Pier Solar: Official Thread

[108 Stars]

I think the save feature already is making things much easier as it is than with savepoints. It's not much of a problem to go to another room to save. Really allowing saves everywhere might encourage people to play like they often do in PC-games; with a quick save every minute.

I do agree it should be possible to choose the save slot every time you save though. Don't know why this was not done. To be safe I recommend using the save file manager from the title screen to copy saves. Always keep one savegame in a town in case you have troubles getting through a dungeon and can't leave it again.

[The Coop]

And once again, another week of mail done, and still no Pier Solar. This thing being walked over from China/customs or what?

[Joe Redifer]

Really allowing saves everywhere might encourage people to play like they often do in PC-games; with a quick save every minute.

But if that's how someone wants to play, who cares? Certainly not everyone would do that as stopping to save all the time would be tedious.

[synbiosfan]

And once again, another week of mail done, and still no Pier Solar. This thing being walked over from China/customs or what?

Me too!

I guess Fonzie is in China and amongst other things checking with the post office to see what's going on.

[yuleeyahoo]

Still waiting

[kool kitty89]

I kind of wish we had left away the CD now. It's really a neat feature and works well from a programming standpoint, but had we known beforehand that modern pressed CDs are so much trouble for old Sega-CDs...

Feels like a bit of a waste for me now, with half of the players using a burned disc after all.

I have trouble with it myself, but not often. Sometimes I can play 2 hours without a single skip, sometimes it happens more frequently, However the sound quality really does benefit, I actually bought my Mega-CD just because of the music.

BTW, I hate to see reviews popping up giving the game a score... after 8 hours of playing it, with the average playthrough time ranging from 30 - 40 hours.

It is PCM right, not CD-DA? All the red book stuff works perfectly... I assume there was too much to cram on 1 disc as CD-DA alone though.

Any idea if the PCM was standard mode 1 data (150 kB/s with added error correction) or the alternate mode 2 form 2 data format that's closer to mode 0 red book stuff (almost the max bitrate and only the hardware error correction of CD-DA). Mode 2 stuff would naturally be more finicky (I think that's why silpheed and a few other examples of FMV are more freeze prone than others using normal mode 1 data at the lower nominal bitrate).

It does seem odd that CD-Rs would tend to be more reliable as such than even lower-end pressed CDs.


Regardless, it's nice to have the proper, silk-screened CD as a display piece if nothing else. (and to use for the rip for a backup -vs downloading a fairly hefty file)


And is the CD is just music or is there voice acting too?

If the game had been pressed at a factory with higher standards (ie a US disc pressing plant) I think we would have seen less bad discs. Kool Kitty, try making a CD-R copy of your disc, you'll find that probably works. Of course burn it as slow as it will let you. The music is stored as PCM that plays through the Sega CD PCM chips. The audio is interesting. Evidently it uses negative dB sample inversion and possibly sample dropping, and is likely processed by a subprogram that runs on the slave processor on the Sega CD 68000.

OK, that's sort of what I was thinking then. I wonder what the sample rate is. (maxed out 32 kHz? -stereo obviously, so still about 1/3 of CD-DA though you'd also be running in a different data mode so deflating that a bit over mode 0 CDDA, more so if they used the common 150 kB/s mode 1 -though I dort of doubt that given the skipping issues since mode 1 should have enough error correction to address that... still, in mode 1 with 32 kHz 8-bit stereo you'd still have 2.4:1 "compression" in sheer disc space compared to CD-DA -taking error correction data into account)

Actually I don't really see why they wouldn't stick with plain 150 kB/s mode 1 data given the sheer amount of PCM that should allow well over 2 hours of audio plus the bonus stuff. (if they wanted to avoid re-seek issues, they could have dual streams parallel/interleaved to allow full constant streaming of each track (you'd still need to buffer some and pull out the desired track of the 2 streams, but the CD drive could be continuously streaming rather than having to bugger a chunk and re-seek if it was a single stream at low bitrate ... that would but it to only 2 streams though -somewhat less efficient than straight packed data requiring seeking, or 3 if they dropped to 25 kHz and then they'd have a lot more space than even packed 32 kHz with 500 MB alone allowing well over 5 hours )


And given past discussions on the topic, burning at the absolute slowest speed isn't necessary, but making sure you select a fully fixed write speed is critical. (so generally not the automatic/"optimal" burn speed options but some fixed speed, like specifically selecting 8 or 16x write speed)

For the NEXT game, just store the Sgea CD PCM audio on the cart.

