I'm sure Pionpiate and Guyome are the same person :p
I know you're joking, but I really don't want to alienate peonpiate since he/she just got here.
Thats not a fair comparison at all, regardless if its 'only' more ram...The snes version is running vanilla and unmodified, without the benefit of mass CD storage to store the huge sprites and animations and without the added RAM to quickly access it.
You say, but it's really has nothing to do with RAM. Not in the context you're thinking. It's cart space. The ACD RAM can't be access like normal RAM/ROM. It's basically just used/treated as sequential storage device for reading from memory. It's not more WORK ram or that sort of thing. The way it's designed, you don't read/write to it like normal for a console or a computer. Like I said, it's directly equivalent of a larger cart ROM. And from that perspective, it's totally fair to compare. The PCE has a better hardware arrangement for doing BG's with more non-repeating tiles than the SNES. This shows in the FF:Special comparison screens shots. This in the WH2 comparison screen shots. That Arcade Card doesn't effect the BG's because all the tiles are already loaded in VRAM. And by comparison, those stage BGs take up next to nothing compared to all the sprite frames of animation.
And I doubt WH2 could be done to the exact quality as the ACD-CD version was on a standard hu-card..again I think it would resemble the SNES version due to storage space limits.
Well, you're only limited by the size of the rom. The SNES *technically* can handle up to a 90+meg cart size without a mapper. The PCE can also handle up to that size with just a simple mapper. There's nothing to say neither could have used larger cart sizes than that. The systems themselves aren't *limited* to small carts. But the point is, WH2 would look the same on hucard given a large enough mapper. I.e. the ACD setup gives no speed or special graphical advantage. It doesn't allow you to display larger sprites, or more colors, or give the system a speed increase. What did do though, was allow the PCE CD system to be *competitive* with the
growing cart sizes of the SFC/MD systems. Technically speaking, the 256k of RAM of system card 3.0 (which again, is used as ROM space. Or better termed "cart space") - is really limited in a lot of ways, even if the CD itself can hold hundreds time more than carts. SF2, a simpler fighter engine/game IMO, was completely *not* doable on the system card 3.0. It *had* to be on a hucard project. And guess what? That same hucard *only* has 8k of RAM. So if you're saying that comparing ACD games with SNES cart is unfair, then I'd have to say comparing SNES carts to SCD games is even more unfair. Unfair for the SCD 3.0 games.
My point is; that ACD doesn't bring to the table what a lot of gamers think. Gamers
always willing to *include* the strengths of the SNES: mode 7, mode 1 (3 BG layers), 32k color palette, transparency effects, the snazy SPC sound unit. Not to mention the very common addon chips of SNES carts. And yet... a lot of gamers are *quick* to dismiss the ACD setup of the PCE. Try to classify it as an addon to the likes of the 32x or whatever. Which is utterly ridiculous. Especially from a programming perspective. I've even seen gamers dismiss the System 3.0 CD addon itself, when it tends to show something superior to the competitor/other system. I just don't understand this logic.
