Its lack killed the performance to an unacceptable degree. Heck even the TurboGrafx CD had up to 256KB cache.
>>12070334Wasnt it due to the slow speed of the CD drive, and not cache?
>>12070334>Its lack killed the performance to an unacceptable degree.Nah, the big issue was that it was a 1x drive unlike the PS1 and Saturn which had 2x drives. Once the CDZ came out with a proper 2x drive load times were comparable to the Saturn and PS1.CD vs CDZ load times videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWjLkwxuIqc&t=191s
It needed RAM no doubt. Why do people think PS1 ports cut so many frames for the main reason?
>>12070334They had no idea what they were doing.
Give me those original japanese inserts you got with your game, anon.
>>12070374It's both. The CDZ has a faster drive and more cache.
>>12070374Saturn and PS1 were cutting frames even if there was space for them because it was still too much load time.
>>12070509>and more cache.I don't think that has ever been proven, originally someone speculated that the CDZ didn't have a 2x drive but more cache and that rumor made the rounds for a while until someone actually timed the thing. There really isn't a concrete source on it having extra cache as far as I am aware.https://www.neo-geo.com/forums/index.php?threads/neo-geo-cdz-single-or-double-speed-lets-discuss.256310/
>>12070370>>12070374It had no cache, the issue of drive speed was greatly compounded by this fact.
>>12070334Because they didn't watch the youtube that told you that's the problem.>>12070570There's been so much bullshit spewed about this that it's not even worth trying to have an intelligent discussion about it. All the information is available, but you'll only find it by reading analyses from people who've actually dissected the systems and tried to improve them. All you'll get from the whatifkids is cancer.
>>12070456/dion/ general when?
>>12070679>Because they didn't watch the youtube that told you that's the problem.Cope take. SNK crippled the system likely to keep carts, which were much more profitable, attractive. Cache was seen as necessary for interactive CD based media way back when the CDi was being spec'd out like in 1984 or whatever.
Worst part about Neogeo CD is that none of the games took advantage of it
>>12070707The system itself had basically no games and I would bet it was a semi-official SNK policy to avoid fracturing the ecosystem.One other thing people have noticed is the NGCD format games are just a straight up image of the cart made into a file and put on the CD which leads to drive thrashing. Philips in the CDi days also told devs to align their assets so there would be minimum drive seeking for related assets. IE all the sound, video, code for a stage or area or whatever should be packed in nearby tracks instead of just wherever. The Neo-Geo's carts were mapped into ROM, they didn't actually have to load in any traditional sense. They were part of memory if you will and readout was just as quick. Totally unlike a CD.
You should have been able to buy an expansion unit for caching sprites on the newer games.
>>12070714IE a properly made NGCD disc would have had duplicate code and data for common shared assets interleaved with the specific code and data relevant to the portion of gameplay. That way the drive head could avoid seeking all the way to one edge of the disc and back, possibly multiple times per software operation, to load the required assets. As anon points out above, no NGCD game ever took advantage of the vastly larger capacity of the CD-ROM format so this would have been more than possible to do. But it probably would have involved doing more than putting an image of a cart on the CD.>>12070729It was all over by the time this could have been a thing, SNK was already flailing around making 100+ foot tall dinosaurs and amusement parks and shit, the corporate parties featured Iron Chefs. It was a blast I'm sure but it blew away the company. They pissed into the wind.By the time they realized they needed 3D they had already spent most of the money and their 3D effort ended up about as good as PC commodity hardware by the time of release.Overall an ignonomious end to what probably started out as a great company run by a pocket full of nerds.
That one anon obsessed with neo geo cd cache
>>12070887It could have saved the system, at the time though there had been an earthquake and Taiwan's RAM factories were all totally fucked, prices were sky high. Even if SNK used Jap chips the global commodity nature hit them.
