SuperDisc BIOS released + analysis [attn: nocash]

[tepples]

I'm assuming less animation because cels can't be streamed from a big 4 MB memory. With SuperDisc you're limited to the 64K VRAM, 128K work RAM in the console at $7E0000-$7FFFFF, and 256K work RAM in the system card at $808000-$87FFFF (mapped in mode $20 aka LoROM).

[Drew Sebastino]

Oh yeah, that sucks... I didn't think the game would have used a unique cartridge, I would have thought it'd use the Super Disc Bios.

Actually, I just noticed something else... Is that game 3 player?

[tepples]

The system card contains both the BIOS and the 256K external work RAM. It takes a lot longer to copy animation frames from the disc to the 256K RAM than it does to DMA data from the cart. But I suspect that this system card is why the DRAM refresh signal was brought out to pin 33 on the cart edge.

The Sega CD ended up having more RAM.

[tomaitheous]

What year was this? Hudson/NEC started working on the Arcade Card for the PCE CD in late '92. That was 2304k if ram (18 megabits, 16megabits of it was DRAM). It was supposed to be released late '93, but delayed until early-mid '94.

[lidnariq]

Date stamps on the ICs on this prototype are 48th week of 1991, so there should be roughly two years of Moore's law in-between, or somewhere around 37% the transistors.

Yeah, it's definitely weak. Six mebibit in late 1991 would be the extrapolation of 18 mebibit in early 1994.

[Sik]

I looked up. Sega CD was doing 768KB of RAM (512KB for CD side, 256KB shared for both sides) and that was back in 1991. And that's in addition to the base system's memory (64KB RAM, 64KB VRAM, 8KB Z80 RAM).

256KB was weak regardless of what metric you use.

[MottZilla]

Allow me to revive this thread and leave something here before returning to work on more pressing issues.

A couple of friends and me (under the pseudonym "Dieter von Laser") developed and released a new game for the Super Disc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99-v8lkoOdo

That's awesome d4s. Are you back from your hiatus now?

I'd love to see this running on the actual prototype as well. Maybe someone will make their own copy of the actual hardware too.

[d4s]

That's awesome d4s. Are you back from your hiatus now?

Thanks!
I guess you could say that I'm back, although my online activity will probably remain low.
Games like Jet Pilot Rising and Super Boss Gaiden just represent itches I couldn't refrain from scratching.