Revival Chase - HuCard conversion?

[Trenton_net]

Hey everyone,

I noted that the homebrew game Revival Chase comes on a CD-ROM instead of a HuCard. Would it be possible to convert this title to work from a HuCard? Given the gameplay video's I've seen, it doesn't seem like running on a CD-ROM is all that essential, since I assume it was done just for ease of distribution and cost.

Does anyone with more technical knowledge know how feasible this would be?

[Gredler]

Hey everyone,

I noted that the homebrew game Revival Chase comes on a CD-ROM instead of a HuCard. Would it be possible to convert this title to work from a HuCard? Given the gameplay video's I've seen, it doesn't seem like running on a CD-ROM is all that essential, since I assume it was done just for ease of distribution and cost.

Does anyone with more technical knowledge know how feasible this would be?

I'd be interested to hear a more experienced person's response, but I imagine the rom size is a large hurdle for this - with catastrophy we've constantly been hamstrung by the ever growing rom size inching near that tiny limit of the hucard compared to cd.

[CrackTiger]

touko might be experienced enough to answer this question.

[NecroPhile]

I'm sure it'd be easy enough to do (relatively speaking) for the creators, seeing as they have the source code.  I think it uses redbook for music, though, so recreating those in chippy tunes would be a pretty big job.  The real question is why would they want to change formats?  If they want to give it away for free, they can release an iso as easily as a rom; and if they ever needed (wanted) to make more for sale, it's way easier and cheaper to get more discs pressed than to have hueys made.

... with catastrophy we've constantly been hamstrung by the ever growing rom size inching near that tiny limit of the hucard compared to cd.

I suspect you're not being very efficient compared to 'real' games.  I'd love to be proven wrong, but I seriously doubt you're even close to rivaling the variety of sprites and background art found in any existing 8mb huey, let alone the 84mb (or whatever it was) limit of SF2's mapper.

[Psycho Punch]

Gredler -- something has to be unnecessarily bloated. Is the art the main culprit? You two should consider a compression scheme -- even simple RLE gives decent results. I'm dicking around the NES again and nametable (aka tilemap) data gets compressed by 65% minimum (of course this depends on how you are building your backgrounds), from 960 bytes to something like 250 bytes. If there's some linear repetition on the background it might be worth to look into it.

RAW art data in the ROM takes too much room, imo.

[Gredler]

I suspect you're not being very efficient compared to 'real' games.  I'd love to be proven wrong, but I seriously doubt you're even close to rivaling the variety of sprites and background art found in any existing 8mb huey, let alone the 84mb (or whatever it was) limit of SF2's mapper.

Yeah, we're not at all nearly efficient compared to 'real' games, certainly not the later games. One browse through the various HUC threads here show that the code alone is incredibly bloated due to the result of the compiled code from huc to asm (please correct me if I am wrong!)

Also, I thought our ROM limit was less than 3mb, not 8mb?

Gredler -- something has to be unnecessarily bloated. Is the art the main culprit? You two should consider a compression scheme -- even simple RLE gives decent results. I'm dicking around the NES again and nametable (aka tilemap) data gets compressed by 65% minimum (of course this depends on how you are building your backgrounds), from 960 bytes to something like 250 bytes. If there's some linear repetition on the background it might be worth to look into it.

RAW art data in the ROM takes too much room, imo.

I'd like DK to chime in, but I am fairly certain we are not compressing any of the art. We are using tilemaps for all the "backgrounds".

The first background was a single screen, so I was fairly liberal with the construction and number of tiles, but it is still less than a single 256x128 image for all of the tiles.

We are fairly early still, obviously, so these are estimates. The one level we have nearing 90% done, the shower level everyone's seen, as a measuring stick against what we want to do makes us need to plan something to reduce the side of the ROM and be careful.

I only mention it as size of ROM is not really a consideration in the CD development within reason, where as on a hucard you have to plan and be much more careful than with CD.

[NecroPhile]

Also, I thought our ROM limit was less than 3mb, not 8mb?

Maybe that's a limitation of HuC, I wouldn't know, but the system itself is capable of addressing 8mb roms before needing a mapper.

I only mention it as size of ROM is not really a consideration in the CD development within reason, where as on a hucard you have to plan and be much more careful than with CD.

But then with a CD you have to carefully cram everything within 2mb chunks, so it's not a free ride either.

[OldMan]

If you are looking to shrink things so you have some room, look at the size of your routines. You can often free up a few pages simply by moving short routines right after long ones. HuC doen't pack pages very full, so some code rearranging is probably in order.

If its really, really bad....Yeah compress the gfx. You can get nice results from compressing them

[touko]

Hi, of course it's possible, but you must recode it because it use a lot of bios routines and load some datas from CD overlays(plus the redbook audio of course) .

[Arkhan Asylum]

Converting is not that simple, if the game was written to use overlays and load from CD.   Which it does, since it loads stuff...

also, the data has to be rearranged.  and music has to be made for PSG!

As for Gredler's problem, HuC is probably sloppily banking data and growing the ROM stupidly, leaving lots of empty space.

[Trenton_net]

Ah, that's too bad. The reason I ask about the game is because sometimes its much easier to bring a HuCard with you for gaming on the go, instead of a whole briefcase setup / Duo setup.

[touko]

Ah, that's too bad. The reason I ask about the game is because sometimes its much easier to bring a HuCard with you for gaming on the go, instead of a whole briefcase setup / Duo setup.

Of course in this case it's not possible to put a cdgame in a hucard like a copy/paste .

[Trenton_net]

Ah, that's too bad. The reason I ask about the game is because sometimes its much easier to bring a HuCard with you for gaming on the go, instead of a whole briefcase setup / Duo setup.

Of course in this case it's not possible to put a cdgame in a hucard like a copy/paste .

No worries. Naturally I wasn't implying so as any attempt to do so would require hacking or at least re-compiling (If done by the original authors).