Paprium: The Official Thread Mk 2

[axel]

Just wow.... after watching Joe's video all I can say is thank God I did not back this project. I have never seen any developer complain of money problems more than Fonzie and yet he throws money away on crap like a custom-made Datenmeister cover inside the cart that most people won't even see.... and then sends out a thong with the game (WTF seriously)

If the Mega Sg lockout was intentional it's like a kick in the balls to the buyer. Why would any developer care what console you use? That strikes me as borderline OCD behavior to demand that complete strangers do things a certain way.

[PreZZ]

As anyone tried all the old mega sg firmwares?

[Devil N]

I do think it would have been better for WM to work with Analogue on a solution for something like the Mega SG's buffered modes. Maybe they tried. We have no idea.

I agree with everything you said and maybe you're right, maybe there is indeed a fundamental compatibility issue that prevents Paprium to work on the Mega Sg. Maybe they did try to make it work. My biggest gripe here though is, if this is the case then WaterMelon can and should just tell us so. Instead we get a bunch of bullshit reasoning about clone hardware being "freshly molded turds" and "they won't last as long as original hardware". That gives me the impression that they're not taking this problem seriously at all. Why can't Fonzie just be honest in answering these questions?

[Stifu]

Hello David,

Thanks for the feedback. Surely the game can have more animations but it's usually counter-productive as more animations bring more sluglish effect even if the speed is increased. You can compare with the games with the best impact effects like SOR1 or Ken, they don't have any animation in fact, just 1 frame. But yeah, everything can be improved for sure.

Thanks again and good luck beating the game!

What a sorry excuse. Let's just ignore all those 2D games that have much better animation than Paprium without sacrificing gameplay in any way. SoR 1 is hardly an example to be followed when it comes to animation, it's fine but it's nothing special. And what is Ken? Hokuto no Ken, maybe? That game has bad animation.

He could just say "We ran out of money / time" or "We had trouble animating such big sprites on the MD", rather than coming with this bullshit.

[jymannob]

Most "unofficial" devices seem to not work with Paprium. (Multitaps and controllers)
https://twitter.com/OriginalFei/stat...890498048?s=20

[Gentlegamer]

I apparently pre-ordered PAPRIUM Classic with the PAPRIUM Manga in 2017. I confirmed my shipping details.

Let's see what happens next.

[Stef]

Had this Twitter convo with Stephane who is listed as Z80 programmer on Paprium. This pretty much confirms that Fonzie purposely locked out the Mega Sg. I like how he first tells me not to blame Fonzie for doing that when, if fact, he did do that. I wonder if Analogue can bypass Fonzie's detection. If not, the game could never be playable on the Mega Sg even if it reproduced it perfectly.

Sorry if I sounded a bit rude, that wasn't my intention. It's just that you have a large public (well deserved) and you were clearly making assumptions that Fonzie deliberately made the game not working on the MegaSG (and you were concluding with something like "that is bad Fonzie..") and this is just wrong. Fonzie actually even contacted Analogue guys about the issue and from what i know Fonzie wasn't the one who didn't made efforts to try to fix it. That was my point, there is already enough drama around this game, no need to fuel more the fire.
At the end the game doesn't work on MegaSG (as i already told it has severe graphical glitches) and it's clearly a problem with the MegaSG which should be (hopefully) fixable at some point.
About the mini game behavior on the MegaSG, to be honest I just guessed Fonzie made that to hide the fact the game is glitchy on the system but maybe i'm wrong as i don't have details here, maybe it's simply due to a bug with the MegaSG so the game cannot properly initialize / save its state to allow the game to boot normally on next power on.. And all in one, again, there is a method to bypass that minigame to have Paprium booting normally on MegaSG (but you won't be able to play it anyway in the current state).

[tokay]

I just realized that shipping an investor edition from France to the USA (or Japan) roughly costs €42.
This is more than the price we paid for one copy (with shipping included) back in 2012.

So Fonzie is still struggling as we speak, taking care of these parcels himself, losing money with every copy shipped.
There are thousands of orders containing one or more items to be packed, checked and brought to the post office.
Meanwhile he has to answer multiple messages by customers who want their parcel yesterday.
The man is not Amazon (which itself has no issue canceling orders btw).

Therefore seeing people claiming that Fonzie is the one to be blamed and has to pay no matter what is just saddening.
If these self entitled retards were pouring THAT MUCH energy questioning their own respective governments / big companies (which steal way much more money and don't deliver any good videogame), world would be a better place.

Too many poisonous people for me here, guess I'll just start muting.
Thanks to the others who share actual facts and positive feedback!

[zborgerd]

Sorry I sounded a bit rude, that wasn't my intention. It's just that you have a large public (well deserved) and you were clearly making assumptions that Fonzie deliberately made the game not working on the MegaSG (and you were concluding with something like "that is bad Fonzie..") and this is just wrong. Fonzie actually even contacted Analogue guys about the issue and from what i know Fonzie wasn't the one who didn't made efforts to try to fix it. That was my point, there is already enough drama around this game, no need to fuel more the fire.
At the end the game doesn't work on MegaSG (as i already told it has severe graphical glitches) and it's clearly a problem with the MegaSG which should be (hopefully) fixable at some point.
About the mini game behavior on the MegaSG, to be honest I just guessed Fonzie made that to hide the fact the game is glitchy on the system but maybe i'm wrong as i don't have details here, maybe it's simply due to a bug with the MegaSG so the game cannot properly initialize / save its state to allow the game to boot normally on next power on.. And all in one, again, there is a method to bypass that minigame to have Paprium booting normally on MegaSG (but you won't be able to play it anyway in the current state).

I don't think that you were rude and appreciate your input.