>>12070921What ever the problem with the ngcd was i don't think snk cared
>>12070703Cope take. Youtube crippled the minds of children likely to keep them watching stupid shit, which is much more profitable than them actually knowing any facts. Cry harder and spew more words you heard on youtube kiddo. Surely that will prove what a knowledgeable and intelligent adult you are.
>>12071503Whatever you're on about has nothing to do with the thread. NGCD sucked, everybody knew it at the time. The technical details of WHY it sucked weren't to be known for years.Did your pee paw work for Neo Geo?
>>12071602There's a NGIDF that takes offense at any criticism.
>>12071602>The technical details of WHY it sucked weren't to be known for years.Yes it was, 1x speed drive. With a 2x speed drive the CDZ's load speeds were on par with PS1 and Saturn.>>12070573>It had no cache, the issue of drive speed was greatly compounded by this fact.With no cache the 2x CDZ got it very close to the competition(which mostly had watered down ports) so either no one had cache or it isn't a big deal and drive speed is the major factor.
>>12072126>Yes it was, 1x speed drive.Without cache. Which is the real thing that killed performance.You don't even know what a cache is do you?>With no cache the 2x CDZ got it very close to the competition(which mostly had watered down ports) so either no one had cache or it isn't a big deal and drive speed is the major factor.They added a cache IIRC. Or more like, by that time it became a standard feature of the drives themselves.
Why didn't they just add an option to cut selected frames and unnecessary animations? The bit of work per the few titles that existed would have created many more sales. The 4th party devs literally showed them the way already.
the best thing about the AES is that you can skip through the boot screen, the title sequences, the instruction screens etc. in basically every game and be playing in less than 10 seconds from the time you turn the console on. i'd argue it's one of the main advantages of the system over its contemporaries. i don't know why they thought producing this shit was necessary.
>>12072175Literally just putting a bigger cache on would have solved a lot of the loading issues. Even better would be a MAX 330 MEGA (41.25 MB) amount of RAM onboard so titles could be delivered on a disc, but run full-speed on the CD-based machine after an initial full loading period. By the time NGCD hit the scene ram was incredibly cheap and they could have stuck in 48MB for $5 at that point. More than enough MEGAs to go around.
>>12072189I estimate that it would be no more than 5-8 minutes load time even for the biggest titles. Most never came anywhere MAX 330 MEGA (41.25 MB) though and many could load in a minute or two max. Then be as fast as the cart-based systems.Seems absolutely mind boggling that they failed to do this.
>>12072175i'm wondering how well "mastered" the disks were, like in terms of where the data physically is on the disk; if done right this can reduce seek times and optimise loading files that are accessed a lot.and if we're talking the early era of 1x/2x drives how many devs are even thinking about disk seek timing? especially coming from cartridge development.
>>12070707>Worst part about Neogeo CD is that none of the games took advantage of itSamurai Showdown RPG was one of the few exclusive games for the Neo-Geo CD. Ween;t there a few AES ports that also came with additional remixed red book audio soundtracks?
>>12072424They'd have to hire someone to even realize that affects things
>>12072442almost every game used cd audio.it was a step up from the compressed samples they had to use in carts.some games included an art gallery and things like that.i guess anon was trying to say that no game (other than SS RPG as you pointed out) took advantage of the increased storage for more game content.
>>12072187They felt the games had mass market appeal but the cost was holding them back. It was worth a shot, a better system might have carved out a space of its own since everyone else was going 3D.
Disabling the BG animations and alternations on many stages would have helped a lot.
>>12071602>Whatever you're on about makes me seethe because you caught me parroting bullshitMany such cases.>>12072141>cache cache cache. the youtube said cache. you don;t know what cache means because you didn't watch the youtube.There's been so much bullshit spewed about this that it's not even worth trying to have an intelligent discussion about it. Prove me right.
>>12070456The guy with the weird thing on his face makes this image so much funnier
>>12073207Are you arguing that caches don't matter? Or that they shouldn't exist? If they were pointless nobody would use them but they do to this day.You just don't like people shit talking your little pet system.
