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Post by turboxray on Aug 16, 2020 19:04:26 GMT
This is for discussing or posting technical observations of PCE games (hucard or CD)
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Post by turboxray on Aug 16, 2020 19:11:08 GMT
Neutopia 2:
It has a reported size of 6 megabits (or 768k), and it does have that as the layout for its rom. But the game doesn't actually use all 6 megabits. There's about 1.1 megabits in the rom that's completely unused. Kind of a shame considering it was there and available for the devs to use. There could have been more overworld area, more quests and dialogue, side quests, etc. Maybe just more polish/in game stuff, or used for some cinemas.
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Post by DarkKobold on Aug 16, 2020 20:15:26 GMT
Neutopia 2: It has a reported size of 6 megabits (or 768k), and it does have that as the layout for its rom. But the game doesn't actually use all 6 megabits. There's about 1.1 megabits in the rom that's completely unused. Kind of a shame considering it was there and available for the devs to use. There could have been more overworld area, more quests and dialogue, side quests, etc. Maybe just more polish/in game stuff, or used for some cinemas.
Isn't this required? Like, you have to be 256, 512, 768 or 1024kB?
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Post by dshadoff on Aug 16, 2020 21:02:21 GMT
Which version - USA or Japan ? (or both)
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Post by turboxray on Aug 17, 2020 0:11:32 GMT
Which version - USA or Japan ? (or both) Both. They're nearly identical in layout. Isn't this required? Like, you have to be 256, 512, 768 or 1024kB?
Not necessarily, but in practice typically. But that's not what's going on here. If you look at roms from this era, they're almost always packed pretty full - not much unused space. Neutopia 2 doesn't just packed everything up to almost 5 megabits and leave the rest. That would definitely indicate they were only expecting to use 5 megabits but used a cheaper 6 megabit pair rom setup. The rom has some pretty large areas of unused space, but it's not all that the end. There's data in the last megabit of the rom. Either the program manager didn't know they had that much free space, or did know but stuff got cut do to budgets.. or they simply didn't care to use all of it. But none of it was, "this is a 5megabit game using a 6megabit layout for convenience or cost measures". Anyway, it's kind of rare to see. Very curious what the story behind it.
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Post by turboxray on Aug 19, 2020 4:52:00 GMT
So I had a look at the first Neutopia game other day. Much like its sequel, it also has some unused space. The game clocks into about 3megabits (384k) and definitely uses compression on the tiles and sprites. I didn't thoroughly check but it appears the maps (divided into screens) are uncompressed. The game has about ~64k of unused space. Considering the original size is cramped at 384k, that's a decent amount of memory not to use. Other interesting aspects about the game; the are unused tiles in vram (placeholders.. they looks like gems), and there are tiles that unused on the overworld map (the first area anyway). An extra statue, a low cut bush, some rock or tree root formations. The game uses 3bit tiles and sprites (7 colors per "cell"). The enemies use a total of 7 colors each, which looks decent for the low color count. The main sprite is all made up for 7 color sprites, but the sprites are composited in real time (as a meta sprite). So the sword, shield, head, body, shadow - they all have their own 7 color sprites. The crazy thing is, is that when he attacks from the side view.. there's few line portions of his frame that overlap all 5 sprites, and that's why you'll see flicker where they really shouldn't be. Especially of the boss is a similar meta-sprite composition. Just for comparison, Zelda 3 on the snes does the same thing, with 7 color sprites and composition with heads and bodies, etc. It does it for the towns people too. But the SNES game also uses 8x8 sprites to help reduce some of the flicker. I circled some of the tiles so you can see. The bird looking statue's lower body is actually used, but just not with that head combination (from what I've seen). You can also see the placeholder or reserved tile cells that look like gems or orbs. I used this as a visual check against the tiles: www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/TG16/Neutopia-LandSphere.png If I'm wrong about any of these, feel free to point it out.
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