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General Sega CD Discussion

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Glisp, Jun 8, 2010.

  1. Glisp

    Glisp

    That one weird guy that does stuff. Member
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    None at the moment I'm afraid.
    You know, I just realized. Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side's controls respond much better to light motions as opposed to rough motions you'd normally see. The fighter itself isn't bad, it just doesn't like certain controllers I'm assuming. I'm gonna (hopefully) purchase a six button arcade stick for my Genesis and see if that resolves some of the control issues. Keep in mind that a lot of the fighters in the 90's suffered from stiff controls so, EC's not the only one. Compared to the original Sega Genesis title, Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side improved the gameplay and controls some.

    Not only that, but the game makes excellent use of the Sega CD's storage space. I have a BIN/CUE dump of the ROM I made with the music internal at full quality. The complete size of the ROM image with the music in it is 482 MBs which is pretty impressive considering it's not an FMV game. The large ROM size is the result of additional animations for all characters, a ton of secret characters such as Crispy the Chicken and Senator, and of course the FMVs.

    As for the 256 Color rumor the game spawned, I asked the Executive Producer and Designer of the game, Michael Latham, on Facebook a while back. You see, the 256 colors rumor has caused arguments in the past. When I asked him, I got the most puzzling reply ever: "Both sides are correct." Not sure what he meant. a lot of the answers he gives to my questions tend to be very confusing.

    Unlike other games with FMVs, Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side's FMVs are full color. This is the result of the FMVs being encoded with Cinepak from the start rather than converted. They are 3D animation and overall just look very good. The game uses a ton of rotating palletes as well. Quite a few of the characters use rotating palletes. Most notably, the boss characters, Eternal Champion and Dark Eternal Champion. This is by far my favorite game for the Sega CD. While some kind of rage quit on it, that's mainly because the AI is absurdly tough. Even on Neophyte difficulty.

    The AI also cheats which seems to be very common with fighters of the time. Even doing things humanly impossible by the player. Though the issue with the AI still being able to use specials even with no inner strength left was corrected in the Sega CD game. In the original Mega Drive/Genesis title, the AI could do some crazy stuff.

    Juggling was introduced to Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side. However, there is a juggle limit. You are only allowed one additional hit. If you try to get in another hit after hitting the opponent the additional time, your attack will miss regardless if it makes contact or not. There's also more projectile deflection moves in this game than the first one so you can pretty much deflect a projectile back at your opponent as long as you time it properly.

    I'd rather not explain in anymore detail as I've literally made a wall of text most people probably won't read out of laziness. if they do then great. If not then oh well nothing I can do. lol.
    A little parting gift before I leave this thread btw:
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD4ObZ0a—E&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]
    This is one of the secret characters: Hooter the Owl. He's insanely cheap. Even for a canon character. And yes, he is canon. He ties in with Xavier.

    And let's not forget EC CD's insane combo system either:
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0WlnbhbnqE&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]
    Thankfully, you have to be a really experienced player to pull these off and the CPU doesn't use combos a whole lot except for a few special move attacks that function as combos.
    Okay that is all.
     
  2. Chilly Willy

    Chilly Willy

    Tech Member
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    Doom 32X
    The CDX doesn't have any issues using the 32X other than it slightly blocks the lid so that you have to be careful inserting and removing CDs. SEGA didn't get FCC certification for the 32X on the CDX, which is why they went from the stance of "yes it works" to "it's not supported". The FCC was quite a bit more anal about these things in the 90s than they are today. That's also why the 32X came with those metal thingys you had to put in the Genesis - they were RF shields to pass FCC certification.

    But yes, a Model 2 would be cheaper and better for a 32X than the much more expensive and hard to get CDX. I have an extra 32X that I sometimes use on my CDX for testing, but I normally leave it off so I can use the CDX for SMS games.
     
  3. Bgvanbur

    Bgvanbur

    Tech Member
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    a disassembly, some small Sega CD projects
    After you cut out the CD Audio and the FMV, it only leaves 12.6 M for other game data. Which is still quite large considering.

    Thanks, I didn't realize Eternal Champions used Cinepak. As such, the FMV is clearly limited to 61 colors per frame. Since these FMV are at ~12 FPS, palette swaps of colors to make additional colors don't work as well (which is why when you look at the FMVs frame by frame you don't see palette swap tricks). So while no 256 color , it still is very colorful and impressive. When comparing it to other Cinepak games, the intro has the most unique colors (478 of the possible 512 colors are used) and has one of the highest unique palette counts.
     
  4. Bartman3010

    Bartman3010

    Site Staff
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    That's one thing I was trying to figure out. So Sega TruVideo is the codec they were using for Sega CD FMV up until a certain point, right? My best assumption that CinePak was used in those Sega CD/32X ports of Digital Pictures' games.
     
  5. Bgvanbur

    Bgvanbur

    Tech Member
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    a disassembly, some small Sega CD projects
    TruVideo is not a film codec. TruVideo appears on both SGA format FMVs and Cinepak format FMVs. Though these seem to be the only two formats that use the TruVideo trademark. Cinepak was used for both the Fahrenheit plain and 32X versions (though the 32X version of Cinepak is very different than the plain Cinepak format). All the plain Digital Picture games used the SGA format, and I haven't investigate the format of the 32x digital picture movies. But since even the later Digitial Pictures games did not use plain Cinepak I don't see why the 32x versions would use the 32x CInepak and not some modified version of the SGA format FMV codec.