Paprium: The Official Thread Mk 2

[Barone]

It was phrased at the time as something like "at least 40 Mbit cartridge is guaranteed" but then people pushed for more since Pier Solar was using a 64 Mbit cart (though there's are claims that it could have been done with 1/4 of that capacity).
All this cart capacity discussion is more of a marketing thing than anything else but a lot of people were dragged to it.

[Chewie]

I would prefer if it was released as a regular cartridge, no fancy stuff. I would like to buy a ROM that I can put on my everdrive and my handhelds. Not a poorly made cartridge with wrong voltages that will give compatibility issues on day one and a lot of problems down the line.

[SEGA-Jorge]

Okay, so I'm going to sound dumb here, so my apologies, but wasn't the biggest game on the console, prior to Pier Solar, Super Street Fighter II? Can't new devs work around that, as the limitation of the console? That game didn't need additional special chips and whatnot, right? But it was still a fairly large game.

From what I understand, SSF2 was a 40mb cart, and they used bank switching to get that to work. But there was 32mb games as well. I imagine a good deal of fun, innovative games can be made within that limitation.

Can someone explain whether indi devs could make games about that size without too much issues?

[Cyberdrive]

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.

[Well Sik I guess that this game could be updated, just using the Information that Barone said here about game size, I really believe that Pier Solar never used the real size that the game has proposed, In fact paprium could be greater.]

It was phrased at the time as something like "at least 40 Mbit cartridge is guaranteed" but then people pushed for more since Pier Solar was using a 64 Mbit cart (though there's are claims that it could have been done with 1/4 of that capacity).
All this cart capacity discussion is more of a marketing thing than anything else but a lot of people were dragged to it.

Barone, I trully believe in you and this is total (marketing)

From what I understand, SSF2 was a 40mb cart, and they used bank switching to get that to work. But there was 32mb games as well. I imagine a good deal of fun, innovative games can be made within that limitation.

Jorge, With this technology of 40/32 even 24mb everything would be more beautiful.
and of course much better than the stock technology we could see games more powered.

I would prefer if it was released as a regular cartridge, no fancy stuff. I would like to buy a ROM that I can put on my everdrive and my handhelds. Not a poorly made cartridge with wrong voltages that will give compatibility issues on day one and a lot of problems down the line.

If the ROM came tomorrow someone will be doing some Hack.
I prefer the cartridge by the console experience

[Sik]

The point being made is that just because you have lots of space doesn't mean that you're using it efficiently.

[SEGA-Jorge]

The point being made is that just because you have lots of space doesn't mean that you're using it efficiently.

Right, but shouldn't more effort be put into perfecting/maximizing existing hardware limitations rather than trying to just make it stronger with added chips, etc? Like, If we know that 32mb carts are manageable, and up to 40mb carts can be achieved, why not just build around the limitation of 32mb? That seems like a good amount of space to work with, considering so many of the games we loved were so much smaller. Am I wrong? I mean, some of the most well respected games were 4/8/16 mb games respectively, right? Wasn't XenoCrisis pretty small? That game looks and sounds goddamn amazing.

This is confusing, I wish I knew/understood more about the hardware.

[Barone]

Both Tanglewood and Xeno Crisis are 32 Mbit games.

Beyond that capacity you do need extra hardware for the mapper; it's not a full blown DSP or CPU like many SNES games used but it's still extra hardware.

Tanglewood could probably have been done with a 16 Mbit cartridge had Matt Phillips knew from the start how to plan things ahead to favor data compression on the Mega Drive, and that's according to himself.
IIRC Sik helped him a lot otherwise the current game wouldn't even fit in the 32 Mbit cart.
If you pay attention to the map layouts, they are worlds apart from repetitive blocky stuff such as Kid Chameleon.

IDK what's the situation with Xeno Crisis, but probably a good chunk of the space went to PCM samples.


I think both Sik and Matt have a similar view to what you described (basically sticking to the stock constraints of the console and learning to work around that).
I'd bet the next game by Matt will blown people away. He always work hard in terms of developing and improving his tools; and he learned a lot with Tanglewood.

[Sik]

Right, but shouldn't more effort be put into perfecting/maximizing existing hardware limitations rather than trying to just make it stronger with added chips, etc? Like, If we know that 32mb carts are manageable, and up to 40mb carts can be achieved, why not just build around the limitation of 32mb? That seems like a good amount of space to work with, considering so many of the games we loved were so much smaller. Am I wrong? I mean, some of the most well respected games were 4/8/16 mb games respectively, right? Wasn't XenoCrisis pretty small? That game looks and sounds goddamn amazing.

This is confusing, I wish I knew/understood more about the hardware.

You're literally just repeating my point (・～・)

And yeah Tanglewood had a massive design flaw early on (Matt didn't realize that throwing in tiles around without worrying about metatile boundaries was a bad idea) which ballooned the amount of unique metatiles for the maps due to misalignments and such. It has a lot more of little details on the floor and such than you'd normally expect (from unique combinations of tiles). Managed to get it to fit by compressing the map data and decompressing it on the fly as the camera pans around though, nothing was removed that didn't get scrapped early on.

[Barone]

Right, but shouldn't more effort be put into perfecting/maximizing existing hardware limitations rather than trying to just make it stronger with added chips, etc?

Just to expand on this a little bit more.

What some people doesn't seem to realize is that you can't have freak extra hardware inside the cart and a proper digital release option at the same time.

You have to choose:
- More extra hardware crap for brag rights and marketing that only benefits one game, one product, one company.
OR
- More push to the stock hardware, knowledge that can benefit the whole community of developers and the possibility of digital releases which are very important to small developers.

You can't have both.
If we move in the direction of stuff like MD+ and Datenmeister it's not positive in the long run IMHO.

[Stifu]

I would prefer if it was released as a regular cartridge, no fancy stuff. I would like to buy a ROM that I can put on my everdrive and my handhelds. Not a poorly made cartridge with wrong voltages that will give compatibility issues on day one and a lot of problems down the line.

True. Although it is unlikely, I can only hope a crafty hacker would find the means to strip all the extra crap from Paprium and turn it into a simple Mega Drive game.

[roce]

Not possible, due to the huge sprites and enhanced music. It would have smaller sprites and different music then, pretty much a different game.

[Stifu]

I believe those huge sprites are possible on a stock Mega Drive. If the extra chip is only used for music, then it should be feasible. We'll see (if the game ever gets released, that is).

[chilled]

what happened to Papirium?

[Stifu]

what happened to Papirium?

Vetea got tired of it and said he isn't actually a Mega Drive or retro gaming fan. He decided to focus on some of his other projects, rather than working on too many at once. He handed PapiRium to some guy who already has his hands full with another game project.

[SEGA-Jorge]

Just to expand on this a little bit more.

What some people doesn't seem to realize is that you can't have freak extra hardware inside the cart and a proper digital release option at the same time.

You have to choose:
- More extra hardware crap for brag rights and marketing that only benefits one game, one product, one company.
OR
- More push to the stock hardware, knowledge that can benefit the whole community of developers and the possibility of digital releases which are very important to small developers.

You can't have both.
If we move in the direction of stuff like MD+ and Datenmeister it's not positive in the long run IMHO.

This is a really good point. I don't mind games that push the limits of the original hardware, but not at the cost of being a title that could have existed at the time of the hardware's life. The idea that adding additional chips etc. that wouldn't have been around in the 90's really isn't something I find interesting, and couple that with the idea that it would also be harder to emulate for release on digital markets, I would totally suggest against it.

This being said, what additional possibilities are available with the Virtual Racing SVP chip?