Do you think Sega-CD achieved its primary purpose?

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Originally Posted by turboxray

In general, yes. I totally agree. But that's what I'm saying.. simply shrinking and reverse shrinking (aka Neo Geo scaling), is easy to do in general. You don't need anything more than intro to algebra, or even that at all. It is literally just a copy source->destination, and using fixed point numbers to skip pixels. I.e. my point is that I agree with you and this was perfectly capable by even mediocre devs back in the day. I just want to make that point clear.

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I know and have no issues with people comparing sprite based effects on systems from games made back in the day . I don't think it's fair or vaild to compare sprite effects done over the last few years, even if they are running on original hardware to ones made back in the 90s.

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. Wait.. are you saying those are more fluid than Popful Mail or Chuck 2??? Because neither is true. Unless you consider sliding 'still' stuff around on screen as fluid animation (I don't). I see nothing 'amazing' in Yumimi Mix intro. You might need to define what constitutes 'amazing' here

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No I'm not . But you said I wouldn't find good examples from Japanese corps and a just gave you some good examples of Mega CD intros from Japanese developer's that for me looked better than PC Eng examples, be that streamed in, Real time, or FMV..


I'll be interested to know if there was anything better on the PC Eng CD Rom2; and I'm not being funny or cocky just interested to know

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

I know and have no issues with people comparing sprite based effects on systems from games made back in the day . I don't think it's fair or vaild to compare sprite effects done over the last few years, even if they are running on original hardware to ones made back in the 90s.



No I'm not . But you said I wouldn't find good examples from Japanese corps and a just gave you some good examples of Mega CD intros from Japanese developer's that for me looked better than PC Eng examples, be that streamed in, Real time, or FMV..


I'll be interested to know if there was anything better on the PC Eng CD Rom2; and I'm not being funny or cocky just interested to know

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Gulliver Boy and Yuna feature much more detailed hand drawn animation streamed at the full framerate the hand drawn frames were drawn at (TV cartoon/OVA standard) and are very high color. I know that Gulliver Boy's definitely hits over 100 colors onscreen at once.

Chuck Rock and Popful Mail's cinemas feature very low detail models and backgrounds and apoear to use a single <15 color palette. It's especially noticeable in Popful Mail as it's a drastic change from the source material and really contrasts from the other artwork throughout the game.

All of these streaming cinemas are impressive for what they are though and showcase the kinds of experiences you could only find in CD games bitd.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

Gulliver Boy and Yuna feature much more detailed hand drawn animation streamed at the full framerate the hand drawn frames were drawn at (TV cartoon/OVA standard) and are very high color. I know that Gulliver Boy's definitely hits over 100 colors onscreen at once.

Chuck Rock and Popful Mail's cinemas feature very low detail models and backgrounds and apoear to use a single <15 color palette. It's especially noticeable in Popful Mail as it's a drastic change from the source material and really contrasts from the other artwork throughout the game.

All of these streaming cinemas are impressive for what they are though and showcase the kinds of experiences you could only find in CD games bitd.

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I'm not the biggest fan of Popfulmail intro on the Mega CD, it's only good point is that it's better than PC Eng version. Also while those are good examples Black Tiger , I don't think they beat The FMV to Adv Of Batman And Robin on the Mega CD .

Which for my money is the most impressive looking FMV on the Mega CD. Thanks for the look out mind, I never really knew of Yuna

The Turbografx never did well in North America, but I always kind of figured that the (then-upcoming) Sega CD was the trigger that made NEC create TTi and have them exclusively market the Duo. The Sega CD and Turbo Duo came out within like a week of each other. Launches themselves weren't big events back then, but I do believe the Sega CD basically killed any chances of the Duo succeeding in North America, or entering other markets.

So did the Sega CD achieve its purpose? Yes, except in Japan. Which is ironic if they had the Japanese market in mind.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

The Turbografx never did well in North America, but I always kind of figured that the (then-upcoming) Sega CD was the trigger that made NEC create TTi and have them exclusively market the Duo. The Sega CD and Turbo Duo came out within like a week of each other. Launches themselves weren't big events back then, but I do believe the Sega CD basically killed any chances of the Duo succeeding in North America, or entering other markets.

So did the Sega CD achieve its purpose? Yes, except in Japan. Which is ironic if they had the Japanese market in mind.

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TTi was Hudson Soft taking over the Turbo brand.

The TurboDuo and Sega-CD released close together because in Japan the Mega-CD launched 3 months after the PC Engine Duo.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

TTi was Hudson Soft taking over the Turbo brand.

The TurboDuo and Sega-CD released close together because in Japan the Mega-CD launched 3 months after the PC Engine Duo.

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TTi was a separate corporation co-owned by Hudson and NEC. But this is kind of nitpicky and beside the point. One might also point out that TTi continued selling the Turbo Express, so technically they weren't "exclusively" marketing the Duo. But you probably knew that, and if you didn't, it's not important. I generally elide trivial facts in the interest of succinctness, when I'm just speculating on a fairly minor subject. ;)

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Originally Posted by j_factor

TTi was a separate corporation co-owned by Hudson and NEC. But this is kind of nitpicky and beside the point. One might also point out that TTi continued selling the Turbo Express, so technically they weren't "exclusively" marketing the Duo.

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Turbo Duo, Turbo Express, Turbo gamepads, Turbo. Turbo, Turbo, Turbo!


Anecdotal; One of my best friends bought a Sega-CD and I bought the Duo with in the week they came out. After he played GoT and few other CD games I had for my Duo (my brother had the original CD unit, before selling it off 6 months later), he was pissed and borrowed money from his father to buy one. We did a lot of imports for Genesis from Japan, but the Duo was the goto for imports. In our group, three of us had Duo's and one had an original TGCD unit (and I knew of two other people that had a Duo).

