Author Topic: PC Engine Creator Memories  (Read 3021 times)

ParanoiaDragon

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #45 on: March 10, 2017, 10:50:25 PM »
i recall buying Beyond the Beyond, & being frustrated that I could't save.  Has enough money for the game, but not for the memory card.  I don't recall how long I sat on the game before getting a card.  Maybe I figured it'd have a password system for people who didn't have the card yet??

SamIAm

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #46 on: March 11, 2017, 02:40:47 AM »
:)

IN DEFENSE OF TENNOKOE BANK

I dunno, man, I don't think there's anything too complicated about the individual-file solution, especially with a little basic idiot-proofing of the interface. In fact, I think it's easier in a lot of ways.

Let's take a look at the problem the Tennokoe Bank causes. Imagine you have Save-A, Save-B and Save-C in your internal memory. You want to keep Save-A and Save-B on deck, but you don't need Save-C at the moment; you just don't want to delete it.

Now along comes Save-D, from a new game you want to play, and it won't fit into the internal memory. If the Tennokoe Bank worked like I think it should, you would be able to copy out Save-C to make room, and that would be that. Save-A, Save-B and Save-D would all be happily in the internal memory for you to have easy access to, and Save-C would be quickly and efficiently tucked away.

Instead, however, the reality is that you have to put Save-A, Save-B and Save-C all into the Tennokoe, and now the only thing in your internal memory is Save-D. Want to play the game that uses Save-A, then a little more of Save-D? That's two more memory swaps.

And then there's the temptation to do something really stupid: copy Save-A/B/C to the Tennokoe Bank without actually swapping, and then just delete Save-C from the internal memory to make room for Save-D. Now you've got two copies of A and B floating around, only one of which you're going to make progress with. Heaven help you if you get them mixed up a couple of weeks later, and especially if you then go on to delete something without checking it.

It's worth mentioning that since there are four banks, that's four times as much potentially wasted space on the Tennokoe since you probably can't fill each bank perfectly.

It's all this versus just copying single files back and forth from a single big bank. There's no complex file system or anything, either, it's just two lists: internal memory and Tennokoe memory.

Sounds like a piece of cake to me.  :wink:
« Last Edit: March 11, 2017, 02:48:06 AM by SamIAm »

ccovell

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #47 on: March 11, 2017, 10:14:53 AM »
IN DEFENSE OF TENNOKOE BANK

(1) I think you are overlooking an important factor: ease of use for all consumers, including average/dumbass/child.
You do have a point; I can see stupid kids saying, "Wakkanaiiii".  However, some PCE games make gamers delete files before continuing, showing a screen with saves and their byte sizes, so even little kids should have gotten used to copying saves and watching their sizes anyway.

FURTHER SIPS OF THE HOOKAH...

(a) "Bank" as a metaphor...
...
...
Or maybe you don't.

Yeah, the current Bank functionality was an incredibly wasted opportunity.  Moving around save files (and even intelligently duplicating them as I did in my BRAM ROM) as a software programmer isn't rocket science.

esteban

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PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #48 on: March 11, 2017, 12:20:24 PM »
Purely as conversation, you guys really don't think it's neat that an entire Bank is preserved at a time?

I mean, regardless of whether you like the system, the implications of it are totally intriguing.

:)
« Last Edit: March 11, 2017, 12:22:06 PM by esteban »
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SignOfZeta

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #49 on: March 11, 2017, 04:20:10 PM »
I'm sure that at the time they though it was a clever idea and a more simplified system. It isn't, and I'm sure whoever got stuck programming it knew that.

As long as we agree to blame management and not the worker I'm prepared to drop my case at this time.

elmer

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #50 on: March 11, 2017, 04:27:06 PM »
As long as we agree to blame management and not the worker I'm prepared to drop my case at this time.

Hahaha!  :lol:

You should know by now that it's never, ever, management's fault!  :wink:

SamIAm

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #51 on: March 11, 2017, 08:07:55 PM »
As long as we can agree that somebody was out of their minds, I'm cool.

dshadoff

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #52 on: March 12, 2017, 09:16:43 AM »
I think you guys may be forgetting an important use case:

Copying an individual Bomberman backup file into a larger pot (total: 8KB) is, as everybody has mentioned, not rocket science.  However, keep in mind that the total storage was still only 8KB.

The alternate method only helps if:
1) you have a lot of games (true only for a limited number of gamers at the time), or when used with certain BRAM-consuming games which started to come out at that time.
2) You don't need to keep multiple copies of the same game.  If you want do that, then you need to have some way of keeping those separate, which needs more space, and some differentiator (note: no clock in the PC Engine, so date/time won't cut it).

Now, why would anybody need mulitple savegames for the same game ?  Perhaps they are in the same family, and can only deal with one console.  And little brother overwriting big brother's perfect score would be traumatic.

That's probably the real reason for the banks.  Each kid gets their own slot.

SignOfZeta

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #53 on: March 12, 2017, 09:49:30 AM »
There you go, trying to explain humanity to programmers. Good luck!

SamIAm

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #54 on: March 12, 2017, 12:43:40 PM »
That's probably the real reason for the banks.  Each kid gets their own slot.


I admit, I hadn't thought of that aspect.

But let me ask: if it had been you designing this, what would you have gone with?

