Neo Geo games to Jaguar? Would be possible?

[agradeneu]

6 minutes ago, Ericde45 said:

you can match but you can not storage all the graphics

so , as CJ explained, you can re-do a level of a game. not all the game.

 

 

This is UTTER NONSENSE. (and therefore any talk with you is futile)

If that was true, Gravitic Mines would have only 1 level, as 1 level needs the full 2MB RAM.

 

However, we have 32 levels, as we dont load all levels into RAM at once. Why would you do such stupid thing? Its ridiculous! 

 

 

BTW music is streamed from cart, so its not useless, after all.

[42bs]

8 minutes ago, Ericde45 said:

you can match but you can not storage all the graphics

so , as CJ explained, you can re-do a level of a game. not all the game.

 

 

Well, with some bank switching logic and fast Flash, it should be possible to store a _lot_ on the cart. But again: Who wants to do it? And if, who's gonna buy such cart. People start crying already if a game for Jaguar/Lynx cost more then 50USD.

[42bs]

BTW: IIRC AvP displays certain objects directly from ROM. If one removes the cart, it becomes all yellow (== 0xffff in CRY).

[Ericde45]

1 minute ago, agradeneu said:

This is UTTER NONSENSE. (and therefore any talk with you is futile)

If that was true, Gravitic Mines would have only 1 level, as 1 level needs the full 2MB RAM.

 

However, we have 32 levels, as we dont load all levels into RAM at once. Why would you do such stupid thing? Its ridiculous! 

 

 

BTW music is streamed from cart, so its not useless, after all.

how do you fit 90 MB of graphics in a 6 MB JAG cartridge ?

( and don't tell you will compress, you can not decompress graphics in realtime with a 10 megabits/s rom bus)

 

you are alsways bullshitting, either you have fun doing the troll here, or you are simply too stupid to understand what you read

 

 

 

 

 

[Ericde45]

1 minute ago, 42bs said:

BTW: IIRC AvP displays certain objects directly from ROM. If one removes the cart, it becomes all yellow (== 0xffff in CRY).

you can even do slower things, why not run gpu code from rom ?

 

[42bs]

10 minutes ago, Ericde45 said:

you can even do slower things, why not run gpu code from rom ?

 

Hmm, never tried. But you need a 32bit wide ROM then (I guess).

[Ericde45]

i think games done during the life of the Jag were not really digging deep to be efficient.

knowing that the bus bandwidth is the main issue, first step should have been to code a music+SFX solution in the DSP, not using samples

and what can we find in the games ? samples and samples, read from RAM.

 

[42bs]

13 minutes ago, Ericde45 said:

how do you fit 90 MB of graphics in a 6 MB JAG cartridge ?

( and don't tell you will compress, you can not decompress graphics in realtime with a 10 megabits/s rom bus)

This is not needed. I am pretty sure, there a NG games where the level data will fit into 1MB.

You do not have to decompress _all_ assets at once or on the fly.

 

But this discussion is academic, unless someone rips some graphic from a NG cart and we can check how good it compresses.

[42bs]

1 minute ago, Ericde45 said:

i think games done during the life of the Jag were not really digging deep to be efficient.

knowing that the bus bandwidth is the main issue, first step should have been to code a music+SFX solution in the DSP, not using samples

and what can we find in the games ? samples and samples, read from RAM.

 

fulsynth was there, but using a MOD was easier and quicker. I guess even hard core Jaguar programmers where impressed by F.A.C.T.S

[Ericde45]

a little reallife example :

in xenowings, png graphics in 24 bits is 155 KB, CRY in 16 bits is 760 KB, lz4 of the CRY 16 bits is 103 KB

but we have cut scene between levels, you can not decompress this while game is running

 

[Ericde45]

13 minutes ago, 42bs said:

This is not needed. I am pretty sure, there a NG games where the level data will fit into 1MB.

You do not have to decompress _all_ assets at once or on the fly.

 

But this discussion is academic, unless someone rips some graphic from a NG cart and we can check how good it compresses.

metal slug C rom : only graphics ( no 68000 code, no samples ) : 4*4096 = 16 MB

compressed using lz4 : 6,82 MB

 

once again, game over, or use GD, or as you said, create you own cartridge electronics.

[phoenixdownita]

2 hours ago, Ericde45 said:

metal slug C rom : only graphics ( no 68000 code, no samples ) : 4*4096 = 16 MB

compressed using lz4 : 6,82 MB

 

once again, game over, or use GD, or as you said, create you own cartridge electronics.

Lz4 is a 2011 invention, in my experience normal zip (deflate kind) however much slower compresses better (sometimes 2:1 depending on data) … try that … or whatever lz4 compression level activates lz4hc which seems to match the resulting size of std zip.

 

At any rate if your point is that the 6MB of directly addressable ROM space of the Jag would have had issues containing the med-to-big MVS titles it is likely the case after all the biggest games were just shy of 100MB of total ROM, BUT some of the ngcd versions should be achievable with the JagCD (yes some of them had less frames of animation to accommodate the 7MB total of RAM of the ngcd) … probably replicating the excruciating load times as well.

