80's home console Laserdisc "Craze"

[Tanooki]

Yeah typo but either way not much color going on, maybe 8, but the sacrifice is so worth it considering the medium they jammed it into. Far cry better than the hot mess the 80s Nintendo systems got, 90s too, and you can throw Space Ace into there too.

[+Black_Tiger]

You got that right. I was going to bring that one up but you got there first. I knew some guys at the company back then as I had a couple friends working for Digital Eclipse. I don't recall most the conversation but they were very proud of themselves knocking that laserdisc game down to 2bit color, only losing 8 steps from the Smithy challenge area, and just shaving down the death sequences to fit it into that 4MB cartridge space. It's stunning how much they pulled off and no matter how much I loathe the game because I can never remember the moves, I still keep it around just for the hell of it. The tutorial mode makes it a bit fun since it throws up indicators for the random stages it will run before stopping.

 

 

Might as well throw the MSU chip for the SNES in here, someone converted that whole Road Buster FMV game to the SNES which is insane.

It's not so insane when you look into what the MSU1 does for that kind of game in particular and in general how much it bypasses the limitations of the SNES hardware, instead of simply feeding it a trickling stream of data like a CD-ROM.

 

When it's used only for streaming audio, then it's closer to what a CD-ROM would do in parallel. But a full sized cart with CD audio on the side is still radically different from CD audio along side a tiny segment of content.

[Tanooki]

Oh I get the mechanics, just more meant it was insane someone went to that kind of effort to create basically their own chip just for that purpose. The SNES had some excellent audio and output at 33khz which is fairly close to CD quality, and it has a nice color palette to display and choose from. I know the chip bypasses the limits quite a bit, but it does it in style that's for certain. Imagine if the tech were cheap enough like FX2 was in the day to bundle up something like that it could have been somewhat of a game changer against old 1x CD titles taking forever to load time and again.