CD Hardware. What makes it weaker?

Specifically, what about the neo geo system's hardware that creats slowdown, and missing effects like the fire stage in LB2?

I was under the impression that it was the exact same hardware, only the games are loaded to RAM via CD.

What is the big stinkin deal.

Also, why couldnt the Dreamcast even do the fire effects from Last Blade 2? That is serioulsy fucked. EIther the Neo Geo is just to much of a beast even for today's machines, or the programmers were lazy, or the programmers wanted to make sure there was only ever one true version of the game, no matter how minute the diffrence.


Rade

Rade Kuruc:

Also, why couldnt the Dreamcast even do the fire effects from Last Blade 2? That is serioulsy fucked. EIther the Neo Geo is just to much of a beast even for today's machines, or the programmers were lazy, or the programmers wanted to make sure there was only ever one true version of the game, no matter how minute the diffrence.


Rade

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That's a case of lazy programming, my friend.

As for the Neo Geo CD, i just don't understand.

I was playing Final Fight Cd on my Mega Cd earlier, and whilst playing i thought 'wow, this game has really big, nicely animated sprites, arranged music , loads of on screen enemies, and it loads really quick'

i mean, didn't the Neo CD come out after the Mega CD? So why so slow? I understand the later neo games being jam full of animation and such making the loading longer...but games like Eternal Champions CD and Fatal Fury Special CD have plenty too, and they load up almost instantly.

Maybe SNK's dev. teams just didn;t know how to squeeze the hardware's full potential, i dunno.

Yeah, it was probably the biggest mistake making the Neo CD with the same speed drive as a sega CD.

Sega CD= 6 Mebagits of Ram (3/4) of a Meg.
Neo CD= 56 Megabits. 7 MB

Quite the diffrence. Add on top of that the fact the Neo programmers were not big on compression and you had to load in a bunch of voice samples and you have your self a monstrosity of loads.

What the Neo could do that Sega CD coulnt was load an entire game at a time. I love the 1 time loaders. So much fun.

I just want to know what held this thing back with the slowdown though. What is the CD system lacks? Is it cache?? I dont know.

I wonder why SNK opted against a Dual speed drive. Saturn and PSX came out at the same time with dual speeds..I guess they weighed RAM over CD speed thinking about the future and how much bigger their games would get.

Who knows.

Does anyone have the pic of the Neo CD/HC combo system handy??

*reads but doesn't know the answers*

kernow:
*reads but doesn't know the answers*

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You were my only hope...

The only thing I can think of is that the games were primarily designed for the home cart system, with its vast amount of bla bla yawn..

as you said it only had a 56 mbit window of RAM to load into, I think if the software were designed from the ground up _for this system, it'd perform better. Its literally the same chipset as the neo, minus the cdrom transport/controller etc yawn... spock

christ.. I have no idea why it was so bad..

I'm no expert, but I would seem that ram was the problem. The Neo Geo cd had limited amounts of ram that took time to access. The homecart system had all the ram the game needed at immediate access. As the games got bigger, the Neo Geo cd had no way to make up for the extra ram of the huge carts. Hence, the animation cuts. Its probably much more complicated than that, but that is how I see it.

yeah im no expert but thats what i thought to. the cart has immidiette acces with ram cd has to load for every stage. damn i really cant explain.

i got a cd my self and a friend of mine has a cart system. there really dousnt seem to be much of a difference. now if a game like MOTW came out on the cd we could really see the difference. i dont know but maybe the cd could handle the game if it where programmed right.

Yeah, but why is dere slowdown and missing effects??? It makes no sense. Oh well, like it is noticable.

Im in love with CD!

Rade Kuruc:


Im in love with CD!

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.....until the CD drive starts to die mad_2

Not enough Ram for the "giga power" titles. it was enough for the pre 97 titles.

1x CD-rom drive.. VERY slow loads on newer titles.

KOF 99 on cd is hell Same with SS4 but honestly you get use to the load times and get over it.

that's why if you really want to get into Neo CD - get CDZ, it makes huge difference in newer titles.
about the slowdowns, probably lack of direct access to the system dedicated memory.

don't quote me on this, but I believe the neo geo mvs/aes was designed as such that it accessed all of the data on the cartidge at once. Essentially it was the same as having a dedicated board with the game roms build directly in. This is different than other cartidge systems were the data is streamed from the roms at a very rapid rate. As a result, the neo geo cd undermines this very feature because of the nature of compact discs. The direct access likely enabled some type of programming trick that the developers needed in order for certain games to function properly.

Again, I don't now how much of that is true.

I thought about the CDZ too, but doesn't the CDZ have a crappier lens or something? I mean i read about it years back but can't remember what exatcly what it was.

