The work of the year! The NEO MASTER LIST (definitive version)

[joe8]

I regret to inform you that the SNK was very shallow in the calculation of megabits. You can tell even from megabits wrong on many catalogs OFFICIAL manufactured and distributed by SNK itself. During processing of the counts megabits final it was clear that very often the calculation of the SNK was estimated at the time of software development and not completion of the project. This has led to detect the data of the partial products, not complete and on which they could be made more changes.

Why does it even matter how many megabits a game has? It's interesting to know how many megabits SNK advertised a game as being, and you can use this number to categorise a game as megashock (or not) on a Master List. But I can't see why most people would need to know the actual megabits/megabytes of a game. I don't if SNK purposely overstated a non-megashock game, just to make it a megashock game. But in general SNK overstated the megabit count, to make their games look bigger (they were in competition with the SNES, and Nintendo also made a big deal of how many megabits their games had). From what I have read, it is also possible that SNK actually deliberately programmed the games inefficiently, so that they would take up more space than they really needed to, thus making the games look bigger and better. Computer games and files are normally measured in bytes rather than bits, so by counting the file in bits, it makes it look 8 times bigger.

 

[gamescollector]

For the creator of the master list is designed so, only official snk products, also within a few months on the site neogeoitaly.net there will be a searchable database of all snk stuff.

 

[Xian Xi]

Why does it even matter how many megabits a game has? It's interesting to know how many megabits SNK advertised a game as being, and you can use this number to categorise a game as megashock (or not) on a Master List. But I can't see why most people would need to know the actual megabits/megabytes of a game. I don't if SNK purposely overstated a non-megashock game, just to make it a megashock game. But in general SNK overstated the megabit count, to make their games look bigger (they were in competition with the SNES, and Nintendo also made a big deal of how many megabits their games had). From what I have read, it is also possible that SNK actually deliberately programmed the games inefficiently, so that they would take up more space than they really needed to, thus making the games look bigger and better. Computer games and files are normally measured in bytes rather than bits, so by counting the file in bits, it makes it look 8 times bigger.

Mask roms are measured in bits not bytes.

 

[madman]

From what I have read, it is also possible that SNK actually deliberately programmed the games inefficiently, so that they would take up more space than they really needed to, thus making the games look bigger and better. Computer games and files are normally measured in bytes rather than bits, so by counting the file in bits, it makes it look 8 times bigger.

This rumor is BS, the actual code for a game (P ROM) is very small compared to the graphics/sound ROMs. Saying that counting in bits vs bytes is like saying a pizza cut into 16 slices twice as big as a pizza cut into 8 slices. Total nonsense.

 

[Razoola]

You are both in a way correct. Programmers of old hardware tended to more store program data in a way that took more space because you wanted to have it in a way that is faster to process. Like madman says though it would not really have a large hit in neogeo terms because sprites and sounds take the bulk of the space. Imagine the effect on meg counts if samples were raw wav data and not adpcm. Snk could over state meg counts on this fact alone if they wanted to inflate game sizes.

I think though that it all comes down to how you count the space used. I personally feel that counting the capacity of the memory is better than counting whats used in the memory when talking about read only memory. Take an s rom for example. It is 128k, even if a game only uses 100k it should be counted as 128k. That is the true size and the neogeo can access it even if blank.

If you look at tiles in the c roms you will find many blank tiles within the data. The blank space at the end should be counted like the blank or marked unused tiles within the data.

 

[madman]

I think though that it all comes down to how you count the space used. I personally feel that counting the capacity of the memory is better than counting whats used in the memory when talking about read only memory. Take an s rom for example. It is 128k, even if a game only uses 100k it should be counted as 128k. That is the true size and the neogeo can access it even if blank.

If you look at tiles in the c roms you will find many blank tiles within the data. The blank space at the end should be counted like the blank or marked unused tiles within the data.

I agree. I think it's an interesting exercise to see how much of a ROM's total space is used, but it's purely academic. At the end of the day, it has nothing to do with SNK artificially inflating ROM sizes as they blew away anything else at the time until you get into the later N64 days.

 

[rcantor77]

Gemant, give me a shout and I can help you get it into a database and presented through PHP/HTML.

All of the data on NeoGeoSoft is database driven so I can easily call out any custom list as required... I do think you have loads of great data but it does make it look a bit too cluttered making it not too easy to read. That was a sacrifice that I had to make and why I have created sub pages for each game with the specific details and a menu to display different lists based on specific criteria.

I do also think that it is a shame that there is no US/EURO info and it is only Japanese focused... it would just be useful, as I have included on NeoGeosoft, to at least present what games were released in what region. I have only included the Japanese dates, but the dates for all AES releases are on JTs Master List here and Kuk has all the CD release dates on Neogeocdworld.

 

[gamerwhat]

There is also the first revision of Viewpoint where neogeo intro is missing.

 

[bloodycelt]

Gemant, give me a shout and I can help you get it into a database and presented through PHP/HTML.

All of the data on NeoGeoSoft is database driven so I can easily call out any custom list as required... I do think you have loads of great data but it does make it look a bit too cluttered making it not too easy to read. That was a sacrifice that I had to make and why I have created sub pages for each game with the specific details and a menu to display different lists based on specific criteria.

I do also think that it is a shame that there is no US/EURO info and it is only Japanese focused... it would just be useful, as I have included on NeoGeosoft, to at least present what games were released in what region. I have only included the Japanese dates, but the dates for all AES releases are on JTs Master List here and Kuk has all the CD release dates on Neogeocdworld.

FWIW, Heroku offers free hosting for rails/postgres sites so long as you keep a certain threshold on databse entries (10,000 rows I think), and the site has a delay when it wakes up. But its free.

 

[Electric Grave]

I love the splash art with the Mini Neo 19 hoodie, man that's the sweetest thing, that cab is awesome, I have the newer model, pretty neat but not as sweet as the one depicted in that art.

On topic, great work! Japanese art is where is at, very wise choice 'cause it keeps things more concise and unaltered by marketing chains.