Maximum cartridge SNES cartridge size?

[chilled]

oh, yes, I was thinking live as during the game (at the beginning of a level, hence those black screens during "loading" time) not in-action of course.

Wasn't there a hard limit of 128 MB ie 1024 MEGA (or more, can't remember) of the memory that can be adressed even through the SSF2 mapper? Same for the SNES

[Black_Tiger]

Yeah. This guy did a hack of the laser disc game Road Blaster for the SNES. This is what having a CD player for the SNES could have provided. This game uses around 480 MB of space.

No CD-ROM could have provided that kind of bandwidth. It turns the SNES into a Neo Geo in that aspect. The CD quality sound streaming aspect is similar to CD games at the time, but you still wouldn't have been able to pull of the same cart games on CD, for the same reasons PCE and Sega-CD games are bottlenecked.

So SD2SNES versions of existing games with "CD" sound added don't represent what SNES CD games necessarily would have been like either.

[Barone]

What Black_Tiger said.

[KnightWarrior]

Could Street Fighter Alpha 2 for the SNES be possible without compression?

[chilled]

what do you mean, possible?

It wouldn't hold on a 32 meg cart that's for sure. You could leave out a lot of animations, backgrounds etc and then it could have.

Then again you can do an 8 meg Street Fighter II (see Tectoy's SMS version) or you could do a 32 meg MD Golden Axe and have kept a lot more things. Or a bank-switched 64 meg Sonic 1 with the SEGA scream sampled at 44.1khz and decent bitrate, etc etc

[Guntz]

I think you guys misunderstand the purpose of the SDD-1 chip used by SFA2 and Star Ocean. It's used for mass decompression to reduce the amount of ROM required by the game, which isn't necessarily the same as the SNES itself decompressing some parts of a game under the usual 32Mbit limit. SNES can address a lot of ROM without mappers (think MKII Unlimited on Genesis), but most games are either 32Mbit or under for cost reasons. A few games used hardware compression instead. Star Ocean for example, consists of one 32Mbit ROM and one 16Mbit ROM, along with the SDD-1.

[tryphon]

I agree. It's weird to think that a decompressor chip was less expensive than adding some MB of ROM at this era...

[Folco]

Without a mapper or extra hardware the theoretical max cart size should be around 13MB.

http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=5367

[gamevet]

No CD-ROM could have provided that kind of bandwidth. It turns the SNES into a Neo Geo in that aspect. The CD quality sound streaming aspect is similar to CD games at the time, but you still wouldn't have been able to pull of the same cart games on CD, for the same reasons PCE and Sega-CD games are bottlenecked.

So SD2SNES versions of existing games with "CD" sound added don't represent what SNES CD games necessarily would have been like either.

I said could, not would. It would really depend on the extra RAM (sega CD only had 6 Mbit) and the processor within the unit. Let's not forget that the SNES CD player would have been released a couple of years after the Sega CD. I was also referring to the video quality and colors that the SNES was outputting.

It's also worth noting that the technology that is in the arcade game was from 1985. It's not like LD was superior to CD storage.

[Black_Tiger]

I said could, not would. It would really depend on the extra RAM (sega CD only had 6 Mbit) and the processor within the unit. Let's not forget that the SNES CD player would have been released a couple of years after the Sega CD. I was also referring to the video quality and colors that the SNES was outputting.

From what I understand, the SD2SNES/MSU1 blows away the bandwidth of 32-bit gen CD-ROMs and is more of an unlimited super fast streaming cart.

The CD-ROM that the SNES almost got was indeed going to be powerful, but still nothing like the SD2SNES.

Since the SNES CD-ROM was going to be more of a Sega-CD style upgrade than a PCE CD style one, it was already going to be pricey and I don't think that they would have given it too much load space memory. Otherwise it would have alone cost as much as a Playstation or Saturn.

If you made the MSU1 compatible with the PC Engine's EXT port, you could do full screen 32-palette fmv, finely dithered at 512 x 240 resolution. But it wouldn't represent what would have been possible with mid-90's CD-ROM technology.

[gamevet]

The CD-ROM that the SNES almost got was indeed going to be powerful, but still nothing like the SD2SNES.

Well, yeah. The CD-ROM would of had pauses to load data into the system memory, while the SD2SNES is one giant hunk of memory.

[tomaitheous]

It's not like LD was superior to CD storage.

LD's stored video as an analog video signal. That's one clear advantage right there. It wasn't until mpeg came around that it started to catch up (still not on par). Would the SNES CD have had mpeg (intra-frame only) decoding like the 3D0, CD-i, PCFX, PSX?

[gamevet]

LD's stored video as an analog video signal. That's one clear advantage right there. It wasn't until mpeg came around that it started to catch up (still not on par). Would the SNES CD have had mpeg (intra-frame only) decoding like the 3D0, CD-i, PCFX, PSX?

Yeah, it's pretty much like a record.

I guess the real question is how did he do it with the SNES in this video? Did he just have static images being spit out at 20fps? I don't see why the SNES CD player couldn't do that as well, with a proper frame buffer and the occasional pause.

[Black_Tiger]

The other factor to take into consideration with how unrealistic that Road Avenger port for SNES is, is that the rom size is 852MB and wouldn't even fit on a CD disc.

[gamevet]

The other factor to take into consideration with how unrealistic that Road Avenger port for SNES is, is that the rom size is 852MB and wouldn't even fit on a CD disc.

The download is only 453 Mbit.


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