RATM, if it's not true it sure does sound good

I think there's some evidence that that's true though, given the relative performance of boots that have 120 vs 150 ns EPROMs in them.

I also know that both Genesis and Super Nintendo games used various sorts of compression schemes in many games to keep ROM sizes and prices low. SNK scoffed at small ROM sizes and price was nearly no object.

Dazz_Kyo said:

I thought about the CDZ too, but doesn't the CDZ have a crappier lens or something? I mean i read about it years back but can't remember what exatcly what it was.

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I have owned both a CDZ as well as a few top loaders. The CDZ is quite faster, and I dont think the quality is compromised at all. No lens issues so far.

Seems like the lens will yes, inevitably fail. Luck of the draw seems to be the only factor on when. That and time used.

Maybe the CDs should have been as big as the Neo carts.

Moving parts fail.

This thread can be closed now.

I really think that some of voice and sound effects were a major factor in the usage of memory for the CD format. Sure the music is off of the CD redbook, but think about the high quality voices in the fighting games. The V-ROM chips on most fighters take up just as much memory as the program/graphics C-ROM chips. Sure some of it was music also, but there are a lot of voice samples.

I think it would have been a better idea if SNK atleast did the sound compression differently and simply converted it. Of course it would of only made maybe 2x memory difference at that time but enough to leave a little room for improvements here and there.

Oh well, thats SNK for ya and I just now realized this is a 4 year old thread.

In the case of the Neo, You couldn't use any audio compression without the implimentation of extra decrompression hardware. The 12 MHz 68K and/or 4 MHz Z80 are nowhere near powerful enough to handle any sort of worthwhile decompression.

That's why atleast for sound they could have maybe used slightly different processors whether add an extra or just clocked up some. Still, I guess it would have defeated the whole purpose of using the same hardware as MVS/AES.

I think RATM's answer is the best here.

From what I have read, it is an issue of being able to access the data. Since there is a certain amount that can be loaded into the ram, there are somethings that had to be cut out.

The carts had some stuff the cd systems didn't because the carts were able to access the data on the cart at anytime quickly, where as the cd systems had to load into ram.

CD Hardware. What makes it weaker?
Specifically, what about the neo geo system's hardware that creats slowdown, and missing effects like the fire stage in LB2?
I was under the impression that it was the exact same hardware, only the games are loaded to RAM via CD.
What is the big stinkin deal.
Also, why couldnt the Dreamcast even do the fire effects from Last Blade 2? That is serioulsy fucked. EIther the Neo Geo is just to much of a beast even for today's machines, or the programmers were lazy, or the programmers wanted to make sure there was only ever one true version of the game, no matter how minute the diffrence.

Click to expand...

Well it's not the same hardware as the AES/MVS, as it has a CD player instead of using carts. So overall, it's not the same. The carts are the RAM- once you plug in the ROM cart it becomes an integral part of the system(unlike a CD).Some of the features of Neo games took advantage of the direct rom access. Maybe even some of the graphical effects required direct access to work properly- with last blade and motw, they were doing things were beyond what the Neo was supposed to be capable of when it was first released. Also these games and the giga power feature were designed after the Neo CD was designed, so it couldn't support those games as well. The MVS system was always the main focus(especially as far as making money), so of course SNK was going to make to games to run well on that system(and make the most out of what the MVS could do, and the Neo CD was an afterthought, but AES hardware matched MVS from the beginning, so perfect translations were never an issue). Conversions of Neo games to the Neo CD became less close to the arcade standard as time went on, but at the beginning they were quite good. To me one of the big attractions of the Neo was huge sprites(the SNES and Genesis had much smaller in comparision) in games like AOF3. The sprites are sometimes smaller and have some frames of animation cut, which is not good if you're trying to sell the Neo CD as an arcade system at home, or as being a proper replacement for the AES. In some cases they cut animations & sprite size to keep loading times down to a reasonable level, it wasn't necessarily always because the system was underpowered. The Neo AES is unusual compared to other consoles of the time, as it did everything with sprites, rather than have for example a set no. of background planes as the SNES & Genesis had. It was not only more powerful than other consoles, it also worked differently too.

You hear a lot about the Neo CD having a 1X CDROM, but I think it was actually a little faster (in terms of Kb/s) than the normal 1X standard. It was some kind of proprietary drive(?).
With AES/MVS games, the programmers tried to avoid any kind of compression(except maybe a few of the later titles), to make their games look bigger in term of "MEGS" compared to the Genesis and SNES. I'm still not convinced that programmers have gotten everything out of the AES/MVS that it can do- we haven't even seen a gigabit title yet.

Concerning the Giga Power games, they used bank-switching technology to be able to be up to 712Mb in size, that would likely cause loading problems on the Neo CD if most of the later games weren't CD optimized.