If we were designing the Tennokoe Bank together in 1991 and you proposed the structure that Hudson eventually went with, I'd raise two questions:

1. Does it over-complicate the interface to add an option for individual file copying somewhere?

2. If the answer to 1 is yes, then is the multi-kid-user situation really worth accommodating at the cost of causing the logistical problems of transferring saves in groups only? In other words, do users who need multiple banks outnumber (or otherwise outweigh) users who simply have a full BRAM and need to copy out something?

The "big-pot" solution effectively gives you the means to have two saves for every game. If we allow ourselves to conclude that the "four-bank" solution is really only useful in families with three gamers or more, then users who need it would be very few. In low-birthrate Japan, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 10% of the user-base.

I'd be curious to see how they advertised it. The comic inside of the manual actually emphasizes the Tennokoe Bank's portability, of all things. Indeed, fast swapping of the entire internal memory would be very useful when bringing games to a friend's house. However, I have to wonder how many people actually used the Tennokoe Bank for that. It's not like individual file copying would have been a terrible solution in that case, either.
« Last Edit: March 12, 2017, 01:39:47 PM by SamIAm »

dshadoff

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #55 on: March 12, 2017, 02:39:57 PM »
The other possibility is that there were a few games being developed around that time, which planned to use the entire BRAM because they wanted to save that much memory.

In a case like that, there is no particular reason for the programmers to use convention by saving the save game as a normal savegame - it could just be a binary blob.  Then your "file at a time" tool would break.  But dealing with the whole bank at once... works.


...And if I were designing it, I would probably have done the "file at a time" deal, until I got to testing it, and then realized that multiple savegames for the same game, need some work... probably as a whole interactive session on how to tell them apart.  And I'd probably panic a bit.  I may even revert to the "bank at once" under those circumstances.
« Last Edit: March 12, 2017, 02:42:14 PM by dshadoff »

SamIAm

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #56 on: March 12, 2017, 04:25:04 PM »
The other possibility is that there were a few games being developed around that time, which planned to use the entire BRAM because they wanted to save that much memory.

In a case like that, there is no particular reason for the programmers to use convention by saving the save game as a normal savegame - it could just be a binary blob.  Then your "file at a time" tool would break.  But dealing with the whole bank at once... works.

I would think that Hudson would have enforced a formatting standard, though. In fact, without it, the CD-system and the Tennokoe 2 interfaces might have reacted strangely to that data. It shouldn't have been expensive space-wise, especially if they're taking up the whole 2000 blocks already. It's probably just two bytes to designate the save-file length, plus a few more for the name.

Quote
...And if I were designing it, I would probably have done the "file at a time" deal, until I got to testing it, and then realized that multiple savegames for the same game, need some work... probably as a whole interactive session on how to tell them apart.  And I'd probably panic a bit.  I may even revert to the "bank at once" under those circumstances.

All of the games I've seen maintain a single save-file-name no matter the contents of the save itself. Assuming that that's true for the whole library, you could just set it up so that you can't have two saves with the same name in the same memory, and have your options for the user be Copy, Erase and Swap. There's no more potential for confusion than the bank-at-once system, and two brothers can still have separate files this way.


Looking at that comic, it occurs to me that maybe the Tennokoe Bank really wasn't designed primarily for people whose BRAMs were full. In that case, it's not necessarily a case of poor design...or at least not the same kind of poor design. Was that really the best prioritization?

Regardless, it still leaves us with the issue I described to the hypothetical person learning about PCE hardware: this system doesn't have any really good options once your BRAM is full, other than to delete something.
« Last Edit: March 12, 2017, 04:47:18 PM by SamIAm »

Black Tiger

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #57 on: March 12, 2017, 04:52:35 PM »
Most saves take up very little space, but many use most or all of it. Even if single file management were available, you'd still be backing up your entire bram if you played a lot of RPGs, each time you encountered one of the big files, and if you mostly played shooters or arcade games, you wouldn't really need a Tennokoe Bank at all.

I still think that flexible save management would have been ideal, but on-console saving and the Tennokoe Bank were already a luxury. And it's silly to make a big deal out of a convenient accessory not having such a minor additional feature when the generation is infamous for major design oversights in each console's hardware, along with all of the other shortsighted decisions that were made in general.

There are still several games which wipe out all of your saves without warning when you start the game. This kind of stuff was common back then.
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SamIAm

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #58 on: March 12, 2017, 10:07:21 PM »
It's not really about whether it's a big deal, because as I've said, I don't think it is. It's only about whether Hudson should have known better. There are plenty of games that use more than 5% (but far less than 100%) of the BRAM. Whether it's that or any other angle, I just don't see a good excuse. It's a "What were they thinking?" moment, even if it is a minor one. Saving on the PCE could have been better, the four-banks system is dumb, and I reserve the right to be annoyed by it.  :wink:

The games that wipe your saves are just the unlicensed ones and Shape Shifter, right? And Shadow of the Beast if there is no space left?
« Last Edit: March 12, 2017, 10:55:43 PM by SamIAm »

Necromancer

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Re: PC Engine Creator Memories
« Reply #59 on: March 13, 2017, 03:23:25 AM »
You act like the save system is broken garbage, yet few agree.  There's just not that many people hung up on keeping save files for decades.
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