Mad Stalker - Arcade or Super System game?

[Punch]

By the way, do you think that it's possible to do a conversion of a, say, roughly 20 to 30 Megabit arcade game to an 8 bit console that can only have 64 KB of ROM without bankswitching or do you think that it's impossible to do so because of the limitations of bankswitching you're claiming? Just a curiosity.

Depends on the hardware, and if the port has been watered down. Is the data on the cart 20-30 megabits, or cut down?

When you say without bank switching, do you mean the hardware can't do that?

Port is of a game that might theoretically hit 30 MiB of data, original might be double the size of the port. Hardware can only see 64 KB of data without resorting to bankswitching circuitry. Seems to be an interesting proportion, not as huge as a CD to HuCard but still an interesting question. In the data size aspect alone, considering all data might be accessed at any given time, is it possible to have this theoretical port?

Again, it depends on the hardware. 20-30MB shouldn't be too much of a challenge. Does the cart have an MMU?
When you say "only see 64KB", are you referring to the ROM chip sizes in the cart? Or the data in the VRAM? The PCE has 64KB of VRAM. Is that what you mean?

Only see 64KB = the CPU can only address bytes 0 to 65535 on a ROM cart. This has nothing to do with VRAM, and yes presumably it would have a MMU chip.

Well without knowing the exact console you mean, I would imagine yes, that's pretty possible. 30MB is a lot, but broken into 64KB chunks with an MMU it shouldn't be too bad at all. With an inbuilt MMU, the data being fed out is only what is needed, and won't constantly be running calls across the bus to the CPU or system MMU.

This is the exact same case as the PCE having a large mapper to be able to hold a 200 MB ROM, why is my example possible and what we're trying to tell you in this thread isn't?

edit: oh and by the way I'm disappointed that you didn't take the bait and claim that it would be impossible. You know which console has 64KB of logic addressing? The PCE. The thing has an internal "MMU" that maps upwards of 1 megabyte (the ceiling for "standard" hucards)... it wasn't as epic as it would be if you answered otherwise but you got the right answer out of pure luck anyway, seeing that you didn't catch that little trivia piece that is even shown in the HuC6280's wikipedia page lol.

No game uses more than 50MB on a CDROM (audio tracks obviously excluded) and this is a 1987 console with a custom mapper built in on the CPU, if there's a hugeass cart it's not going to use all data at once and it won't bankswitch on the cart side more than once per second, thus it could run all CD titles without loss (except for Redbook audio of course), it's not rocket science dude. It's possible even if you pretend that the cart would be slower than the CDROM pickup of the Duo (which it's never going to be, not even close lmao).

[Black Tiger]

Lol, irrelevant. We're talking economy of scale in terms of what is acceptable performance. 2-8MB is nothing compared to CD size.

And as was said before, the game itself is nowhere near the 650MB capacity of a CD.  If a CD game were made as a huey instead, it'd lose the hundreds of megs of redbook and adpcm.  Duh.

Lol, that is still data being stored on ROMs. Not only that, but all sound data is run off the CPU, with no additional sound chip as found in the CD-ROM unit. That is even worse...

There are more chiptunes in CD games than HuCards.

Many HuCard games run multiple samples at once while still running intensive games that would melt the SNES.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

[Artabasdos]

Lol, irrelevant. We're talking economy of scale in terms of what is acceptable performance. 2-8MB is nothing compared to CD size.

And as was said before, the game itself is nowhere near the 650MB capacity of a CD.  If a CD game were made as a huey instead, it'd lose the hundreds of megs of redbook and adpcm.  Duh.

Lol, that is still data being stored on ROMs. Not only that, but all sound data is run off the CPU, with no additional sound chip as found in the CD-ROM unit. That is even worse...

There are more chiptunes in CD games than HuCards.

Many HuCard games run multiple samples at once while still running intensive games that would melt the SNES.

What does that have to do with a bottlenecked bus and horrible data overload?

[Necromancer]

The PCE's sound chip can combine channels to play better quality sound. Therefore the redbook could theoretically run to some extent when converted to whatever container.
I'm arguing that your point about a "Huey" of several hundred MBs wouldn't work very well. Even with an onboard MMU. That amount of data would bottleneck.

You also didn't mention about converting the redbook to chiptune. Your argument was purely on MB size.

I never said that a 500+ megabyte huey would be required; that's your foolish notion.  The entire argument is about recreating a cd game as a graphically identical huey, and I said in the very beginning that adpcm and redbook would be scrapped: "other than redbook and adpcm stuff, if it could be done on CD it could be done on huey".  Don't try to change the argument after being shown you're wrong.

Since elmer has posted such fancy details, let's use Xanadu 1 and 2 as examples: they have about 6 megabytes and 9 megabytes of game data (respectively) with the rest of their discs being filled with adpcm and redbook.  These are a couple of the largest and most graphically impressive games around, yet they'd comfortably fit in a cart similar in size to Star Ocean or Pier Solar, neither of which have any "performance issues" you claim.  These two games also rely heavily on chip tunes in game, so you'd not need to double the rom size or play in silence.


