Paprium: The Official Thread Mk 2

[crazyteknohed]

This SOR4 Stuff was a nice distraction, but We are still at a major deficit for actual Paprium news. Luis came in here, stirred up a hornet's nest and ghosted. Our money is so, so gone. hahah. News soon indeed.

At least it kept the board lively and brought lots of traffic which is a good thing.

[axel]

Decompression on the fly with the Datenmeister, of course.

Admittedly 24 levels doesn't mean much without saying how long they take anyway. For all we know that elevator screenshot we saw long ago may have counted as a whole level on its own.


EDIT: just checked and SOR3 is 3MB, and that game has 8 rounds (each split into multiple smaller acts). Yes, you only play through seven, but there are two alternate Round 7 depending how you did before. Anyway, by extrapolation 24 rounds would require 9MB, although that's also assuming 3x more unique enemies and such… 8MB sounds doable even with just a mapper and no extra hardware help.

Also let's not forget that Paprium is supposed to be 8MB ROM + 2MB RAM (hence the whole 80 megabit marketing (10MB)). That RAM may be used as a decompression buffer, which could be very useful for streaming. That could help crunch down things a bunch more by keeping more data compressed.

Yes that's true except from what I saw at the release [sic] party the levels appear to have many more background tiles than a standard Genesis game. So if they are intended to be the same length as SoR2/3 they should take up way more space.

I don't know what kind of compression was available for SoR2, but I presume a modern DSP with 2 MB RAM can use much better methods. Just for comparison I loaded the first level of SoR2 into Photoshop, changed it to 16-color indexed color and saved it in a few formats. Here were my results:

Uncompressed TIFF: 2.34 mb
4-bit BMP w/ RLE compression: 477 kb
PNG: 118 kb

I know it's not a real comparison because no game stores the level data as one giant bitmap, but if RLE is consistent with what was done back in the day and PNG is closer to what could be done with modern hardware, it's conceivable to get a lossless 4:1 compression ratio. That would put Paprium in about the same ballpark as KOF '95 or D&D:Tower of Doom.

...that's presuming of course the graphics were actually compressed in the first place, the fact that the backgrounds loaded when the Datenmeister wasn't even working suggests to me they are not.

[Barone]

Yes that's true except from what I saw at the release [sic] party the levels appear to have many more background tiles than a standard Genesis game. So if they are intended to be the same length as SoR2/3 they should take up way more space.

Not necessarily.
In the pre-alpha demo we saw in the party, you have a lot of transitions; the stages seem to be made of several small segments (think Splatterhouse 3).
A design like that favors the use of compression, especially if you have a powerful DSP inside the cartridge.

There's quite a bit of reused tiles in the short continuous segments, such as the foreground layer being made of background tiles with a different palette and stuff like that.
Some segments also reuse the same far background graphics than others, etc.

[OverDrone]

Paprium was also supposed to have RPG elements, I think? I wonder if the idea was to be able to revisit stages too, like how RPGs make you revisit dungeons. Though if you're going to make a RPG beat'em-up that way it may be better to take the River City Ransom approach instead (no explicit stages, but rather many rooms that are connected making one single giant "stage").

There was supposed to be a traditional arcade mode as well, luckily. TBH I would have preferred if WM had just focused on that and left the RPG beat em up idea alone - unless the RPG elements are REALLY light (like a shop after each level clear to raise health/damage ability etc, like Xeno Crisis for example).

But leveling up thru XP gained from grinding areas you've cleared previously or whatever, is kinda Dragons' Crownish for my liking.

Seriously, this project was massively over ambitious. They had their work cut out just getting the fundementals of a functional belt-scroll beat em up in place, never mind trying to balance some grindy ARPG system as well.

But since information is not forthcoming, we can only guess at the scope of such a feature.

[crazyteknohed]

Honestly, the parallels between this and Bandersnatch/Psyclapse are uncanny:

https://tiredoldhack.com/2019/01/02/...irror-episode/

[Chewie]

The parallels are there, but at least Imagine burned their own money...

