512kbytes of RAM to work on CDROM? Or are all those needed assets handled by bank-switching? The SFII ROM is 2.5Mbytes so I'm guessing it has the capability to swap out four 512kbyte banks worth of assets on the upper ROM while leaving the other 512kbyte program bank in a fixed location on the lower ROM. This all fits conveniently within the 1mbyte footprint allotted by the card bus.

 SF2 on PCE doesn't use any extra ram. It's just the 8k ram of the stock system. I said if SF2 were to be made for the PCE CD, it would need at least 512k of ram, which is above and beyond the 256k of SuperCD.

 The PCE has a total of 2megabyte (16megabit) address range, but the upper 1megabyte range is reserved for addons. Though technically there at least 900k linear addressing available as open bus space that no addon every used, so 14-15megabit is the largest rom the PCE can officially handle without a mapper (but would need a chip for translating the address range - bank $88 to bank $EF).

 So the lower 1megabyte is used for hucard stuffs. SF2 splits this into lower 512k (fixed rom bank) and upper 512k (you map in one of four 512k sections of the upper 2megabyte rom; the lower cannot mapped or accessed this way). It's the simplest mapper ever. Game logic and sound samples are in the first fixed 512k bank, while the rest of the uncompressed sprite assets for the characters are in the mappable banks. It's right up there with the simplest NES mappers every used.

[SignOfZeta]

I learned something today.

When I play Gate Of Thunder, I'm not playing on PC Engine.

OK...

Heh.  Did you know Metal Combat isn't really a SNES game?

Yes, it is. I also have the bazooka shaped Super Scope for what it's worth, if that's what you're getting at. I have a handful of titles for it. Yoshi's Island is a nice diversion.

A "diversion"? Who are you, Thurston Howel III?

Yeeeeeazzzzzz, well I dabbled in Carnage Heart before a lark with Street Fighter III: Third Strike. Then I spend a moment or two with Romance of Three Kingdoms. It's all a blur in my life of high leasure. Huh haaaa! Yezzzzzz...

[StarDust4Ever]

I learned something today.

When I play Gate Of Thunder, I'm not playing on PC Engine.

OK...

Heh.  Did you know Metal Combat isn't really a SNES game?

Yes, it is. I also have the bazooka shaped Super Scope for what it's worth, if that's what you're getting at. I have a handful of titles for it. Yoshi's Island is a nice diversion.

A "diversion"? Who are you, Thurston Howel III?

Yeeeeeazzzzzz, well I dabbled in Carnage Heart before a lark with Street Fighter III: Third Strike. Then I spend a moment or two with Romance of Three Kingdoms. It's all a blur in my life of high leasure. Huh haaaa! Yezzzzzz...

I meant Yoshi's Safari, not Island. 

It's a nice change in pace from all those "blast shit up before it blasts you" type early FPS combat games. Some of the games that could have really benefited from Super Scope use actually don't work with it. Like the Wikipedia article quoted Revolution X as Super Scope compatible. It isn't.