/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5838161]

15 blocks in total on a standard Sony PS1 Memory Card. 1 save = 1 block, Though some games would require more than 1block for a save.

Final Fantasy 7 requires just 1 block for a save and your FF7 save consists of a record of all of your Items, Equipment, Materia, Limit Breaks, Equipment on each character, Materia that are slotted to each character's equipment, your option preferences (like changing the menu color and setting ATB to real-time or wait), and all of the various event flags of the game keeping track of where you are in the plot and if you're spoken to such-and-such for an event or whatever. That's quite a lot of information for just one whole save block!

Then there are simple platformers where the only data being saved is "You are at level 3." Those also require one block.

What was Sony thinking?????

[Anonymous No.5838169]

>>5838161
>"Buy more memory cards goyim"
Became pretty evident around 6th gen when they started including slots for memory cards inside game cases

[Anonymous No.5838235]

>>5838161
Before recent times, memory was extremely costly. The greatest limiting factor of older consoles was their memory, not their CPUs. The thing that made arcade machines so robust in their graphics was their huge memory banks, but that large memory cost a lot of money. To keep the cost of mem cards cheap, small amounts of memory were used.

[Anonymous No.5838263]

>>5838161
I still have my same memory cards from when I got my PS1 in 1998, they have never corrupted and still hold all my original saves.

Feels good man

[Anonymous No.5838286]

>>5838161
This UI was so fucking slow.

[Anonymous No.5838295]

whatever you can fit in 8kb of memory

[Anonymous No.5838337]

I'll try to be concise here, OP.
In terms of "size", a PSX block has 8KB of data.
What you have to understand is, when the game saves data on a block, it doesn't save in a format like this:
- Potions: 03
- Hi-Potions: 15
- Mega Potions: 12
- Elixirs: 02
- Remedy: 01
- Enemy Materia: 04

And so on. No, the format is like this:
- <a bunch of checksum bytes> 00 04 0F 03 0F 0C 02 01 04

The game code has something called a "lookup table" that tells it to look into a specific position in the save data to see how many of tha item you have. So a portion of code will be like:

<Quantity of Potion>
<Look into position 01 after the first 00 04 0F bytes>
<Quantity of Hi-Potion>

And so on...

Anyway. What makes a game like Diablo take a retarded amount of memory blocks (is it 10 or 15?) is because those games save every single map state on a "main save". It's a little hard to put into words, but imagine it's like this: there's a file called map01.sav that has the state of the whole map01.map file. It isn't as big as the .map file, but it still needs to save the state of the whole map. So for example, it would need to save the position of items on the ground, amount of enemies killed (and if there are any alive), chests opened, etc.

If you have the PC versions of Fallout 1 and 2, you can look into your sav folder, and see that there's a separate save for each map. An even older game that uses this was the original Wasteland.

[Anonymous No.5838371]

>>5838235
>bunch of inaccurate bullshit
Don't even know where to begin with this

[Anonymous No.5838393]

>>5838337
Thats the same reason why games like the original Metroid will take made up passwords, because all the password is looking for is (En-Tanks gained, Missles Gained, total of items gathered, Ridley Dead, Kraid Dead, Area last in, and Samus suit), which could also be a string of hexcode. Other passwords were either VERY specific (You're in Level 5) or don't allow for impossible combinations (You can't start Megaman II with all weapons equipped, because the code for you having a specific weapon also shuts off access to that stage).

[Anonymous No.5838396]

>>5838371
Well if you actually had anything to counter my post you'd have posted it.

[Anonymous No.5838423]

>>5838286
Looks way better than the PSOne UI. I miss my original PSX

[Anonymous No.5839354]

>>5838393
IIRC, some of those older games use an algorithm to generate the passwords. One such algorithm that was broken was River City Ransom's/Kunio-kun's. If you know the algorithm, you can make your own passwords up.

Games like Megaman that bar you from that, probably have some routine to block invalid values (so like a checksum, but for the password). However, does Megaman save things like the amount of lives? If it doesn't, then it's just a list of valid passwords that is checked. If it's an algorithm, it probably checks invalid situations (all weapons on Stage 1, Wily defeated before all bosses, etc).

[Anonymous No.5839402]

>>5838295
Is it possible to do a save state of a world in just 8kb?