>>12074684>Are you arguing Of course not. I'm only mocking a foolish ignorant child who knows nothing but the misinformation youtube filled its vacuous skull with.
Magazine retailers like this were not always indicative of prices when it came to hardware, as they would add their own mark-up. $566 (US) for a CD Neo-Geo... damn. But then again, look at the price of Fatal Fury Special AES.
>>12074985>Chips & Bit's was one of those mail order companies that ran in every gaming magazine back in the day. Them and Tommo or Die Hard Gamers Club. I would use them as a reference guide for what games are out. Sometimes they would have some interesting pre-order listings for vaporware or cancelled games.
>>12074985More Neo-Geo CD prices.
>>12074985>March 1995These are import prices. The Neo Geo CD launched in Japan and Europe in late 94 but didn't hit America until 96 because SNK realized how much they fucked up with the 1x speed drive. The delay was because they were looking at the cost / benefit of ripping out the 1x drives and replacing them with 2x drives which they found unfeasible. So they screwed themselves twice, first by putting in a terrible drive and second by releasing it anyway but a year later after the Saturn and PS1 was on store shelves and worse, in January, right after Christmas. I hope whoever pushed for a 1x drive was mocked for it ruthlessly in-house. Fucking moron.
>>12074954What does Youtube have to do with SNK cheaping out and leaving off the cache? People widely complained about the slow speed of the NGCD back in the day. Only later was the problem identified, and apparently on a Neo-Geo related forum and not on Youtube.You're just seething that people are shitting on your pet system.
>>12075064>$69 across the board for CDshmm, that's not unheard of, FFVII was $70 when it came out
>>12075140>What does Youtube have to do with SNK cheaping out and leaving off the cache? People widely complained about the slow speed of the NGCD back in the day.It doesn't matter what you do to a 1x speed drive, it will still only be a 1x speed drive and thus insufficient. Your cache solution is not good enough, the CDZ with a 2x drive is juuust fast enough for some of the later games.
>>12072424I remember that Graham Devine who made The 7th Guest talking about how this was important in a video from... must be thirty years ago now. I think the interview came on the 7th Guest CD actually.
>>12075161>It doesn't matter what you do to a 1x speed drive, it will still only be a 1x speed drive and thus insufficient.Caching can cover the dearth of data coming off the drive during seeking operations.>Your cache solution is not good enough, the CDZ with a 2x drive is juuust fast enough for some of the later games.2x drive plus cache you mean. But a larger cache would help even more with the death of the data stream during drive seeking. It was a big mistake to omit it especially for a 1x drive.
>>12075140>What does Youtube have to do with this bullshit I heard from youtube
>>12075184>>12075184I didn't hear it from Youtube, I heard it here citing SNK Forums ages ago actually. I don't watch Youtube.
What if Youtube is right though, does that make the topic verboten? If somebody posts something true to Youtube does that make it unworthy of discussion or somehow pointless?Baffling logic here from the NGIDF member.
I'd just like to mention that only the AES is based and all of this other shit is for faggots, including consolized MVS boards.
>>12075208It was weaker than the competition at the time and the only thing that saved the system were a handful of brilliant games. Baseball Stars, Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown.
>>12075214>the AES was weaker than the SNES and GenesisNot only is that retarded and wrong, but the AES had the longest lifespan of any console ever made so clearly it did a few things more right than having a "handful of brilliant games".
Neo Geo management was so inept to spend 0 time optimizing the game content for CD loading. With all the bells and whistles they approved on the animation you'd think they'd just know something needed to be done like with every single game they ported with slow loads.
>>12075218>Not only is that retarded and wrongIt's not, it was weaker than CPS.>but the AES had the longest lifespan of any console everBecause SNK never updated it which killed the company. Finally they tried to get a 3D system together but it never made money because it was mid by release.
