nesdev.org

IvanDSM wrote:If i wanted to do a fake device i would ask "How can i make a SNES-CD that plays Never Gonna Give You Up
upon loaded?"

You don't need a CD for that. Nor do you even need a Super NES, really. All you really have to do is put Kirby's hamster friend and Dr. Light's robotic housekeeper in the same game. Read more

byuu: I'm pretty sure that more than 224x144 is possible, at the expense of a bit of grain. Choose a few palettes that represent parts of the image and assign them. Smashing.

tepples wrote:

IvanDSM wrote:If i wanted to do a fake device i would ask "How can i make a SNES-CD that plays Never Gonna Give You Up
upon loaded?"

You don't need a CD for that. Nor do you even need a Super NES, really. All you really have to do is put Kirby's hamster friend and Dr. Light's robotic housekeeper in the same game. Read more

I know that rom. It is really stunning. Can we keep an entire track on NES? Like Yellow Submarine? Please don't refer to 2-in-1 Streetdance and Hit Mouse. That shit annoys me. The sound quality is so bad i'd puke on the cart.

Edit (Add): And the point of that message is that if i wanted to do a fake device, i'd do one that played the whole track, so it would rick roll the guy who buyed it.

Bregalad wrote:That's pretty much what the Super Game Boy does I guess.

Uhh, no? The Tristar NES or whatever does this, but the SGB uses the SNES PPU.

koitsu wrote:There wasn't enough bus bandwidth to do full-screen video playback.

Yeah, it would basically be like the Mega CD, only more limited. SNES is further crippled by VRAM being off-limits during screen rendering, so even heavy sprite rotation wouldn't be practical.

The only thing an add-on unit could do better than say a SuperFX/SA-1 would be CD-audio playback and lots and lots of raw data that carry those fun "loading, please wait" screens. It's further crippled because both the expansion port and PPU+APU are on the B-bus, so you have to doubly transfer all data.

MSU1 is basically everything the SNES CD could have offered, except in the cart on the A-bus, so you double your potential with direct-to-VRAM transfers. It's enough to pull off dithered 60%-fullscreen video, which is passable for animated video, but doesn't hold a candle to PSX/Saturn MPEG video.

The SNES-CD would further need a lossy video decoder to handle the 2.48MB/s throughput rate and smaller storage pool (700MB), making the 224x144x8bpp@30fps output even more pathetic. Also must keep in mind that the SPC700 can put out amazing sound already. It wouldn't be as huge a gain as it was for the Mega Drive.

In my opinion the main gain for a SNES CD would have been the storage. ROM Memory was expensive and plenty of games certainly had to make cuts because of this. While it was an early game Final Fight suffered because of the 8M of ROM was not big enough to fit an entire level as well as a 3rd player character plus I recall hearing it may have been a reason for the low sound quality particularly of the music.

Another thing byuu while you mention the SPC's great quality, it's still limited by the 64K of memory. Isn't the reason Street Fighter Alpha 2 has those strange pauses due to loading SPC memory? If you played music off a CD you could save alot of memory not needing samples for music instruments or pattern data for playing the music or code for playing it. You'd have much more room for high quality sound effects, plus more sound channels for them.

But it doesn't matter now, it's not like if you made a SNES CD that suddenly there would be games for it. About MSU1, I've heard of some projects using it to add FMV and CD quality audio. Wasn't someone putting Chrono Trigger's PSX FMVs into it? And I thought I heard something about Der Langrisser too.

CD storage won't help you that much with games. You are limited to 1-2x transfer rates, have terrible seek delays with no random access, and only have 128K RAM to buffer, most of which is used by your game engine already. Only way to make it shine would be to stick a 64MB RAM+MMC chip in the cartridge slot to buffer your game and eliminate loading times during play. And that'd cost a fortune back then, and you couldn't make anything more visually impressive because you have the same PPU. And for what? FF6 @ 3MB was already 40 hours of gameplay. Would we seriously expect 200-hour RPGs with this added storage?

Much as I love the SNES, I have to agree that the SNES-CD concept made no sense. It would have bombed like the Mega CD.

Re: MSU1, yeah it's basically meant to enhance existing games. I've made patches to replace the SPC soundtracks (leaving sound effects intact) in Earthbound and Der Langrisser, and smkdan inserted the CT PSX intro into the SNES version on the older 21fx API. Super Mario Odyssey's a custom SMW ROM hack that uses it as well.

Progress hasn't been too rapid because only bsnes can use it so far. Planning to try and pick things up a bit more once the sd2snes goes on sale.

The PC-Engine CD attachment was fairly successful. In the end I agree that cost ultimately made these CD attachments doomed to be a niche product. But PC-Engine's CD was nothing more than CDROM storage, audio, and a bunch of RAM for loading the game into. If you had a cartridge with a large amount of memory, 8 or 16 megabits, I think you could have some nice games on SNES. But that's not to say that they would be vastly better. Afterall, storage problems were attacked by compression too with SDD-1 and other means.

That's really what it is about, having more room for level data, graphics animation, and CD audio. Sega CD took it further by adding a second CPU and other things.

It'll be neat to see what happens when the SD2SNES cartridge comes out.

MottZilla is right. The FDS came with a 40 KB system card, the PCE CD had 64 KB plus a 192 KB Super System Card (built-in on the Duo), and the Sega CD had 768 KB. The Play Station would have probably used such a system card.

How about T.I.M.E.? (Is that the way it's written) How did it control the audio tracks? Or did YOU have to play the track manuallly?