exodus
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 161
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Post by exodus on Oct 8, 2023 22:30:00 GMT
So I've heard that the super cd version of the first tengai makyou was sent out for free and is identical to the original non-super cd release. Is this true from a rom perspective? I guess it was free promo for the format in a way, but isn't particularly "super" - anyone know if they truly just repackaged the disc, or did they add something?
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Post by dshadoff on Oct 8, 2023 23:49:23 GMT
The story behind it was that the load times in the original were complained about. The SCD version was supposed to have been re-arranged in order to use the additional memory on SCD, to improve that experience. I'm not sure how much the load time duration or frequency were improved, but I do know that more memory was put to use, and that it's different code on the disc. elmer may be able to give some more details on this, as I believe he was studying the differences between the two.
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Post by supper on Oct 9, 2023 1:57:36 GMT
While I can't shed much light on the technical differences, I can tell you a little about how this version was distributed from encountering ads for it while going through Japanese magazines. It was indeed a giveaway prize, and apparently never sold at retail. The main campaign seems to have taken place from October 20th to December 31st of 1992: the first 30,000 people to buy a Duo and mail in a copy of the included warranty card received the game as a prize, according to an ad on the very first page of PC Engine Fan's December 1992 issue.
At least one other giveaway took place later on -- if you successfully complete the game Magicoal with all 64 collectible spells, you're rewarded on the ending screen with the super-special-secret code "KNAHT", which you could send in for a chance at winning one of an additional 2,000 copies. (Though Magicoal's sales seem to have been quite dismal, considering it didn't even crack the top 10 of any magazine's sales charts, so I have to wonder if they actually managed to give all those away.)
Those are the two giveaways I've seen mentioned. There may have been more; I haven't read every single article of every single magazine.
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exodus
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 161
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Post by exodus on Oct 10, 2023 3:16:22 GMT
Thanks for this! Curious to hear what elmer says, but I also had heard that the main thing was load times, and it's good to know the code is different on disc. Also cool to hear about the giveaways - that Magicoal one is incredibly odd, why would that be the game, of all of them? It's not even a proper Hudson game, being Hunex and all. But maybe they found they had extras and thought "what can we do with this?" I brought all this up because I've seen the narrative that the CD and super cd versions were identical repeated a few times, most recently in this nice video on tengai makyou's origins, so I wanted to see whether the truth was what I remembered it to be. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgS-yJEPaQk
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Post by dshadoff on Oct 10, 2023 3:39:05 GMT
Well, let’s be clear about what “different” means here: It’s not an exact byte-match It does use additional memory banks It doesn’t appear to change any aspect of the game
So, if a patch is created for this game, it would need to identify which version to patch, because they aren’t interchangeable.
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gilbot
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 137
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Post by gilbot on Oct 10, 2023 6:02:08 GMT
I have the Super CD version, but the load times were still horrible (frequent and long), and the experience seemed to match what I had seen kids playing the original version in department stores bitd (I was a late adoptor, as I only bought a Duo long after it's released). I'd like to see a comparasion if there is a chance. That said, the originally campaign was a celebration of 1 million CD-ROM 2 systems sold, and those who bought a Duo and mailed a copy of the warranty card back at the specific period would get a copy of the "not-for-sale" Super CD version of this game. Eventually it fell far short of the targetted 30,000 units during that three-month period, so a lot of new copies were later floating around in shops and were sold for cheap (at least cheaper than the "non-rare" "not not-for-sale" original "not super" version, even used copies). That's how I bought my copy. (No. I didn't got mine with the compaign, as I got my system much later than that, and that I don't live in Japan.) That's probably why they were able to give away more copies with Magicoal later (probably more games had done similar thing too). And it doesn't matter that Magicoal was not developed/published by Hudson. The campaign was mainly arranged by NEC (OR rather, the NEC+Hudson combo which developed the PCE systems). The main objective of the original two Tengai games was to sold the systems, the original CD-ROM 2 and the Super CD-ROM 2 systems respectively (while Kabuki Den was a quick cash grab), as the scale this large for a console game was never attempted before (having to hire that many professional voice actors and Oscar winning composers for a computer game was unheard for) so no matter how well the games were sold, they're probably sold at a loss (even worse, the games were never supposed to be sold outside Japan). So, the give-away CD-ROM 2 version of the first game was also created to help sell systems. As Magicoal was published by NEC HE itself, it was totally reasonable for it to be used as another tool to burn consume some of the remaining stock of the game. FYI. the primary objective of YS I+II was also to sell the CD-ROM 2 system, so it was probably also sold at a loss (especially since Falcom charged unreasonably high licensing fee), no matter how popular it was. (At least it was released outside Japan, unlike the Tengai games...)
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Post by elmer on Oct 11, 2023 13:08:38 GMT
Thanks for this! Curious to hear what elmer says, but I also had heard that the main thing was load times, and it's good to know the code is different on disc. The program code on the SCD is marginally different from the CD version because it caches some of the most-commonly-used program and data overlays in SCD memory, and then loads them from there. The game itself also contains a couple of replacement CD routines to get around bugs found in the System Card 1.0 routines. The SCD caching helps a bit, but there are still constant seeks and loads when moving around the map, and so the game is still a bit annoying/slow. Better caching could be implemented (such as keeping the most-recent loads in memory so that entering/leaving a building were faster), but at the end of the day, there's no way to get around the fact that the game is split into more than 670 small chunks of "location" data, and over 190 chunks of "enemy" data!
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exodus
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 161
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Post by exodus on Oct 11, 2023 23:05:57 GMT
Thanks for this! Kind of matches with what I heard as far as the data being read differently, but not necessarily better. the replacement routines to get around system 1.0 problems is new to me! interesting stuff all around. Folks certainly got better at loading management in later games.
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