Wanna know what's really funny?  This shit isn't exactly hypothetical.

There's several titles that were released as both 500+ megabyte cds and 8 megabit or smaller hueys.... yet they were substantially identical games other than the tunes.

There's several more that were released as PCE CDs and SNES/Genny carts.... yet the latter 8 or 16 megabit carts weren't missing 90% of the graphics/sound/etc.

[Punch]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

[Artabasdos]

Of course it's different. The CD can hold 500MB+ of data, and load it into RAM when required. A HuCard/cart can only hold a few megs in total. IIRC SFII on PCE is 20 megabits, or 2 1/2MB!

The only appreciable difference there is cost.  20 megabits isn't the max allowable rom size; with the right mapper, a huey could be made to hold just as much as any cd game made....

I think the issue here is how you phrased this. If you're chopping the sound data to chiptune then yeah, it's going to work. 8 or 9 MB would still be a pretty fat cart too.

Pier Solar can also use the MegaCD to play the OST in-game. The MDCD's hardware is considerably more powerful than the PCE's in terms of audio.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Actually it's 2MB. All chips would likely be powered. They are in the SFC and MD.

[Black Tiger]

Sapphire's data track is only 118 megabits.

Spriggan is 6 stages at <.05 megabits each and like all stage-based CD games, is loading redundant code and assets each time . Add in a 30KB chiptune soundtrack and superfluous cinematics and it would be a whopping <4 megabit HuCard, just like Musha.

Nevermind what all the people who are intimately familiar with programming the hardware have said over the years about how this stuff actually works. Lets just interperet the specs as though the PCE is the Vita.

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Games like digicomics and some RPGs use a lot of space for streaming adpcm dialogue.

Otherwise, PCE CD space is used up no differently than audio CD space. It's 99% redbook.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

[Punch]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Actually it's 2MB. All chips would likely be powered. They are in the SFC and MD.

Of course I'm not counting audio. JB Harold probably has the disc full of ADPCM samples... which you cannot play without CD hardware anyway.

[Artabasdos]

Sapphire's data track is only 118 megabits.

Spriggan is 6 stages at <.05 megabits each and like all stage-based CD games, is loading redundant code and assets each time . Add in a 30KB chiptune soundtrack and superfluous cinematics and it would be a whopping <4 megabit HuCard, just like Musha.

Nevermind what all the people who are intimately familiar with programming the hardware have said over the years about how this stuff actually works. Lets just interperet the specs as though the PCE is the Vita.

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Games like digicomics and some RPGs use a lot of space for streaming adpcm dialogue.

Otherwise, PCE CD space is used up no differently than audio CD space. It's 99% redbook.

I think you well know that I'm not comparing it to the Vita outside of how larger Flash can affect seek time.

Like I said above, the poor phrasing by Necromancer gave the wrong impression. A 1:1 data copy of CD to Flash would be f*cking slow on a machine of that era, especially with the limited address space and low bus bandwidth.

[Punch]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

Thanks, I'll need it someday, as a person who actually can and has produced PC Engine software. God bless you, random Internet late 80's videogame connoisseur.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.
[/quote

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

So no PCE CD holds over say 300MB of data, including audio?

Actually it's 2MB. All chips would likely be powered. They are in the SFC and MD.

Of course I'm not counting audio. JB Harold probably has the disc full of ADPCM samples... which you cannot play without CD hardware anyway.

Yes, yes you can. You change it to the container and combined bit output of the first 2 combined PCE channels. It's sampled sound, just like voice samples in any game. The quality probably wouldn't be great though.

[Artabasdos]

@Punch

Oh God lol. Scale. 30MB vs 500MB. An inbuilt MMU would help, but good luck powering f*ck knows' how many vintage ROM chips with whatever fragment of 4W the PCE gives the slot. The seek/fetch is still gonna be brutal.

No game uses "500 MB". You don't need to power all ROM chips at once as you will NEVER have access to all of them at once anyway. Anyway see my edit, I'm out of batteries to argue with you, I'll just lol at you trying to pass off as an expert on everything PCE and when the joke gets old I'll add you to a list only Xak/Validus had the honor of joining since I've started using this forum. Yes, I respect you as much as Xak now.

And yeah, you don't understand my point of the bus. Good luck getting so many bankswitched calls across it using the PCE's MMU. 

Thanks, I'll need it someday, as a person who actually can and has produced PC Engine software. God bless you, random Internet late 80's videogame connoisseur.

So you used 80's era ROM chips in excess of say 300MB using the PCE's MMU eh? Don't think so.

 Or, more likely, you used an Everdrive with modern components, and a complex MMU to handle the SD card data.