[Flygon]

The sad bit is, is that 16mbytes of Parallel Flash costs about the same as 8mbytes.

And even 32mbytes isn't too bad of a jump.

[axel]

Honestly, the parallels between this and Bandersnatch/Psyclapse are uncanny:

https://tiredoldhack.com/2019/01/02/...irror-episode/

Wow. There are a lot of similarities there. Except of course that a game was released after two years. But yeah -- a project that's way too ambitious for the hardware, a hardware add-on, a box of crap that has nothing to do with the game, etc.

[SEGA-Jorge]

There was so much nonsense tech going into this game. All they needed to do was make a fun beat-em-up. They sunk themselves with all this advanced stuff they were trying to do. I think that the teams that are doing Genesis dev currently have it right. Just make fun Genesis games using what the console can do. All of our favorite games were running on just what the hardware could do. We really don't need to have these outlandish tech demos on 30 year old hardware. Just make good, fun games.

[chilled]

Paprium is supposed to be 8MB ROM + 2MB RAM (hence the whole 80 megabit marketing (10MB)

Wait, what? I missed that announcement completely.

[Spendle]

There was so much nonsense tech going into this game. All they needed to do was make a fun beat-em-up. They sunk themselves with all this advanced stuff they were trying to do. I think that the teams that are doing Genesis dev currently have it right. Just make fun Genesis games using what the console can do. All of our favorite games were running on just what the hardware could do. We really don't need to have these outlandish tech demos on 30 year old hardware. Just make good, fun games.

Agreed - I was thinking this earlier myself. On reflection the Paprium concept is way over the top and I'm pretty sure the majority of us would have been just as happy with a good quality beat-em-up. I clearly got dragged into all the hype of this game that it clouded my judgement. On reflection, is it any surprise this game has failed to materialise?!

[Sik]

Wait, what? I missed that announcement completely.

From the beginning (I think) Paprium was being promoted as an "80 MEGA POWER" game, implying Paprium is a 10MB ROM. Years later we found out that it's actually 8MB ROM + 2MB RAM, showing how bullshit the whole marketing has always been :​D (also for further context: Pier Solar was also 8MB ROM, though no added RAM).

Not sure if the 2MB RAM are for the 68000 or the Datenmeister or both, so mind that.

[Cyberdrive]

From the beginning (I think) Paprium was being promoted as an "80 MEGA POWER" game, implying Paprium is a 10MB ROM. Years later we found out that it's actually 8MB ROM + 2MB RAM, showing how bullshit the whole marketing has always been :​D (also for further context: Pier Solar was also 8MB ROM, though no added RAM).

Not sure if the 2MB RAM are for the 68000 or the Datenmeister or both, so mind that.

Sik first off all I'm really your fan and loves The Things that you say about genesis
I wanted to know about this particular magical Chip
Somehow this Datenmeister looks more incomprehensible for me Sound or Graphix where is the real application, you said something that is really important who'll take this RAM the 68k ou the DATEN
Everyday that I look back the Images I just think How great is the Metasprites that they used in this game, sometimes remember the same kind of techs used in CPS1 with Final Fight.

[Sik]

That's the other issue… Datenmeister was never anything fixed, just the codename for what would be the coprocessor.

From what I recall it started as a literal custom chip (Fonzie actually wanted to get it into an ASIC, which should give you an idea of how little notion of limitations he has), then moved to a FPGA when that didn't work, then moved to some off-the-shelf coprocessor when that didn't work… at least if I'm remembering right how this whole fiasco is (also the latter may or may not have been suitable for the job at all, on that note). Also it was never clear if it was meant to add sound channels, or handle sprites, or what. It was always a moving target and I imagine Paprium kept getting rewritten a lot of times as it changed.

The only thing concise about the Datenmeister is its name.

[axel]

Project Y was initially announced as a 40 mb game. That should have been plenty -- it's the same as SoR2 and SoR3 combined.