neogeo cd

[turrican3]

hi guys,
is the neogeo games which are better on neogeo cd than on neogeo ?
i just tested neo turf masters and there just the music who change a little, that's all.

[tin]

IMHO they are awful cos the loading destroys it

[Retro-Nerd]

True, especially the first CD console version was awfully slow.

[ Show youtube player ]

[turrican3]

ok i saw,
but is there neogeo cd games with better intros or better musics ?

[r.cade]

Most of them have "better" music, as redbook audio instead of chiptune. This is, of course, subject to personal preference.

[SolderPCB]

I like the Neo Geo CD, Loading times don't kill it for me as loading times on new devices are even longer. if Loading times were a killer no one would have used the Amiga.

At the very most the Neo Geo CD takes 1min to fill it's ram and that doesn't happen that often. But when it does you don't get much loading after it.

Most games have about 30s loading.

[r.cade]

Yes, the load times are overblown. Somebody somewhere decided to put it in a review and it became "urban myth". Many PS1 and other CD games of that era were the same or worse...

[tin]

Well I never read any reviews relating specifically to the neo-geo CD, my opinion came from Playing a neo-geo for the first time, then playing the neo-geo CD straight after.

IMHO the loading IS significantly worse than other CD based systems, purely because of the large amounts of data involved, and the speed of the drive. Ruins things for me.

And yeah I do get brassed off when there's extended loading on the likes of PS3. If BWB could program C64 tape games that disguised the loading, then it should be the norm on this kind of stuff.

[Retro-Nerd]

And you should wonder why there's no Metal Slug 3 Neo Geo CD version. The CD console couldn't handle it. It's only a single speed drive. The PSX has at least a 2x drive, the Saturn a 2x drive plus a 512kb data cache.

[r.cade]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

And you should wonder why there's no Metal Slug 3 Neo Geo CD version. The CD console couldn't handle it.

No wonder here... The NGCD was discontinued for 3 years before that game was released.

[Retro-Nerd]

No wonder here... The NGCD was discontinued for 3 years before that game was released.

That didn't stop SNK/Playmore to release modules for a dead/discontinued system.

[r.cade]

No doubt SNK/Playmore can be commended for supporting that hardware platform for a really long time.

But certainly the NGCD was a budget system with limited RAM. It couldn't play the more complex games without load times. No arguments here.

It is what it is, and a neat addition to the collection. If you dislike the load times, an old XBOX with the emulator and ISO rips of your games completely solves that problem in modern times.

[tin]

For sure, would not say that the slow CD means you should not have one!! have one of EVERYTHING!!!!

<edit> or SIX OF EVERYTHING!!! *goes on ebay*

[Retro-Nerd]

For smaller games it's indeed a nice low cost option compared to AES. Though not enough exclusive games like Ironclad to make it really attractive back then.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by r.cade

No doubt SNK/Playmore can be commended for supporting that hardware platform for a really long time.

But certainly the NGCD was a budget system with limited RAM. It couldn't play the more complex games without load times. No arguments here.

It is what it is, and a neat addition to the collection. If you dislike the load times, an old XBOX with the emulator and ISO rips of your games completely solves that problem in modern times.

The neogeo like any (most i'd say) arcade hardware, has a 68000 processor, which never had access to the graphics stored in Graphic roms. It uses instead big sprite list (tiledata in reality), that are sent by the 68000 to the neogeo graphic processor, which in its turn deal with the graphic tiles (display animate). The very reason behind the small lump of ram, is that one tile is coded on 1 byte or 1 word. The neogeo ram allows 65535 words to be stored, moved etc.... which is gigantic !

Metal slug 3 could have been done on neogeo CD since the neo CD console has the same amount of ram as the AES and MVS systems. The only diff is the loading speed.

[Retro-Nerd]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

The only diff is the loading speed.

And that's why they didn't release it. Like other big games too. Would have caused stutter due to ingame loading times.

[dlfrsilver]

retro, do you have an idea about the sprite-lists sizes ? it's very small files. and loading from cd means that only the requested graphics are loaded (when in opposite, the cart version has everything ready to execute (no loading).

It's juste they didn't had to idea to port it whatsoever. This game need to load around 4mb of graphics per levels, nothing hard really.
And no stutter since you can preload datas in ram.

look :

68000 Program Memory: 2 MB (you can split the game code in parts in order to get thing in 2mb)
Fix Layer Memory: 128 KB
Graphics Memory: 4 MB (largely enough to load a level in full)
Sound Sample Memory: 1 MB (music can be splitted too)
Z80 Program Memory: 64 kB

VRAM: 512Kb (For graphics attributes)
SRAM: 2 KB (For high scores / general save data)

[Retro-Nerd]

From what i've read the bigger Neo Geo modules streams constantly pre-rendered backgrounds graphics/animations into Ram during gameplay. I could imagine it would stutter with a single speed drive. But i guess on EAB are some real Neo experts too. Correct me if i'm wrong with my layman point of view.

[dlfrsilver]

that's what most coin-op hardware machine is doing. But it's not exactly streaming, the 68000 is sending via ports the spritelists (since the neogeo is not using bitmaps but sprites, toward the VDP, which then from what it gets know exactly what to display and where (backgrounds and sprites, and if animate them is required, and which speed use (yes, the neogeo has a hardware possibility about the speed used on animation, very clever). A neogeo cd game works like a computer for loading files, and still use the tile things from the mvs and aes systems. This means the game code load each required files in ram, and the associated sprite-lists. The main advantage these systems have is that the video tileram is dynamic, it can be very quickly filled, erased, modified on the fly with no risk of ram fragmentation for instance.

The megadrive works the same way. The tile/videoram is connected to the VDP which then organise and display the sprite (animate them too, etc...)

[Retro-Nerd]

http://www.neo-geo.com/wiki/index.ph...CD_consoles.3F