Wouldn't need the CD at all then, just use the Genesis DAC... and there's those nice realtime Z80 decompression engines Chilly Willy has been working on (including one nice format from Tiido) up to 24 kHz, or plain PCM of course, but still only up to 27 kHz (DAC's limit) and mono only.

ROM is certainly much cheaper now too, but I wonder if there's still some practical limit in terms of power consumption. (pier solar gets pretty hot in my model 1 if that's any indication of the power dissipation -though you'd think with modern ROM/flash chips -forget which they used- and even the bigger N64 games didn't get THAT hot, let alone modern DS cards and such... hmm maybe it's just heat bleeding over from the motherboard and not internal to the cartridge )
Hmm, if you used a 64 MB cart and dedicated a huge chunk for streaming audio (say close to 56 MB) and used Tiido's 3:1 scheme (compared to uncompressed 8-bit) you'd have over 2 hours of compressed streaming audio.

I know, but I still see people complaining about the price increase. Thing is, I couldn't see it getting much higher than $70 anyway, which is quiet reasonable considering new games tend to sell for between $100-$130 in Australia.

I wouldn't think it would be that extreme either... the other costs would still be pretty much fixed (PCB, cart casing, bank switching logic, packaging, etc) so it wouldn't inflate things proportionally... plus these homebrew projects usually aim at trying to at least break even but obviously aren't in it for making any kind of substantial profit. (so you don't have the retail inflation of a commercial game either)

And we're talking what, 64-256 MB in terms of the absolutely "huge" games?

I just want to see a Genesis cartridge that has more memory than any Neo Geo game.

Were there any NG games in the Gbit range? (I know the N64's 512 Mbit games don't beat the biggest bank-switched NG games, but the 2 GB DS games probably would )
Ah, Fast Striker is some 1560 Mbits, so still only 3/4 the size of the ROMs in some DS games.


Er... wait wasn't it *established* at one point that on the Neo Geo "games are measured in Mega Bytes, not Mega Bits"

[Chilly Willy]

Wouldn't need the CD at all then, just use the Genesis DAC... and there's those nice realtime Z80 decompression engines Chilly Willy has been working on (including one nice format from Tiido) up to 24 kHz, or plain PCM of course, but still only up to 27 kHz (DAC's limit) and mono only.

ROM is certainly much cheaper now too, but I wonder if there's still some practical limit in terms of power consumption. (pier solar gets pretty hot in my model 1 if that's any indication of the power dissipation -though you'd think with modern ROM/flash chips -forget which they used- and even the bigger N64 games didn't get THAT hot, let alone modern DS cards and such... hmm maybe it's just heat bleeding over from the motherboard and not internal to the cartridge )
Hmm, if you used a 64 MB cart and dedicated a huge chunk for streaming audio (say close to 56 MB) and used Tiido's 3:1 scheme (compared to uncompressed 8-bit) you'd have over 2 hours of compressed streaming audio.

I think the idea is to still use the PCM chip in the SCD, just not reading the data from the CD. That would give you 32kHz stereo PCM out while still having the YM2612 DAC for other things. Just decompress into the word ram and have the SCD side feed it to the PCM chip as needed.

[BrYaN]

Don't worry, I'm still waiting too!

[djshok]

The CD only ever skips on one song for me. The one called Point Zero Ruins, and it skips on that one every single time, but nowhere else, it's really odd.

[Dark Sol]

Whoever waits for game - check your chinese tracking. Every China airmail even smallest packet has correct tracking which you can check at usps

[kool kitty89]

In our case, saving anywhere could have let to a too easy game. The player can walk a few steps and save all the time. If he has a bad battle, he can reload quickly. It's just too easy, like having save states when you do a speedrun or something like that.

Or having multiple save files easily selectable for progressive saves as is default on many (even pretty old) computer adventure games and some other modern games on HDD/mass storage save memory platforms.

Of course, you could still hack that on any game with a reasonable number of save slots and a profile copy function, but it's less easy.

A lot of PC adventure games were designed with difficulty intending for a lot fo trial and error along with logic based puzzles, so multiple saves is pretty damn important.


Actually, I'd take fixed save points over omitting easily selectable multiple save files. Easier to go back to a previous save if you realize you really screwed up after the fact, like the possibility of putting yourself in an impossible position (as you mentioned specifically about the trench, or adventure games which intentionally trick the player into "closing off" the game by certain actions... or accidentally like with the trench and one spot in Zelda LTP iirc where you can use a key in the wrong place -you CAN get around that if you buy a key, but I think there's only one place in the entire game to do that and it's really obscure -or maybe there isn't and it's truly impossible).
That sort of thing is even more useful with auto-saves as you can't accidentally overwrite your old file if you set it up to have each auto-save in a new slot (and prompt you when all slots are filled).

