Saturn VCD Card - improve cut scenes and FMV?

[gregnash]

anyone know if having a VCD card installed in your saturn improves cut scenes and FMV sequences etc?

Radiant Silvergun has some good cut scenes, but desperately needs sharpening. Also would it be all cut scenes/graphics or just MPEG 1 stuff?

i dont really know what i'm talking about to be honest. but as i love my saturn, i feel like i should treat it. oh and i wouldn't watch VCDs on it, just interested in graphical enhancements.

[fast]

I never thought about that. If somehow it does I am in the market aswell.

[lordofduct]

not really

The MPEG card allows games to use a better quality video format (MPEG, duh). The game itself has to HAVE this better quality file on it. I don't know of any American or European games that utilize it.

I do know some Jap games did. Like there is a version of both Lunar 1 and Lunar 2 MPEG version.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl= ... N%26um%3D1

Regular games use the CPK format, it's a Sega file format that isn't related to MPEG at all. The card has hardware in the MPEG card is for MPEG, it's from before they had a fast software MPEG decoder. It doesn't understand CPK at all... so it won't do anything to your regular non-MPEG games.

The number of games that use it though are so few and far between there is no real use for it. Other then playing VCDs... which never really hit big in the US. Also it's ONLY VCD, not SVCD. Because the card only support MPEG-1 at 352x240, SVCD uses MPEG-2 at 480x480



In Japan there is also a RAM cart you can get... not a memory card RAM cart. It actually increases the RAM. There is a 2meg and 4meg version. Again though this really only helps out games that utilize the cart, which of course there are only JAP games that use it as the carts were never released outside of Japan.

Again why this doesn't help out games that don't utilize it is because of hardware. Memory isn't free floating like you'd think. In windows and the sort it's appears to be free floating because that's the way Windows manages its memory. But in the case of the Saturn games are written in Assembly and C, memory management is performed every step of the way by the programmer. The programmer codes the game with the physical constraints of the memory in mind. If they assume there to only be 2megs of memory at any given time, then the programmer will never use more then 2megs to ensure the game doesn't crash.


Of course you may be wondering why things like the PS2 offers graphical enhancements to PS1 games. These enhancements aren't graphical enhancements to the games themselves. What they do is take the video buffer, which is an after thought, has nothing to do with the code of the game... it just watches the video buffer just before the video is spat out to your display and applies filters to it. The filters are bitmap, so you get things like "anti-alias", "algorithmic scaling", and other other things.

[fast]

Ohwell. And duct, little typo - the ram cart is 1 meg or 4 meg.

[gregnash]

wow great answer, cheers. think i'll stick me 40 beans someplace else, nice one

[Dakinggamer87]

As mentioned above, not used much. It was only utilized in a few games and far and few in between as well..

[brycester]

Marvel Super Heroes american release for saturn supports the 4 meg ram cart even if it is not noted on the box.