/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7944129]

I know there where actually some 32x CD games released, but they where all FMV games, what would a game that actually took advantage of all that hardware would be like.

[Anonymous No.7944246]

>>7944129
You could almost certainly make a pretty authentic port of Doom that way.
>enough disc space for all the levels, textures, and enemy rotations, don't have to cut the bosses
>the FM Synth the Genesis has is actually pretty good, and you can make a great rendition of Doom's soundtrack that way (they just didn't), but with CD you could also use a recorded soundtrack
>audio quality is already good
>controls well with the six button controller
>pretty good and consistent framerate already

Really, there's actually lot you could do, port Heretic while you're at it, but 32X+CD games didn't make any economic sense.
You could maybe also port Ultima Underworld

[Anonymous No.7944607]

Doom would have fit on a cart. SF2 Turbo without the 32x was 5MB.

The Doom WAD was only 12MB.

[Anonymous No.7944648]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOWZbydnlZE

[Anonymous No.7944858]

>>7944246
You need a 4MB ram extension, but it will work.

[Anonymous No.7944972]

>>7944129
32X games were usually the same game as normal, but with a wider color pallet.
With a CD drive that wasn't wasted on FMV, they could have made gargantuan amounts of level content. The same kind of games, but years of playtime. Of course the pressure the make all those levels would mean some dips in quality, so the game might not really be all that much fun after a while.

[Anonymous No.7945223]

The reason most 32X+CD games were FMV was because the 32X could only see part of the Genesis's RAM and none of the CD's, and the CD couldn't see the Genesis's or 32X's RAM at all. So passing data between either add-on and the base console was required to get any sort of cooperation between them. Cycles spent passing data are cycles not usable for other things. And if one side of the bus is still locked, then the other side will get stuck waiting for things to clear up. This is why the majority of 32X or Sega CD games mostly used the hardware of the addon console and used the Genesis for controller ports and little else. The 32X+CD games had the majority of the game on the carts, and just used the CD for videos.

If you actually tried to use the entire setup to it's "fullest" potential, you would find the Genesis itself is the bottleneck. If you used the 32X as the main unit(for the two SH2 CPUs) and tried to use the CD for storage, you would end up with long loading times every single time you accessed anything on the disc. Because you would have to parse the data through the Genesis's 64k of RAM and pass it onto the 32X. If you used the CD as the main unit(for the two 68k CPUs and 512k RAM), you would be hard pressed to find any situation in which passing a task over to the Genesis to be passed to the 32X, to be passed back to the Genesis before finally making it back to the CD would actually have the benefit of the SH2's not get wiped out by the cycles wasted passing it around. And if you used the Genesis as the main unit, you would wind up with a Genesis with more RAM, but the RAM would be slower to read from and write to than the base 64k, and four additional CPUs, all of which require ownership of the bus to communicate with the main CPU, preventing any other CPU from communicating at the same time.

[Anonymous No.7945661]

>>7944607
You gotta fit more than just the .wad in the cartridge as well.

>>7944858
The 32X would already provide the additional lifting power in the equation though. The 32X port that itself actually runs very well, very smooth with no slowdown or anything, and it controls well. The problems it has (aside from pricing) is that it was hurriedly rushed, so the music sounds like complete shit, because no real time was put into adapting it for the hardware properly, and it's missing a bunch of content, like levels and monster rotations.

With enough time you can just do the music properly for the synth and it'll sound great, but a recorded soundtrack like on the 3DO port is doable, and with a disc media to store the level data in (and maybe the boss monsters' assets), you don't need to cut any of them. You'd have loading times between levels, sure, but when you're actually playing it would work great.

Something else you could do is to set this all up for some multiplayer shenanigans, with two TVs, two Genesises, two Sega-CDs, two 32Xs, two sixbuttons, two cartridges and dsics, and a link cable. This is getting into an absurd fucking fantasy and nobody would have ever bothered with this at the time, but it's still fun as an idea, and if some demented homebrewer wants to Frankenstein together the perfect Sega Doom port, these are options they can pursue.

[Anonymous No.7945681]

>>7944246
Cuts were made to the console ports of Doom due to RAM limitations, not cartridge capacity.

[Anonymous No.7945712]

>>7945661
I was told that the 32x port was at least visually the best by far of the early doom console ports. All the others had horrible frame rate, had to be scaled down visually to an almost comical level, or both.

[Anonymous No.7945749]

>>7945712
The 32x port is scaler down. Lower res than Jag, but it runs okay.

The Saturn port looks much better, but runs poorly, and the PS1 port is nearly perfect, and you wouldn't have to wait long after the 32x port for this.

[Anonymous No.7945754]

Technically speaking, which hardware was better, the Gen+32X+SegaCD or the Saturn?

[Anonymous No.7945759]

>>7945223
Thanks for the explanation, but 32x CD games only came on CDs. They weren't cart CD combos. My understanding is these games used the 32x for higher color video processing, but I'm curious how it got all that data up there.

[Anonymous No.7945761]

>>7945754
Saturn and it's not even close.

[Anonymous No.7945796]

>>7945681
This varied, there was a standardized set of levels for console ports of Doom which was referred to internally as the Console Doom set, these had rooms cut, geometry simplified, had textures changed, and even some levels replaced or removed entirely, due to the expected limitations.

This set made sense for the Jaguar, 32X, 3DO, and later the GBA. This set was however also used for the PSX port (except with the addition of an altered Tower Of Babel, replacing Dis from the PC version, either level being absent in the previous console ports). The same degree of simplification wasn't really done to the Episode 4 levels or Doom 2 levels in the PSX port, and while you notice more peformance hits there, they still run.

Possibly the 32X port skipped enemy rotations to have to load less sprites into memory, however. I would still have considered back rotations, and left/right (which could be retained as just one direction that is mirrored when needed). The PSX and also N64 may have had better memory to work with.

[Anonymous No.7945812]

>>7945796
This set of levels originated from the Jag port. It was done there because of memory limitations. Most console versions from around that time were similarly limited by RAM, but I suppose as newer machines came out they were less constrained in that particular way.

[Anonymous No.7946020]

>>7945661
The engine is 1MB max.

[Anonymous No.7946781]

>>7944607
>SF2 Turbo without the 32x was 5MB.

You mean SuperSF2

[Anonymous No.7946949]

>>7946020
On PC, sure.

[Anonymous No.7947000]

So, the genesis has its own sound engine.

The CD add on had its own dac for the cd player, and another sound engine.

did the 32x have its own sound engine too?

[Anonymous No.7947748]

>>7947000
>did the 32x have its own sound engine too?
yes

[Anonymous No.7949747]

>>7947748

thats crazy

what was its specs?

[Anonymous No.7949801]

the more i learn about the 32x and cd addon the more i think sega was snorting some heavy coke

[Anonymous No.7950103]

>>7944129
You could have a game with sega cd scaling the ground and the 32x would do the objects.
Space harrier shows thats its capable to that it self. Would be interesting to see if it could do outrunners.

[Anonymous No.7950312]

>>7949747
Just 2 pwm channels. If you want to do anything fancy you need to do it in software.

For the most part you will be relying on Genesis audio instead. Doom used the new channels exclusively for sound effects for example.