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| Main - Gaming - Screaming into the Ether About 64DD |
| Zoinkity |
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 Bronto Burt Level: 9 Posts: 32/33 EXP: 3124 Next: 38 Since: 10-16-24 Last post: 13 hours Last view: 9 hours |
With a bot count higher than active users it's a safe bet a straight rant will be quietly ignored.
Let's say you're interested in looking up info about the features in a 64DD game, especially an unreleased one but honestly, sort of applies to released ones as well. You can safely ignore 90% of all English references about the drive at all about literally any subject. Over the last 10 years most of the hardware BS has finally stopped being circulated. A 64DD is just a magnetic drive with a clock (and an eeprom for calibration settings, a drive microcontroller, neither of which you were ever supposed to access). That's it. No external 32bit processor, no built-in modem (that's a cartridge), no internal ram, no magneto-optical setup. Read, write, check your watch. Ah, but software... The English side of the web is pure speculation. Why say that? Try to find information on the only two publicized 64DD disks that weren't released: "井出洋介の麻雀塾 / Ide Yousuke's Mahjong Cram School" and "現代大戦略 / Modern Grand Strategy - Ultimate War". By "publicized" that means they were 1) products on Randnet's webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20000303113048/http://www.randnetdd.co.jp:80/step2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000301195528/http://www.randnetdd.co.jp/game/no_sample/senryaku/senryaku.html (Sadly http://www.randnetdd.co.jp/game/no_sample/majan/majan.html was never captured) 2) in promotional booklets: 64DD Randnet Booklet 3) and in the Spaceworld 1999 catalog (arguably on display there as well): Modern Grand Strategy - Ultimate War Ide Yousuke's Mahjong Cram School 4) Occasional magazine mentions when they were still new products, with varying degrees of usefulness. Not all those writers knew Japanese; at least they provided photos. 5) Unseen64, as accurate as the internet itself. The Japanese side of the internet has the occasional mention of this stuff. The English side has nonsense about "Mother 3" and dozens of so-called cancelled projects. So yeah, about those... The typical story with "64DD development" is Company A tells Nintendo they want to make video games, then Nintendo says "why not 64DD?" and hands them a drive. They build a demo, scratch their heads, never touch the drive again and only sell carts. It continually comes up in interviews but those aren't usually cross-checked against the release/development announcements of the time, resulting in an insane list of 60+ games that presumably were made for the drive but neglecting Japan-only sources that include a different list--augmented by bozos that think every game OS2.0J and earlier that includes the cart interrupt handler in the sdk's init function (like NTSC GoldenEyes and Conker's Bad Fur Day) are 64DD titles as well. A couple high-profile examples: if you check those promo catalogs Mother 64 is listed as a cart in the Spaceworld catalog, with a playable demo on cart, and never was it shown as a disk. On the other hand you have Morita Shogi which was never shown as a disk, lot checked September of 1997 with release in '98, but somehow the story is this was pushed to cart after the failure/delay of the drive...which was originally slated for release March '98 and didn't fail until two+ years later? The internet is full of lies. Let's say all you want to know is what drive features something is supposed to use. It will use something, it's basically required to do so for the same reason "DX" colorized games were required to include some kind of new stuff as well. The drive's main feature is loading or storing 20MB+ of stuff, depending on the disk format. The cartridge slot can be used for a modem, video capture card, or literally anything else you can stick on the bus. All I wanted to know was what Ide Yousuke's mahjong game did with the drive before they ported it to cart following the Aruze acquisition. There are no English sources, but worked out from Spaceworld 1999 guide that the third, deleted mode shown on the pamphlet (on the left) is a feature to play back professional games with commentary, not unlike Habu Shogi's 500+ recorded games. The mode's image, associated text, and seemingly all code for this mode are completely removed from the cartridge release. Okay, could probably download more of them. Question is answered for the most part. Why did it take that much effort? How is one of the few disks promoted for sale a literal footnote at the end of speculation about a Mario64 sequel? Okay, Doubutsu no Mori is fair enough. Actually developed for it, rather well documented. How about Ogre Battle 64? It was a cart+expansion until beta testing; there's an actual note about it in the lotcheck list. As for the actual library of games, here's how/why they used the drive: *) For Japan Pro Golf Tour 64 that was play-by-mail and DLC courses--and the only reference to the feature at all was in a graphic at the end of the above linked Randnet booklet. *) All Artist titles are interoperable, with print and paper model services via Comms Kit, video capture & modem when applicable, and supports an unreleased color GB printer via equally unreleased cable. Create & trade generated content. A lot of Talent videos made the rounds. *) Dezaemon 3D could trade games, update itself, and install plugins to expand the editor (presumably). Also lifted all the file limits imposed by SRAM size. *) Doshin 1 saves the entire world to disk. Every single node's elevation and what's on it. *) Doshin 2 sets little event quests to complete in Doshin 1, unlocking videos and letting more of you pee on the poor giant. They're supposed to be used in tandem...which would have worked better if they were available at the same