>>12075308>it was weaker than CPSBut not weaker than contemporary consoles, and the AES is a console. >Because SNK never updated it which killed the companyGood. I'm glad we got a cool system that survived for 14 years instead of being axed after 5 years or the company pivoting and making some DVD box with loads of shovelware games.
>>12075192>I didn't hear it from Youtube, I heard it here from other clueless under ageThat makes it so much better>ages ago actuallyWay to your yourself as underage>I don't watch YoutubeWay to out yourself as a tiktok babyAnyway, thanks for confirming you're a clueless fool just parroting bullshit. You're welcome to stfu now, or keep on coping. Whatever level of humiliation you prefer.
>>12075385Doesn't matter where one hears it, the point is you're awfully angry that people are shitting on Neo-Geo. I really DO think your pee paw worked for Neo-Geo.I think the biggest problem you have, is that your system looks less attractive to the retro enthusiast because NO GAMES and you're probably sitting on a rotting hoard of SNK trash.
>>12076417bro just get an AES and a multicart so you don't have to cope this badly lok
>>12075325>But not weaker than contemporary consoles, and the AES is a console.No, it's an arcade machine marketed as a home arcade machine. With the attendant prices.As an arcade machine it was mid when it came out.
>>12076420>just get an AES and a multicartI've already emulated the entire library, in fact I was emulating the Neo-Geo a quarter century ago. It was one of the first systems supported by MAME.The only games worth a shit are the Samurai Shodown games, Baseball Stars, and Metal Slug. Everything else, including Art Of Fighting, is garbage.
>>12076421>it's not a console because it isn'tProfound.
>>12076425It's not a console. It's a home arcade for the non-existent market of the PRO tier ADULT gamer who wants to sit back in their modern penthouse apartment and play games without all the KIDS irritating them. While sitting on a Herman Miller chair and sipping on Moet.
>>12076424oh look it's the spic faggot who shows up in every neo thread to tell you how he ackshually doesn't want an AES because uhh emulation or something. thanks for your contributions pablo, but you're brown.
>>12076421>As an arcade machine it was mid when it came out.And yet, SNK couldn't come up with a reasonable successor to the MVS. Those MVS units use to be really popular for arcade owners and people who ran coin-op machines as a business. Especially the four cartridge units here in Canada. I use to bump into those machines all the time at places like the local movie theatre, the laundromat, convenient stores, and other non arcades as well as arcades. The concept of never having to remove the arcade cab for a new one, or have to go through an upgrade process was appealing for people who owned those machines. The Hyper Neo-Geo 64 was a big flop. SNK eventually gave up releasing their own hardware and just moved to NAOMI.
>>12076594Death of American arcades meant they couldn't fund a new system.
>>12076435They're on SNKs Discord server and they banned everyone who isn't brown, killing it.
>>12076606i have no idea what you're trying to say but i imagine you, too, are brown.
>>12070334have you ever played a 3DO game nona
>>12076594>And yet, SNK couldn't come up with a reasonable successor to the MVS.Well, that's not surprising, they started spending money on all kinds of wild stuff. It was Japan in the '90s, they had corporate parties catered by Iron Chefs, they built hundred-plus foot tall dinosaurs, made an amusement park, all that crazy money should have gone straight into an MVS/AES successor as soon as the first one shipped. When the system became a bit dated they realized the competition was light years ahead and flailed around in all directions. They made a fucking GAME BOY TIER handheld - a black and white one - ten years after the Game Boy came out. They put their catalog on CD but as this thread proves, the CD system was inadequate.I think Hyper Neo-Geo 64 could have succeeded if it came to market a couple years earlier. But it was late in development and things were moving so fast that a couple years was long ass time in reality, and with how much 3D was advancing in those days.
>>12076604Home consoles and PCs were more than adequate, and people would rather spend $300 on 3DFX than pumping more quarters into arcade machines. Emulation was hitting in the late '90s and the MVS/AES was one of the first big targets for MAME. Why buy NGCD and wait forever for the CD to load when you can just pirate the games and run them from your hard drive with virtually no perceptable load times?