For some reason here in my city, I guess it was just more popular. You could find used import games for it locally, and definitely used TG/Duo stuffs in game shops for years.. even bought two TG16s at a goodwill-type shop in 2012 for $5 each. I even saw a SuperGrafx hucard just chillin in a used game shop about 8 years ago. Toys R Us had old-new stock in back inventory for Duo and TG16 stuffs. You just had to ask at the counter for them to check - that was in the early 2000's too. I was surprised to find, in the early 2000s, that in other parts of the US people didn't even know about the system.

In comparison, I only knew of two people who had the SegaCD and one had an import MegaCD (but it was mostly on display at a local game shop, so I guess he didn't play it much haha. He was the manager).

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Originally Posted by gamevet

The Sega CD should have been more like the PC-Engine CD, with better support for arcade games and RPGs that took advantage of the added storage space.

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this, plus more open to supporting to redbook/etc additions to 2D stuff. there's a host of genesis ports with better sound that the sega-cd saw, but they weren't among the better titles most times....i would've loved this focus.

I was recently playing Saphire which got me thinking, how much do the hardware enhancement cards help PCE in comparison to its Sega counterpart? Its like a RAM expansion right? Which one has more RAM?

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Originally Posted by RvR

I was recently playing Saphire which got me thinking, how much do the hardware enhancement cards help PCE in comparison to its Sega counterpart? Its like a RAM expansion right? Which one has more RAM?

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There aren't any enhancement cards. The system cards are the empty cart space that a game segment gets loaded into. That's why CD games are bottlenecked compared to carts.

RAM is simply rewriteable memory and can be physically built in to misc parts of gaming hardware. The PC Engine CD and Sega/Mega-CD-ROMs do not increase the system ram, or gpu ram or anything like that.


The PC Engine CD-ROM only adds one channel to stream redbooks audio from a CD and one channel of adpcm audio that has 1/2 meg of space to work from.


The Sega/Mega adds:

A new cpu much more powerful than the Mega Drive's.

8 audio channels for samples and 2 megs to work out of and a channel for redbook audio.

A dedicated chip for scaling/rotation type effects.


The PC Engine CD-ROM has 1/2 meg of space for content to run out of. Half of that can be eaten up by code alone. The Super CD card bumped the total space to 2 megs and the Arcade Card bumps it to 18 megs, but the new space is slower memory.

The Sega/Mega-CD has 6 megs of space to run game segments out of.


So Sapphire can not only run the same on a HuCard (minus redbook and adocm audio), it could actually feature more animation and artwork per stage, since it wouldn't be limited in space like a CD game is.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

So Sapphire can not only run the same on a HuCard (minus redbook and adocm audio), it could actually feature more animation and artwork per stage, since it wouldn't be limited in space like a CD game is.

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I know this is true in theory, but in practice most HuCard games are technically inferior to the CD games that were released for the machine. Apart from a couple of exceptions such as SF2 and the Soldier series, most of the HuCard games are more akin to 8-bit titles with better/more colourful graphics, whereas CD games (case in point: Sapphire) are more in line with titles released on the console’s 16-bit peers.

This is an area the PCE-CD outshone the MCD in my opinion; by having games markedly technically superior to cartridge (or in this case, Hucard) equivalents.

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Originally Posted by crazyteknohed

I know this is true in theory, but in practice most HuCard games are technically inferior to the CD games that were released for the machine. Apart from a couple of exceptions such as SF2 and the Soldier series, most of the HuCard games are more akin to 8-bit titles with better/more colourful graphics, whereas CD games (case in point: Sapphire) are more in line with titles released on the console’s 16-bit peers.

This is an area the PCE-CD outshone the MCD in my opinion; by having games markedly technically superior to cartridge (or in this case, Hucard) equivalents.

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I guess you only try out English titled roms or something then?

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Originally Posted by crazyteknohed

I know this is true in theory, but in practice most HuCard games are technically inferior to the CD games that were released for the machine. Apart from a couple of exceptions such as SF2 and the Soldier series, most of the HuCard games are more akin to 8-bit titles with better/more colourful graphics, whereas CD games (case in point: Sapphire) are more in line with titles released on the console’s 16-bit peers.

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This is true as a very broad generalization but it doesn't mean much. One factor is that hucards were the majority of releases in the early years but fairly scant in the later years. But look at Bonk III, which has only minor differences with the CD version, or Bomberman '94 which exceeds the Genesis version. The earliest CD games were pretty unimpressive too.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

I guess you only try out English titled roms or something then?

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I only ever owned a Japanese PCE so not necessarily, no. I’m sure you can find the odd HuCard here and there that does look on par with games on legitimate 16-bit consoles, but the vast majority of card titles do play more like 8-bit titles.

I’ve played quite a lot of games for the system and there aren’t many Hucard games that look/sound as impressive as early Megadrive titles like RoS or CoI. Hell, even the piss-poor Altered Beast looks/sounds better than, say, Legendary Axe, although admittedly it certainly doesn’t play better. Let’s not even look at later titles like Gunstar Heroes or TFIV...

The Super CD format on the other hand was comparable with the likes of Lords of Thunder, Rondo, Sapphire etc.

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Originally Posted by crazyteknohed

This is an area the PCE-CD outshone the MCD in my opinion; by having games markedly technically superior to cartridge (or in this case, Hucard) equivalents.

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I can barely think of any Mega Drive game that's actually better than the Mega CD version of the same game. The issue for SEGA was the base Mega Drive userbase was so big and it had trouble supporting both the Mega Drive and Mega CD (along with other formats like Game Gear and Master System) Whereas with Hudson they just seemed to go all out for the CDrom and it had the userbase in Japan to make it viable