time. *) Randnet was an internet browser, email client, and technically expandable with plugins somehow. Used for all downloads not handled by the Comms Kit. *) Sim City 64 saved maps. Hundreds and hundreds of maps. Can feed it new scenarios, pretty sure. Artist stuff can be slid in. *) F-Zero X can create and store courses and ghosts. Mostly ghosts; they're the size of a whole blasted SRAM module. Courses waste a whole LBA despite being like 1KB. (Cars are dumb.) Admittedly the other expansions are speculative. The runtime is completely overwritten by disk versions, it could literally become anything. *) Pocket Monsters' Stadium became its sequel. Only disk features mentioned are massive save limits and the Pokémon Park (likely minigames; you "play with friends"). *) Pocket Monsters' Stadium 2 also accepts an expansion, more save space. *) Mario Party supports downloading more games into the game list. Again, it became its sequel. The disk code in the other Party titles doesn't work. *) Ocarina of Time had the infamous dungeon reshuffle they literally couldn't release after one week. Why? ~A week after Japan 1.0 was released a major bug forced a 1.1 revision release. ~One month later a second 1.2 release hit to remove the Islamic call to prayer they copied from the official Foley sound library and used as an atmospheric. Every time you do that you recompile the game and that changes the addresses of every blasted C lib function, and unlike in modern times they couldn't be certain they didn't need to release a version 1.3, 1.4, etc. in the future. How do you link a single disk to multiple existing versions of a game as well as potentially nonexisting versions? Duplicating the imports on the disk, or just overwriting the whole runtime. Basically, OoT's expansion was dead in the water and the reason all the others rewrite the runtime. Also, Miyamoto is arguably an even less reliable source than any other random Japanese company's suits. Zelda 3 was a playable cart at Spaceworld, then he said it was a disk so they tried to shoehorn in disk support (only a subset of things can normally be replaced and the drive hijacks the whole bus during operation), but the good thing that came out of it was an ocarina. Still better than when Namco cooked up a story about pizza to support giving false testimony in a USA court about puckman not being somebody else's product. Koei still denies publishing the entire Strawberry Porno series, but it's hard to defend a game like “Do Dutch Wives Dream of Electric Eels?” when it has a rape button. |
| NovaSquirrel |
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 Micro-Goomba Level: 7 Posts: 16/16 EXP: 1168 Next: 280 Since: 08-16-24 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 7 hours |
Having a new version of a game potentially shift things around to new locations is a problem I hadn't even thought of for this kind of thing; I know the Nintendo DS had a solution there with an actual formal filesystem (and disc consoles were already doing that) but I guess Nintendo wasn't there yet. I'm not surprised there's a lot of misinformation out there considering how much there is even for consoles and addons that English speaking countries got, and I think there's a lot of people just repeating lazily researched stuff from other people. Check out my site! It's got a bunch of projects I've worked on, including homebrew and a virtual world about collaborative map building that's RP focused. |
| Zoinkity |
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Bronto Burt Level: 9 Posts: 33/33 EXP: 3124 Next: 38 Since: 10-16-24 Last post: 13 hours Last view: 9 hours |
Well, the funny thing about that is on the disk side of things you see exactly that.
The 64DD did use a minimalistic ELF loader to pull one of three softmodem libraries off the modem cart and relink them to the current game. Also, quite a few games do have full-fledged filesystems for their own data outside of the savedata MFS filesystem. Sometimes it's an extension of it, sometimes its own thing. Dezaemon 3D allows you to overload any ROM-side disk stuff (yes, that's a thing) with a same-named saved RAM-side file. Japan Pro Golf Tour 64 also allows that to a degree but shadows select files, mostly runtime and code blocks to prevent hijacking. Others were a mix, hiding system files behind hardcoded LBAs but resources like models, images, and audio in the flesystem. The trouble comes in cartridge side of expansions, especially when it comes to the basic C library functions. Files are one thing, but relinking to a different import list quite another. The partial solution was the have the cartridge provide a table of pointers to select used functions, not terribly unlike how said ELF loader works but without the self-modifying code. Sounds fine on paper until the list grows exponentially. Maybe they shouldn't have obfuscated so much behind macros? Oh, and there were a few that had parameter changes, changed names, or were outright removed. Among them was a low-level direct PI read used throughout the disk library. -and there's the biggest problem. They didn't want to reveal a lot of the drive behavior to prevent it being exploited. The IPL doesn't even have a full library! It can't read beyond the first disk zone. Obfuscation made expansions a pointlessly complicated process that, when you step back and look at it objectively, only relied on their cartridges to "stream" ram-expensive stuff like audio and animations but otherwise could be distro'd as standalone disks. Really, what they wanted was another Satellaview but without the save memory restrictions. Despite what western media seems to think that was a very successful product. Lots of support and fairly large user base despite it being in the market with 32bit systems. Then again, the same media seems to think PC Engine was a commercial failure. Any shmups fan would set them up the bomb. |
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