 

Wrt smaller MVS games take Nam 1975 at 46 Megabits is less than 6MBytes, same for Magician Lord btw. Once you go bigger than that depending on how much data each screen/level accesses some game may work out even if they are say 10MB total.
KOF 94 was already 24MB but if they made it work on the ngcd … then again it has 3 times the RAM of the Jag … anyhow here are the sizes https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=Meg_count

Edited August 14 by phoenixdownita

[Clint Thompson]

Given the upcoming JagStudio will include bankswitching and GD file access, saying you're limited to just 6MB is not even going to be a talking point anymore. Thought we were past the "is the Jaguar capable of doing it" sort of talk by now. It clearly is. The problem always goes back to: who's going to bother making something on the level of a NGCD game for the Jag? Probably no one.

 

I've really got to make some time to pull together some of the junk I've been working on and post it. Literally everything I've been working on pulls both audio and graphics/animations from ROM, despite it being impossible.

Edited August 15 by Clint Thompson

[agradeneu]

Ok, I wont react to any negative nonsense anymore, but rather make some positive thoughts that are practically relevant if I was part of a project porting a NEOGEO game, e.g. Metal Slug 1.

My thoughts are based on my expierience of the last 6 years working on several Jaguar games, including REbooted, Gravitic Mines and recently Last Strike DX and Jumping at Shadows credited as "AnderLex".

On the Lynx I worked on Odynexus, LynxBlast and Microvaders. Currently I am working on Wyvern Tales Gaiden. 

 

Metal Slug is a 330 Meg game, that means around 42 MB. It would fit into a 6MB cart probably, using compression like Gravitic Mines. If you use Jaguar GD, like Clint already pointed, its a no brainer.

 

It has 6 levels, so roughly 7 MB per level. 

 

Jaguar has 2MB RAM, so obviously, not all required assets and music for a level would fit into the RAM at once. Putting the whole level into RAM would be convinient, but nobody expected it would be a walk through a park to port a NEOGEO game, eh?  

 

 

Metal Slug has mostly 1 - 2 graphic layers displayed at once in game, 1 level "map" layer and several background layers.

 

 

1. I would ask the engine to stream the game layer from ROM. Bandwidth looks suffice enough: Having 10 MB/sec is not far away from 12MB/sec for all graphics on the NEOGEO. And we just need to save enough space to fit the important stuff into fast RAM.  

 

Metal Slug is a rather slow game and runs at 30FPS. We had a nice streaming tech in Odynexus on the Lynx, despite the limits, to scroll a background much larger than what would fit into Lynx limited RAM (64kB).

 

 

2. The other option would be to divide the game layer into smaller sections, large bitmaps, and only cache the sections that are needed in RAM. I saw this structure in "The Last Strike". 

 

 

3. All sprites and sound FX would fit into RAM then, optimistically, especially the sprite graphics that are used repeatedly throughout a level. Music could be streamed from ROM if possible, or put into RAM. It depends how much RAM was saved.

 

 

It would be interesting then, to test it out with a prototype porting the 1st level of Metal Slug.

 

 

 

HOWEVER, several reasons were already given, why it was not feasible to port NEOGEO games. It is NOT the limits of hardware of Jaguar.

 

 

Its mostly a matter of licensing issues and general lack of interest, time and available resources in the Jag dev community.

 

And one last thing: The job of software application programming is to solve problems, not to create new ones or to ask companies to design new, more expensive hardware so that your new, fancy, but terribly unoptimized application can run on. Imagine that in the professional field, it would make any progress impossible!

 

 

Edited August 15 by agradeneu

[agradeneu]

6 hours ago, Clint Thompson said:

Given the upcoming JagStudio will include bankswitching and GD file access, saying you're limited to just 6MB is not even going to be a talking point anymore. Thought we were past the "is the Jaguar capable of doing it" sort of talk by now. It clearly is. The problem always goes back to: who's going to bother making something on the level of a NGCD game for the Jag? Probably no one.

 

I've really got to make some time to pull together some of the junk I've been working on and post it. Literally everything I've been working on pulls both audio and graphics/animations from ROM, despite it being impossible.

I agree, and your last demo was a showcase of streaming graphics from GD, is that correct? Can you talk a bit about that tech?

[agradeneu]

13 hours ago, Ericde45 said:

metal slug C rom : only graphics ( no 68000 code, no samples ) : 4*4096 = 16 MB

compressed using lz4 : 6,82 MB

 

once again, game over, or use GD, or as you said, create you own cartridge electronics.

Again, Gravitic Mines contains over 42 MB data on a  6 MB cart. And its a real game, contradicting your claim based on a theoretical example. 

Because what you do not tell the audience, is that there are better compression ratios than the one you use in your example. 

