Bregalad wrote:
So perhaps I was wrong with my premise that the FDS was quickly abandoned in the 1st place ? It might just be Square who rage-quitted the FDS platform after a long period of love, not Nintendo themselves ?
Maybe "rage-quit" was indeed too strong of an expression, but as already pointed out, the low number of 1st party titles in the late years of the FDS did indicate that Nintendo did become less and less interested in the format.
And for Square... They're just close to bankruptcy at the time, and FF1 was a gamble. Maybe after assertion they concluded releasing it in FDS could definitely not save them (even if it sold well the turnover of selling a cheap FDS game possibly couldn't be enough to save them) so they released it as a cart instead, and that's probably the right choice. Imagine every 3 seconds, after walking a few steps the screen turns dark with the text NOW LOADING... staying for even more seconds, before a battle starts, I'm sure not many people would enjoy that...
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My point is, since neither the MMC1 nor MMC3 re-uses the FDS CPU cycle counter nor the sound hardware, they were not superior, but at best different, if not inferior. This is not obvious by playing FDS games since pretty much all of them seriously underused the hardware they run on - the sound being only used for vague sound effects and the IRQ timer only for simple status bar splits at best.
I think as a single
hardware unit that cost as much as the console itself they tried to stuff whatever good stuff they could think of into the FDS drives, so that games for the system won't be outdated that fast and developers could just choose from available features to use in their games(as unlike cart games you cannot attach hardware enhancements into the disks). On the other hand, for cart games the mapper chips/logics just added to the cost of every single game, so unless absolutely needed the mappers were supposed to be economic enough that provided features just enough for the games. It was until late that really powerful "all-in-one" mappers such as MMC5 were invented, possibly because of technically advancement that the cost of such chips was no longer
that high, so it's not a waste even no one single game would use all its features.
For features of the FDS being under-utilised it's possible that developers (other than Nintendo) probably weren't that familiar with the hardware initially, or some just didn't care that much due to factors such as time and cost. Compare early Konami FDS titles to later ones. In Akamajo Dracula I think they didn't use the extra audio(or used only a little), but in the sequel they're used in the BGMs. Bio Miracle Upa had really great themes too. That unfortunately they had to give up these extra bits when they converted the games to carts.
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What about Mega Man 1 who was initially supposed to be on FDS ? I think Capcom originally intended the room between the level and the boss to be there for hiding disk loading time, however it seems disk loading requires almost 100% of the CPU so I've always wondered whether that would have been technically possible. That's another topic, though.
I think it's not done to "hide load time". I suppose that "corridor" thing share data with the boss room, so that when you die in a boss fight you respawn in that corridor and you may still have some chance to farm say weapon energy before challenging the boss again, without the need to access the disk. If they didn't add that corridor thing, you either fight the boss immediately after your death if you don't want extra load time; or requires a disk access if you're to be thrown outside the boss room.
(Note that Dracula X on the PC Engine did a similar thing.)
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ROM size is not the only factor to consider when knowing which format is "superior", you know. Even when it comes to ROM size, since disks were so cheap, a 2 or 3 disk game wouldn't have been any problem - and there's only a couple of those. On the contrary in the era of CD games, games that spawned on more than 2 disks were extremely common, so much cheap were the disk to made.
No, ROM size is not the only factor (I never said that, so why mentioned this?) but size of games was actually one of the
main reasons they designed the FDS, since it was very expensive to produce carts of large games. The FDS was supposed to expand the size of games. But soon it became a moot point when it didn't cost
that much to produced large carts than before.
Releasing games in multiple disk IS a problem as load times and disk swapping are INDEED annoying, depending on what kinds of games they are and whether the developers are good enough. For example, if a game is divided into levels it makes sense to have the data a few consecutive levels on each disk side, so there will be load times like after each level and you only need to flip the disk every few levels; but if it's say a large free roaming RPG (not action "RPG" such as Zelda that the battle action could take place immediately on the field) such as FF1 above having load times before every battle and if the game spawn multiple disks, even requires the player to swap the disk often, would be an annoying experience.
In the current (real-life) library, that most games occupy at most 1 single disk, there are already many examples of good programmers (and planning) and bad ones. For good ones frequency to disk access and disk swapping is minimum, but for the bad ones... you really need to have tried it to believe it, and it's even harder to imagine what will happen if the games spawn multiple disks.
For CD games, one thing is, the access time is already much faster than floppies, and also, the capacity of the optical media is LARGE in comparison, so even if a game is released in multiple CDs you probably don't need to swap disc that often.
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Namco(t) and Konami were just 2 developers among hundreds - if they were rich enough to be able to make their own cart and their own mappers with expansion sounds, good for them. Most developers weren't, and relied on Nintendo to make their carts, and their mapper choice was restricted to discrete logic or MMC series mappers. Except if maybe they got a contract with Namco or Konami to use their mappers, but I don't think this ever happened (correct me if I'm wrong). Even within Namco and Konami, only a small minority of their games used the sound chips.
With FDS format, the sound chip is already here in the RAM adapter and is basically for free. You could use it just to improve sound effects slightly (what Nintendo did mostly), or to have music with an additional track which is very significant when the 2A03 only has 4/5 tracks in total. With the IRQ counter combined with $4011, this offers tremendous possibilities with sound/music that were never exploited. Too bad Rare wasn't a Japanese company :p
I think most developers(especially small ones aiming for non-major games only) just didn't care. The same could be said of the DPCM channel. It's inside the console itself but not many developers actually use it that much (unless you are Sunsoft). The sound capability of a Famicom was already miles ahead of the beeper of PCs and was better than the generic TI chip used in many other 8-bit systems such as MSX and the SMS, so some people were already content with what was available.