>>12076417>u-u-ur madlmfao. You've got stage 4 terminal seething kiddo.
>>12076668This, the arcade window was closing, home consoles were every bit as good by a few years later.
the real question is why did they not have a Sonic the Hedgehog game at releaseNIGHTS looked pretty cool but the game is assi was very confused as a kid why Sega didn't have a Sonic gameand they did it again with the Dreamcastshould have let me be the CEO at 11 years old, they'd still be in the game
>>12076630No, why?
>>12075308>It's not, it was weaker than CPS.isn't neogeo supposed to support unlimited pixels?what about memory size limitations, that forced capcom fighters to limit the roster size?
>>12077120>isn't neogeo supposed to support unlimited pixels?Is ir? You tell me!
>>12077120it was not unlimited. but it allowed a ridiculous amount of sprites.so much so that backgrounds are sprites because it has no background layer to speak of.
>>12077236It was novel and powerful, but not the most powerful even when new. Very good hardware especially for the day. Execs nosed the company in in an orgy or excess. That's why it's in the hands of the arabs now.
>>12077236The SNES high resolution mode was pretty bullshit, as it was limited to 16 colours and has issues with fast scrolling. It was mainly meant for text and menus.
>>12077282Yeah, there probably should have been an asterisk there, especially since PC Engine also can theoretically reach that resolution. Still, a lot you can do with 16 colors, PC-98 was capped at that with a similar resolution. Unless there are other limitations I don’t know, I’m not too familiar with SNES graphic modes.
>>12070334traditional cd cache would have done nothing because the neogeo cd doesn't need it.it has a whopping 7mb of dram "cache" that worked as a game cartridge.that is, the neogeo cd would fill those 7mb with game data and then use it as if it was a cartridge.and having that much "cache" was exactly the issue. because it couldn't do nothing until the copy was done, the motorola 68k copied the data.the faster drive on the cdz helped a little, but the 68k was still busy copying.source: https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=Loading_timein comparison, the sega cd had like 10 times less dram and the ps1 could load and play the game at the same time.
>>12077706Terrible idea. Apparently they decided they shouldn't have to shell out the cost of developing a functional mass market unit and just pocketed the hundreds from the price tag.
>>12077747it was a decent solution. it's just that the execution was terrible.to fix this they could have added a coprocessor to handle data copy and a second dram memory bank, maybe shrinking the first one to not blow up the price too much.but that way they could load data to one dram bank while playing the game from the other.this would potentially reduce the loading to the big load at boot up and then a small one to start the game. since most data could be preloaded and the game would be waiting to load the data from the character you selected, your opponent and the background (thinking about a fighting game here). following characters and backgrounds would be preloaded while you play.though, this approach may impact redbook audio playback.
>>12075257Did they even know you should do that?
>>12079168Didn't they pay attention to what 3rd party devs had been doing to their ports and how long it was taking to load?
>>12080596you need to think within the context of 1994.loading times weren't that bad back then for a CD system and the quality of the games. after all, once in-game, it is the same as an AES.but it also had to compare to the AES and other cartridge consoles that had no loading at all.it was more the frequency of the loads, because it had a big load at launch and then many smaller loads while playing, inbetween rounds for fighting games.the last blade is among the worst offenders of this.i just played a round and it had 7 loading screens from the title screen to the end of the first stage.>loading the character selection screen>small load after selecting character for the vs screen>small load for the stage splash screen>a big one to load the stage, characters and opponent intro>small load for the actual fight>small load inbetween rounds>loading the victory screenthe small loads are like 5 seconds max, the big one is like 30 seconds.but games like metal slug load a lot less.
>>12070334I think they wanted to keep selling carts for $400 a pop.