Hell, that sort of system also solves the issue where you get locked into the final segment of a game and can never go back. (to explore, for fun, etc -Star Fox Adventures did that... a pain since I rather like going back and wandering around a beaten adventure game and playing through certain areas again -Major's Mask made that even better in some ways as it reset the time but kept net progress, so it's almost like an adventure game equivalent of a level select feature once you've completed the game )

I think the idea is to still use the PCM chip in the SCD, just not reading the data from the CD. That would give you 32kHz stereo PCM out while still having the YM2612 DAC for other things. Just decompress into the word ram and have the SCD side feed it to the PCM chip as needed.

I got that in his post, but I countered that as it would make things less accessible to many users and that would be one of the biggest pluses for on-cart audio: not requiring the add-ons. (otherwise the only other plus would be no skipping disc issues, but that shouldn't be a problem anyway -especially if CD-Rs are working better... very odd, and you'd only even need to resort to non-red-book audio on CD if you needed well over an hour of play or a dynamic sound engine needing samples buffered into RAM and possibly multiple streams of data to allow various dynamic selections; CD-DA is perfect with my CD/player too, just not the in-game PCM stuff)

Hmm, what might also be interesting for a pure cart game would be to add code that would allow better quality with the 32x used... use a format with Genesis compatible sample rate (so 27 kHz max -24 kHz using something based on your compression engine, or 22 kHz for convenience -and to allow 10-bit PWM) and then have code to allow it to be played through the 32x instead with realtime PCM to PWM format conversion. (probably preprocess the audio to be optimal for 10-bit output and truncate that to 8-bit for the Genesis -so not quite as good as stuff fully formatted for 8-bit)
However, one problem with that would be using stereo on the 32x side but not Genesis: you couldn't just play 1 of the 2 channels or you'd lose 1/2 the sound and decompressing and mixing 2 streams at those rates would be impractical for the Genesis as well, so the only option would be using redundant tracks or not offering the audio for both systems. (and if you made it 32x only, that really defeats the purpose over using a complementary CD)


You could still just leave it as mono only with the moderate enhancement of the 32x side's added resolution. (you could still do some realtime stereo effects both for sound effects and such and the streaming audio -but pan the entire stream, limited but occassionally useful)
If you did fully optimize for 8-bit resolution for the best possible sound on the Genesis, you could possibly use the 32x to interpolate the final output as well (probably set it to 44 kHz 9-bit), that could apply to uncompressed 8-bit PCM as well. (with uncompressed stuff you'd also have the potential to use Tiido's sample engine to add 2 ~22-23 kHz streams together, so stereo could be used and converted to mono on the Genesis -though Tiido's engine is also designed for preformatted 7-bit samples padded to 8-bit iirc, but truncating 8-bit to just the upper 7 bits probably would be OK while the 32x would do full 8-bit stereo PCM with potential for interpolation if desirable)

In the case of uncompressed stuff, that could also work for the MCD if you had code that supported 32x OR MCD OR mono conversion on the Genesis. (in that case you might want to format everything as sign-magnitude rather than normal signed PCM samples -or unsigned, but signed makes more sense given you'd need to truncate to 7-bits before adding and playing on the Genesis- and the sign-magnitude format shouldn't really make anything more intensive on the 32x or MD side other than requiring different code than normal signed PCM would require -for the Genesis it would need to be unsigned in the end anyway and 32x would be PWM in the end and sign-magnitude is pretty close to the same thing as signed PCM but organized differently, so no reason to add unnecessary complexity for realtime conversion of signed to sign magnitude for the MCD PCM player, just use the 8-bit streams directly -and no filtering, but scaling+oversampling+digital filtering from the Ricoh chip)

[Jazzem]

Could we get a rough ballpark of when the reprints will be up for order again?

[promking]

and how much?

[Zebbe]

Could we get a rough ballpark of when the reprints will be up for order again?

Last thing I heard would be around the 25th and it will still cost $45. But that was over a week ago.

[Jazzem]

Thanks! Shall definitely get in on that. Though the website still won't work on my computer for some reason, but it works fine on my phone and at my uni library.

EDIT: (quick check; I assume you mean 25th of January as in tomorrow?)