Could Neo games have been able to make use of extra enhancement chips on the game's PCB like the SNES?
A 3D chip or just something to boost stock hardware performance would have been interesting to see.
Could Neo games have been able to make use of extra enhancement chips on the game's PCB like the SNES?
A 3D chip or just something to boost stock hardware performance would have been interesting to see.
Sure they could have done this stuff. A cart with RAM for tile data would have allowed them to do some tile (sprite) rotation, and casting or a number of other tricks. They could have even offloaded some 3D calculations to a CPU on the cart board to handle this process. It would only be limited to what the developers could come up with.
One of the features on the first gen motherboards (at least AES anyways) was the audio pass through on the cartridge port. This would have been great to have on all motherboards. We could then use custom audio hardware from the cartridge to do things like audio streaming (mp3 game tracks), sound mixing, etc...
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That's exactly what WaterMelon are doing with Paprium. It's a neat idea, but the Neo can produce nice sound on its own, unless you really need that crystal clear PCM that lasts for hours.Originally Posted by JMKurtz
Does the MVS have the audio pass through? I still have questions about the NGDevTeam music.
Last edited by Neo Alec; 11-23-2017 at 11:40 AM.
Looking at MVS cartridge pinouts, it doesn't look like there are any audio pins at all. They are present on the AES cartridges, but their use is limited to an early board revision? Get NeoBitz or some other Neo dev in here, so that we can get actual answers. NeoSD or Raz, maybe?
JMKurtz=NeoBitz. That's why is post is so good
The way the Neo works with graphics, I don't know if you'd need a CPU on the CHA board. Maybe to do polygons, but clearly all you need is a ton of ROM and the Neo can throw it all on the screen.
Isn't that pretty much what NG Dev Team is already doing with their cartridges? I figured they were using a ton of ROM for rendered CGI animations. There's powerful FPGA processors in their carts too, but it's unknown if their FPGA is doing anything beyond data decryption and multiplexing, like processing game logic or graphics.
I think it would be awesome if Cuphead was ported to the Neo (could definitely do a great port, with all the animation and such), perhaps using some chip to hold CD quality audio to be streamed, in stereo, instead of compressed audio used in later releases for the hardware.
I have thought about this quite a bit. I have come to the conclusion that in theory anything is possible provided it is output as a set of sprites at the native neo geo resolution with the right colour set. In theory you could in effect have a mini computer in the cart producing what ever you want be it 3D or whatever. All you would need is a chip to convert the output on the fly to sprites for the neo geo to display and since high bandwidth streaming is what the neo geo is about it should be possible. Not sure about the screen lag and maybe I'm wrong but I think the architecture in effect makes anything possible provided you apply the constraints above. It's what makes the Neo such a powerful machine.
Why would anyone want that, if Cuphead can already be played in its original quality on other platforms? To me, enhancement chips are for allowing the artists and programmers to extend hardware's original capabilities, while still being true to the platform in some way. I would totally dig enhancements which would bump up sprite animation to a CPS3 level, while offering more background layers, and maybe an extra audio channel, but things like "let's make it play Doom" are pointless from the gaming standpoint [while extremely interesting from a technical standpoint].
Hook line and sinker! Haha
DANGER!!
The animation wouldn't look right with the Neo's lower resolution.
You could have pointed out any of the 10,000 reasons that wouldn't work, but no, you chose artistic integrity above everything else. I respect that. Classy.
I think it would need to be reworked but I'm sure if the Neo could run a recognizable version of Cuphead. Sure, you can play in it's original quality on other platforms but it would be a cool proof-of-concept.
I don't own an xbox one, but would love to run cuphead in a cab. Looks like a great game. Considering buying a pc to stick in a cab, just for games such as these.
No point in porting it to Neo though. 1) I'd rather get a new game 2) It's gonna be expensive, just like all other high quality new homebrews 3) People are gonna complain about the price, even though we are here discussing the port of such a game, instead of being thankful there are neo games being printed at all
Potentially, but to the best of my knowledge the benefits of this would be relatively minor since you're still dealing with a relatively slow machine.
+ for something like cuphead you'd still need to port the code to something compatible... probably easier to build from scratch.
Aside from this it kind of takes away from the appeal of neo which despite it's relatively modest cpu was still great as time went on because it chose well with sprite handling capabilities, and boldly fcked off rom size (further augmented later with switching banks, and cheaper components) - just went above and beyond what most comparative designs ever even tried to achieve.
I'm still waiting on that Street Fighter II port. The geo could handle that with ease.
As soon as you put Ram into the cart you have buffering which causes at least 1 frame lag to begin with. Maybe it would be useful for background tricks and game logic is completely untouched.
A second CPU and GPU would have been neat. The two weaknesses, amount of sprites and speed.
Last edited by powerflower; 12-21-2017 at 11:12 PM.
They did this with the PGM and it causes a lot of problems due to timing issues between the processor in the cart and main processor on the mobo. But it's possible.
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