PC Engine Creator Memories

[elmer]

As long as we agree to blame management and not the worker I'm prepared to drop my case at this time.

Hahaha! 

You should know by now that it's never, ever, management's fault! 

[SamIAm]

As long as we can agree that somebody was out of their minds, I'm cool.

[dshadoff]

I think you guys may be forgetting an important use case:

Copying an individual Bomberman backup file into a larger pot (total: 8KB) is, as everybody has mentioned, not rocket science.  However, keep in mind that the total storage was still only 8KB.

The alternate method only helps if:
1) you have a lot of games (true only for a limited number of gamers at the time), or when used with certain BRAM-consuming games which started to come out at that time.
2) You don't need to keep multiple copies of the same game.  If you want do that, then you need to have some way of keeping those separate, which needs more space, and some differentiator (note: no clock in the PC Engine, so date/time won't cut it).

Now, why would anybody need mulitple savegames for the same game ?  Perhaps they are in the same family, and can only deal with one console.  And little brother overwriting big brother's perfect score would be traumatic.

That's probably the real reason for the banks.  Each kid gets their own slot.

[SignOfZeta]

There you go, trying to explain humanity to programmers. Good luck!

[SamIAm]

That's probably the real reason for the banks.  Each kid gets their own slot.

I admit, I hadn't thought of that aspect.

But let me ask: if it had been you designing this, what would you have gone with?

If we were designing the Tennokoe Bank together in 1991 and you proposed the structure that Hudson eventually went with, I'd raise two questions:

1. Does it over-complicate the interface to add an option for individual file copying somewhere?

2. If the answer to 1 is yes, then is the multi-kid-user situation really worth accommodating at the cost of causing the logistical problems of transferring saves in groups only? In other words, do users who need multiple banks outnumber (or otherwise outweigh) users who simply have a full BRAM and need to copy out something?

The "big-pot" solution effectively gives you the means to have two saves for every game. If we allow ourselves to conclude that the "four-bank" solution is really only useful in families with three gamers or more, then users who need it would be very few. In low-birthrate Japan, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 10% of the user-base.

I'd be curious to see how they advertised it. The comic inside of the manual actually emphasizes the Tennokoe Bank's portability, of all things. Indeed, fast swapping of the entire internal memory would be very useful when bringing games to a friend's house. However, I have to wonder how many people actually used the Tennokoe Bank for that. It's not like individual file copying would have been a terrible solution in that case, either.

[dshadoff]

The other possibility is that there were a few games being developed around that time, which planned to use the entire BRAM because they wanted to save that much memory.

In a case like that, there is no particular reason for the programmers to use convention by saving the save game as a normal savegame - it could just be a binary blob.  Then your "file at a time" tool would break.  But dealing with the whole bank at once... works.


...And if I were designing it, I would probably have done the "file at a time" deal, until I got to testing it, and then realized that multiple savegames for the same game, need some work... probably as a whole interactive session on how to tell them apart.  And I'd probably panic a bit.  I may even revert to the "bank at once" under those circumstances.

[SamIAm]

The other possibility is that there were a few games being developed around that time, which planned to use the entire BRAM because they wanted to save that much memory.

In a case like that, there is no particular reason for the programmers to use convention by saving the save game as a normal savegame - it could just be a binary blob.  Then your "file at a time" tool would break.  But dealing with the whole bank at once... works.

I would think that Hudson would have enforced a formatting standard, though. In fact, without it, the CD-system and the Tennokoe 2 interfaces might have reacted strangely to that data. It shouldn't have been expensive space-wise, especially if they're taking up the whole 2000 blocks already. It's probably just two bytes to designate the save-file length, plus a few more for the name.

...And if I were designing it, I would probably have done the "file at a time" deal, until I got to testing it, and then realized that multiple savegames for the same game, need some work... probably as a whole interactive session on how to tell them apart.  And I'd probably panic a bit.  I may even revert to the "bank at once" under those circumstances.

All of the games I've seen maintain a single save-file-name no matter the contents of the save itself. Assuming that that's true for the whole library, you could just set it up so that you can't have two saves with the same name in the same memory, and have your options for the user be Copy, Erase and Swap. There's no more potential for confusion than the bank-at-once system, and two brothers can still have separate files this way.


Looking at that comic, it occurs to me that maybe the Tennokoe Bank really wasn't designed primarily for people whose BRAMs were full. In that case, it's not necessarily a case of poor design...or at least not the same kind of poor design. Was that really the best prioritization?

Regardless, it still leaves us with the issue I described to the hypothetical person learning about PCE hardware: this system doesn't have any really good options once your BRAM is full, other than to delete something.

[CrackTiger]

Most saves take up very little space, but many use most or all of it. Even if single file management were available, you'd still be backing up your entire bram if you played a lot of RPGs, each time you encountered one of the big files, and if you mostly played shooters or arcade games, you wouldn't really need a Tennokoe Bank at all.

I still think that flexible save management would have been ideal, but on-console saving and the Tennokoe Bank were already a luxury. And it's silly to make a big deal out of a convenient accessory not having such a minor additional feature when the generation is infamous for major design oversights in each console's hardware, along with all of the other shortsighted decisions that were made in general.

There are still several games which wipe out all of your saves without warning when you start the game. This kind of stuff was common back then.

[SamIAm]

It's not really about whether it's a big deal, because as I've said, I don't think it is. It's only about whether Hudson should have known better. There are plenty of games that use more than 5% (but far less than 100%) of the BRAM. Whether it's that or any other angle, I just don't see a good excuse. It's a "What were they thinking?" moment, even if it is a minor one. Saving on the PCE could have been better, the four-banks system is dumb, and I reserve the right to be annoyed by it. 

The games that wipe your saves are just the unlicensed ones and Shape Shifter, right? And Shadow of the Beast if there is no space left?

[NecroPhile]

You act like the save system is broken garbage, yet few agree.  There's just not that many people hung up on keeping save files for decades.

[SamIAm]

It's probably not worth this much discussion, I'll give you that.

[xcrement5x]

This has been a cool discussion though.  I appreciate seeing other people weigh in on the pros and cons of the bank swap system. 

The dev/hardware people make a solid point though, I feel like someone probably promised this product by a certain date and the programmer just needed to get it done and the bank system was the easiest to implement without a ton of additional checking needed to deal with individual save files. 

I'd personally love a way to transfer individual saves, or even back them up.  But I've learned to have a much more zen approach to saves in my older age.  Let them stay as needed, but if I lose them then it's just a good excuse to play the game again ;)

[SamIAm]

Well, in that case, I'll go ahead and post this. It's an magazine write-up from shortly before the Tennokoe Bank came out. Apologies for the table-breaking size, but the characters are hard to read if I shrink it down more.



"The Tennokoe Bank allays one worry of owners of the Tennokoe 2 and the CD-ROM system: lack of backup memory. To be precise, it gives you four times as much extra backup memory, and since it's also a card, you can easily carry it around. Recent RPGs and simulations require a lot of space in order to save, and many find themselves having to delete other data in order to do it. With the Tennokoe Bank, you can just copy it to your card. You can copy it back to the system later, and you can also swap the data back and forth at once. With the data on a card, it will be a piece of cake to take it anywhere. It goes on sale September 6th for 3800 yen."

On one hand, they were definitely aware that the 2000-block internal BRAM wasn't going to be enough for some people, and they seemed to be aware of a rise in popularity of games that need more memory. On the other hand, there's that "portability" aspect popping up again. That might really be the reason for the four-bank structure; they wanted to make it as easy as possible to play on a friend's system.

I'll see if I can find a proper advertisement, since that would be from Hudson themselves and not some magazine writer.