[Anonymous No.5839547]

>>5839402

I dunno. I tried once playing Prisoner of Ice which is a basic adventure game and probably only needs to store the inventory alongside some miscellanea, and was shocked when a single save took up *half* of my memory card.

[Anonymous No.5840326]

>>5839402
That's like asking "How do I build a house?"
There are many things that you can subjugate to the save file that can be dictated by game logic and therefore not take up save file space.
mega tl;dr it depends on the game

[Anonymous No.5840354]

>>5838161
>What was Sony thinking?????
why is it sony's fault now?

[Anonymous No.5840357]

>>5840354
Because they wanted people to buy more memory cards.

[Anonymous No.5840552]

>>5838161
They didn't want to fiddle with space (they saved that for their next playstation) so instead they just used standard blocks. It also was a meager amount so Joe Schmoe that only plays a few sports games had to buy only a single a card. This allowed a standard base console price but leveraged memory prices.

[Anonymous No.5840990]

>>5838161
how about the fucking sports games that took like 10 blocks for the season mode and another 2 just for your settings?

[Anonymous No.5841948]

>>5838263
Same here, except I static shocked one of them and wiped it that way. Still works fine after that though

[Anonymous No.5842451]

>>5838161
Oh yeah well City of Lost Children as well as Discworld required all 15 blocks for 1 (one) save. Explain that shit.

[Anonymous No.5842526]

>>5838263
Based, I had my saves too but I managed to accidentally format it with Alien Trilogy.

[Anonymous No.5842537]

>>5840990
Can't relate, anon.

[Anonymous No.5842551]

>>5840990
Vagrant Story didn't use an entire card but it did something possibly more annoying
You have a pretty small inventory for equipment and weapon parts but hey you got an extra storage bin you can access at save points, too bad the game has to load it from the memory card and then resave it any time you want to access it cause it didn't fit in the PSX memory I guess

[Anonymous No.5842557]

>>5840990
pfft I hope you have a few extra cards laying around

[Anonymous No.5842702]

>>5839354
Mega Man used algorithms, it was just really really simplistic. The entire password system got broken back in the NES days and magazines would print "make your own Mega Man password" features.

[Anonymous No.5842748]

>>5838161
>What was Sony thinking?????
That the access to the eeprom can be made simpler and safer if the blocks are in just 8KB increments instead of game having to refer to some file allocation table that a buggy game could corrupt and make all your saved data useless.

[Anonymous No.5842762]

>>5842557
wtf there was a western port of 3D KAKUTO TSUKURU ?!

[Anonymous No.5842775]

>>5838161
"Get my console for cheap then buy my ridiculously overpriced mandatory accessories" has been a fundamental marketing strategy for Sony, Nintendo and Sega during the second half of the 90s/first half of the 00s.

[Anonymous No.5842776]

>>5842775
>he continuous to buy PC components for $1500 every year

reality check

[Anonymous No.5842853]

>>5842748
>instead of game having to refer to some file allocation table
https://problemkaputt.de/psx-spx.htm#memorycarddataformat

[Anonymous No.5843214]

>>5838263
>>5838337

When getting a DexDrive I saved most contents of my mem cards on my computer (an Amiga 1200). But I still have the mem cards anyway. Also I played a lot around with said saves, like programming a small tool to manipulate the PS1 Saves of Resident Evil 2 (which also could be done via a simple Hex Editor), so you can fill your inventory or the magic chest with whatever items you want. Also by saving the saves to the computer I finally could change the language string of said saves and download save files from other regions (like replay data for driver from other countries, news tracks for VRally 2, or user edits for all the wrestling games) and convert them to the my language version. This of course only works with games that doesn't use checksums for the save files, but there weren't that many who did it that way. Vagrant Story was kinda interesting, since the number of blocks grew with the players progress and also looked like it was heavyly compressed.

There were also some more games with such inefficient game saves like said Diablo, that they needed a whole card (max. 128 kb) card for just one save. One block was indeed 8 kb big with an additional 8 kb block for the contents of the inventory of the mem card.

[Anonymous No.5843240]

>>5842551
My observation about this game was, that the save file grew with the progress of the player. But looking at the save files on a computer via a Hex Editor also revealed that some sort of compression was also in effect. I noticed that too, since in contrast to most other save files that I copied to my Amiga , the built in compression of the tool that I used made the files bigger than they originally were, wich indicates that the game used a rather good compression algorithm for it's save data.