Also, Mega SG was released in 2019. It may have been too late to work out the issues w/ Paprium compatibility by the time some parts of the project had been completed, let alone ever changing Mega SG firmware that was broken with official games (regression) after the fact.

As great as it is, Mega SG has some bugs that remain unfixed and it's been like this for over a year.

[Gadispalembang]

I've been staring at schematics for the Genesis and Sega CD. Looking at the compatibility doc, you can see that the game
will not function on a VA6 alone. By default, the pin I'm most interested in remains low on the Genesis, while the Sega CD
pulls it high according to the service manual.

https://console5.com/techwiki/images...il%2C_1994.pdf

Page 6, 68 (CAS2) pulled low
Page 23, 12 (CAS2) pulled high


I might be getting ahead of myself, but it's very possible that pulling Paprium's B21 pin high with a 10K resistor
connected to pin A2 or A31 (5v power) might work. I'm placing a lot of theories on the table which I will test
out once my copy arrives.

I will test the game on my VA3 with and without the decoupling capacitor, and with and without the decoupling capacitor
while the Sega CD is attached.

[Barone]

I've been staring at schematics for the Genesis and Sega CD. Looking at the compatibility doc, you can see that the game
will not function on a VA6 alone. By default, the pin I'm most interested in remains low on the Genesis, while the Sega CD
pulls it high according to the service manual.

https://console5.com/techwiki/images...il%2C_1994.pdf

Page 6, 68 (CAS2) pulled low
Page 23, 12 (CAS2) pulled high


I might be getting ahead of myself, but it's very possible that pulling Paprium's B21 pin high with a 10K resistor
connected to pin A2 or A31 (5v power) might work. I'm placing a lot of theories on the table which I will test
out once my copy arrives.

I will test the game on my VA3 with and without the decoupling capacitor, and with and without the decoupling capacitor
while the Sega CD is attached.

If you set the pin to high the game will likely interpret that you have a Sega CD attached and powered on.
I don't think that's what you want.

My bet is that in some models it's not properly behaving as low when it should, that's why to some people attaching a switched off Sega CD is helping.
When the game mistakenly interprets you have a Sega CD attached, it will try to access Sega CD's address space and it locks up at doing so.
In most cases it happens at the copyright screen, where it tries to detect the add-ons; if it detects a LaserActive it will use a unique logo in the next screen, for an example.
In some other cases it seems to happen in the beginning of the levels. Some people can run the attract mode once and even get to start the game but it then locks up right at the beginning of the first stage.

Also, apparently, when the Sega CD is attached you get the music track titles at the beginning of the levels; this would explain why some people experience lockups right at the beginning of the level.

[Stifu]

Fonzie actually even contacted Analogue guys about the issue and from what i know Fonzie wasn't the one who didn't made efforts to try to fix it. That was my point, there is already enough drama around this game, no need to fuel more the fire.

If Fonzie just answered this in the first place, people wouldn't have been annoyed and would have been understanding.

[Ryoandr]

I just realized that shipping an investor edition from France to the USA (or Japan) roughly costs €42.
This is more than the price we paid for one copy (with shipping included) back in 2012.

So Fonzie is still struggling as we speak, taking care of these parcels himself, losing money with every copy shipped.
There are thousands of orders containing one or more items to be packed, checked and brought to the post office.
Meanwhile he has to answer multiple messages by customers who want their parcel yesterday.
The man is not Amazon (which itself has no issue canceling orders btw).

Therefore seeing people claiming that Fonzie is the one to be blamed and has to pay no matter what is just saddening.
If these self entitled retards were pouring THAT MUCH energy questioning their own respective governments / big companies (which steal way much more money and don't deliver any good videogame), world would be a better place.

Too many poisonous people for me here, guess I'll just start muting.
Thanks to the others who share actual facts and positive feedback!

Imagine no negative feedback because it might hurt your feels.

[Gadispalembang]

If you set the pin to high the game will likely interpret that you have a Sega CD attached and powered on.
I don't think that's what you want.

We'll see, you have to crack a few heads when you're testing things. That will be a last resort to pull that pin high, and I believe there are
a few more indicators which determine whether a Sega CD is attached or not. Pin B2 (DISK) appears to be high by default on the Genesis,
whereas the Sega CD connects it to ground when attached, much like the B32 pin on the Genesis cartridge slot is pulled down when a game is inserted.

[evilevoix]

It's a shame that now that the game is finally out, this thread is still used mostly to talk about delivery issues and Fonzie's scummy business practices rather than the game itself. It shows that Paprium will forever be tainted by the drama surrounding it, which is really unfortunate.

Coming back to the game itself, yesterday I went through the Skyline stages and beat the final(?) boss. I got an unsure ending which is what I was expecting. What I wasn't expecting was for my save game to get locked afterwards. I know, it's in the manual, but I had forgotten about that little detail. I had wanted to go back and complete all of the side missions from the throned characters to see how it would affect the ending, but I can't do that anymore now. Guess I'll have to start over with a new save. Bit of an annoying design choice, that. Lesson learned: make sure to copy your save to another slot before heading out to the final stages.

Also now that I've unlocked the Boom Box, I tried recording a few music tracks from my model 1's headphone jack to my Sound Blaster X-Fi HD. They turned out quite well, so I uploaded a few samples to SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/astfgl32/sets/paprium-boom-box

For now this includes just the main theme and my two favorite tracks from Powder Zone and Police HQ. They're recorded in 96 kHz 24-bit and I've only done a few rough edits on them, reducing noise and trimming silence. This was originally meant for personal use only, but if any of you like these recordings and want more, let me know.

Same just happened with me. Time to go back and do it for Very Hard Difficulty. Shame you can't go an finish. That last Skyline stage to the Solarium is a rough one.