 

 

Edited August 15 by agradeneu

[agradeneu]

12 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

 

 

At any rate if your point is that the 6MB of directly addressable ROM space of the Jag would have had issues containing the med-to-big MVS titles
 

The Jaguar has 2MB RAM with much higher bandwidth (100MB7sec), so it was dumb to read all graphics directly from ROM. Please read again, what "kskunk" and what I have written how I would use RAM and ROM of the Jaguar for the best effect. 

Jaguar and NEOGEO are apples and oranges in hardware design, e.g. because you have a proper size of RAM, you can decompress compressed data sitting on ROM. It makes no sense to mis-use the Jaguar like it was a NEOGEO and then tell it was impossible. That is circular thinking that reproduces a false concept. 

Edited August 15 by agradeneu

[roots.genoa]

Is there a reason why you dismiss CDs? I mean if carts are limited to 6MB, CD-ROMs are not.

[agradeneu]

8 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

Is there a reason why you dismiss CDs? I mean if carts are limited to 6MB, CD-ROMs are not.

ROM drives are rare and even more expensive than Jaguar base systems. So you would produce a game for an even smaller audience.

 

Jaguar CDs usable RAM would be smaller, and the speed of CD ROM drive is slower than cartridge.

 

Carts are limited to 6MB as for now, but you can use compression ratios like 7:1, or use the Jaguar GD for "unlimited" space.

 

 

[42bs]

56 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Metal Slug is a 330 Meg game, that means around 42 MB. It would fit into a 6MB cart probably, using compression like Gravitic Mines. If you use Jaguar GD, like Clint already pointed, its a no brainer.

A compression of 14% is rather optimistic. And yes, I know Gravetic Mines has also 42MB of raw data. But I guess the original data was tuned for better compression.

For example the scene data for STNICCC2000 is 623KB which does not fit into 512K for the Lynx. Even LZMA can hardly reach 50%. LZ4 compresses down to 80% which just fits for both decompression speed and final size.

 

So if the 42MB of the Neo Geo game were not created with compression in mind, you cannot shrink it. But hey, maybe there are ROM files around to try.

 

[42bs]

14 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

Is there a reason why you dismiss CDs? I mean if carts are limited to 6MB, CD-ROMs are not.

I guess the number of working CD units is a small number. And even less of the owner would pay for a Neo Geo port.

[agradeneu]

18 minutes ago, 42bs said:

A compression of 14% is rather optimistic. And yes, I know Gravetic Mines has also 42MB of raw data. But I guess the original data was tuned for better compression.

For example the scene data for STNICCC2000 is 623KB which does not fit into 512K for the Lynx. Even LZMA can hardly reach 50%. LZ4 compresses down to 80% which just fits for both decompression speed and final size.

 

So if the 42MB of the Neo Geo game were not created with compression in mind, you cannot shrink it. But hey, maybe there are ROM files around to try.

 

I cannot think of anything I "tuned". The graphics are 16 bit, 8 bit and 4 bit in various sizes. No, I dont think there is any tuning necessary. The graphics look exactly the way how I painted/pixeled them.  

 

Its quite a bold assumption that NEOGEO graphics were not designed to be compresssed. Its something to find out. However, don't present your speculation like a fact you can snowball on. NEOGEO graphics are 4 bit sprites/tiles and I dont see any issue to compress them like any other 4 bit, 8 bit or 16 bit graphics data. The fact that they have used no compression is due to the ROM sizes and the way the hardware was designed to read directly from ROM. Therefore it makes no sense to compress them, but its hardly a reason you cant.

Edited August 15 by agradeneu

[42bs]

Ok, I did check some Neo Geo ROM. Some ZIP files are 6 or 7MB, so these games would very likely fit into a Jaguar Game.

Metal Slug 3 is 82MB zipped, so nooooooo way to fit this into 6MB for the Jaguar.

[agradeneu]

29 minutes ago, 42bs said:

Ok, I did check some Neo Geo ROM. Some ZIP files are 6 or 7MB, so these games would very likely fit into a Jaguar Game.

Metal Slug 3 is 82MB zipped, so nooooooo way to fit this into 6MB for the Jaguar.

Some of tbe largest NEOGEO games would require using Jaguar GD, I agree. Metal Slug 3 is surely a feat and would push everything to the limit. Therefore I would focus on Metal Slug 1 or any other game in the range of 100 - 400 Mbit.  However, these ROM sizes are not optimized for Jaguar, and therefore I would be more cautious drawing ultimate conclusions.

 

My personal favourite would be "Last Resort", a splendid shooter and not a too big "Megs monster". And recently, Demons of Asteborg went NEOGEO (and GBA) with more colors and effects. 

 

Edited August 15 by agradeneu

[jguff]

17 hours ago, 42bs said:

But this discussion is academic, unless someone rips some graphic from a NG cart and we can check how good it compresses.

Sprite form (not native tile form).  

https://www.spriters-resource.com/neo_geo_ngcd/ms/

 

kawaks emulator can be used to rip any sprites that are not included in above link