>>12080649>you need to think within the context of 1994.Yes, context is important, when looking back it is easy to see how they missed the oncoming disaster. The system launched in Fall of 94 but systems don't just materialize, there is concept, R&D, prototyping, supply chain and manufacturing to consider so the roots of the Neo Geo CD probably go back to 93. What's more emerging technology means cost considerations constantly change, a 2x drive probably seemed like a bigger expense then it would have ended up being early on in development.From there point of view, most of the games they were putting on the system were 32-64 megabits and could be handled in one single minute long load, the larger games that RAM could not handle all at once needed a 30sec introduction load and 10-20sec between stages. Since arcade games were short that is 1-3min of loading for a 20-30min long game, reasonable in there minds.When it comes to their downfall I think 3 thinks screwed them. First off, I don't think they realized how loading adverse people were, even with their initial games they caught a lot of flak from journalists about load times. Second, the CD and AES were parasites of the MVS arcade cabinet and to keep up with the competitions new hardware the arcade division compensated by greatly increasing the size of games, 100+ megabits was the standard, 200 and 300+ quickly approaching. Third and worst of all, the fighting game boom was in full swing, the arcade team was cranking them out and loading times for that genre were poison. It was combination of loading big sprites, detailed backgrounds and tons of animation frames with the incredibly short length of fights, 30-60sec that made it so bad, it meant you were often spending more time loading than playing.
Continued>>12080756By the time they were ready to launch, SNK knew the gravity of the mistake they had made. They desperately delayed the US launch by a year to try and rip open the consoles and cram a 2x drive in the thing but it was financially unfeasible so all they ended doing was wasting a year. It really says something that they were willing to consider chucking tens of thousands of drives plus endure the cost of labor to do this just to avoid the reputation hit they were already taking in Japan and Europe. They also rushed out the CDZ in Japan which had overheating problems from the rushed development but by then they had already eaten the bad press and all their biggest fans invested hundred in their original console only to have the new model taunt them.Hindsight is 20:20 I guess but this whole scenario is like watching that BBQ scene from the Simpsons where Homer is desperately trying to fix his mistake while digging himself deeper. The ease of getting arcade games on the cnsoole is the reason why the NeoGeo CD can operate with a smaller install base than mainstream consoles but despite that they mostly stopped releasing new games in 97 because most people had 1x systems and the games were too big, the ones they did release had awful load times on the OG units, tolerable on the CDZ. The AES continued releasing games into the 2000's.
>>12080760>not mentioning the "neo-geo" pocket disasterThey wasted an ass ton of money on that failed garbage too.
>>12080649I just watched KoF 94 load on NGCD and it was unbearable. That was their flagship title going into the 2nd half of the 90s.
>>12070521>Saturn and PS1 were cutting frames even if there was space for them because it was still too much load time.PS1 lacked space, Saturn lacked memory bandwidth for high animation titles. Loading times was the last thing anybody cared about, as long as it was less than half a minute (see Sim City 2000 ports).
>>12075180Cache is just memory the drive loads stuff into. There's no difference whether it is main memory or cd subsystem cache memory, other than cpu access times.The presence of cache means the cd drive loads 1/2x(cache size) worth of data, signals the CPU that it can start copying data over to main memory, then starts loading the next half of the cache and repeat.Lack of cache means the cd drive puts a buffer into system memory and loads data there continuously until it is done loading, then tells the CPU that it's go time. This is assuming the cd subsystem can load shit into main memory which is the only way a cd drive could even function. But most systems wouldn't be able to do that so the drive probably does have some memory bank for loading so the cpu can DMA data off of it.Extra cache don't mean jack if the rest of the system does not use it, so the CDZ adding cache could not make older software load faster.>Caching can cover the dearth of data coming off the drive during seeking operations.The system would still need to wait for the seek to complete, and there's no extra data being added to the cache so loading will stall while a seek is going on. Cache does not magically help with that. The only place where it helps is when you are continuously streaming music or fmv assets, but those would be in a serial order anyway so they don't need any seeking done anyway.
