What games did you want to see most on the 32X?

[Bones Justice]

Herzog Drei is still my first choice.

But I have been thinking about Virtua Racing a lot recently, too. Why not a sequel? Maybe a new car or a motorcycle and several new tracks. They wouldn't have to make an entirely new game yet it would still be good. They could add a few effects like variable weather or variable lighting for different times of day; imagine driving Sand Park at night, for example. I always thought the pit stops were not properly utilized, either. Maybe they could add car modifications, fuel, and tyres as options.

They could do that with several other games, too. Virtua Fighter 2, Doom II, Shadow Squadron 2, etc.

I know Sega had some arcade games that didn't make it home. I would have liked to play Wing War at home, for example.

[sheath]

Supposedly all the 32X needed to do more fully texture mapped games is more RAM, which could have been included in the cartridge in later games, '96 and onward, for a reasonable price. I'm pretty sure I've said it in this thread, but I was looking forward to more down ports of Saturn titles like Virtua Cop, Sega Rally and Daytona. Back in the day, even if though I knew the 32X version was going to be technically inferior, I would have waited to see how it turned out before buying the Saturn game. I bought all of the pre-launch Virtua Fighter 32X swag months in advance of its release, before I even bought a Saturn. I still wonder what I did with that stuff, the VHS tape would be cool to see again.

[Tanegashima]

I make fun of the 32X all the time, but in a way it's potential is better than Saturn to me because it uses Cartridges...I hate CD load times and unreliability. There's nothing to break on a 32X and no to minimal load times.

The yellow gold color scheme is awfully attractive too...

Raiden on 32X would have been real cool

Super Smash TV...

Elevator Action Returns...this could have been perfect for the 32X I LOVE this game, one of my favorite arcade games ever.

[chinitosoccer]

A 6 Mb RAM Expansion and Fatal Fury Special, Samurai Shodown II, World Heroes Perfect and Darkstalkers for the MegaCD32X.

[Bones Justice]

Would it have been possible to sell a game as a blank cartridge with the game on a CD? Then future games could sell at a lower price if you bought the CD only.

[sheath]

If I recall, rewritable flash memory was extremely expensive back then, which is why CDRs and then DVDRs existed before flash drives were ever consumer priced. The ROMs these cartridge games came on were significantly cheaper one shot deals (which I randomly forgot recently).

If the Sega CD was going to be included, it already had enough extra RAM to include significant improvements to what the 32X could do texture wise.

[Chilly Willy]

Just like there were 1 and 4 MByte ram carts for the Saturn, I figured we'd see 1 or 4 MByte ram carts for the CD32X. Most VGA games would have been fairly easy to port with 1 to 4 MBytes of ram loaded from a CD. Most of your work would be optimizing for speed.

Look at Doom for 32X - all the "optimizing" was to fit in the ridiculous ram constraints, not for speed, and it was still pretty fast. If they hadn't been scrimping for every byte possible, they could have spent more time on the game itself.

[chinitosoccer]

Could have been possible to make a 1:1 port of Doom if Sega had released a 4 or 8Mb RAM cart for the MegaCD32X??

(8Mb would be matching a RAM expanded Saturn with a 4Mb cart) I think a "PC perfect" port of Doom would be posible, saving the sound differences (Midi Wavetable soundcards) with all animations, screen size and levels of the Pc version, or are there another hardware restrictions??

and how could the ram expansions have benefited the Sega Saturn if the 4Mb RAM cartridge were used for Doom?

[Chilly Willy]

Could have been possible to make a 1:1 port of Doom if Sega had released a 4 or 8Mb RAM cart for the MegaCD32X??

(8Mb would be matching a RAM expanded Saturn with a 4Mb cart) I think a "PC perfect" port of Doom would be posible, saving the sound differences (Midi Wavetable soundcards) with all animations, screen size and levels of the Pc version, or are there another hardware restrictions??

and how could the ram expansions have benefited the Sega Saturn if the 4Mb RAM cartridge were used for Doom?

A "perfect" CD port could be done with a 4MB ram cart. Doom was written to run in as little as ~3 MBytes of ram. The default minimum zone size for ram in Doom is 2 MByte, and a maximum of 6 MBytes. Using a smaller amount of ram means the game needs to load from the drive more often, but you still have everything. The music would have been better done using the Slave SH2 like my MOD player demos show. Eight channel MOD would cover virtually all Doom music with no changes. It probably would have been easier for them to convert the MIDI music into MOD than into the FM/PSG music they made instead.

Of course, using the 32X like that was more a second generation game thing, and the 32X barely made it through the 1st generation of titles. If the 32X had survived, I would guess we'd have seen something like Doom II and Final Doom released as an 8 to 12 MByte cart with an extra 1 MByte of ram in the cart as well. Or maybe SEGA would have released a 4 MByte ram cart for CD32X games to use, and then a slew of various VGA game ports.

The Saturn has 1 MByte of "fast" SDRAM where the program and main data is loaded for the game off the CD. It has another 1 MByte of "slow" DRAM that is used for storing data for the game. The Saturn version of Doom is the "usual" cut-down version to fit in the limited ram. If the Saturn version had supported the 4 MByte ram cart, they could have had a much more complete version. It's my intention to make a Saturn port that uses the 4 MByte cart to play the regular PC Doom files.

[Da_Shocker]

How prudent is it to release an upgrade for an upgrade?

[sheath]

RAM upgrades are generally successful, and if the RAM was just put inside the cart for a "premium" title the public was already mind washed to accept the prices.

[Da_Shocker]

RAM upgrades are generally successful, and if the RAM was just put inside the cart for a "premium" title the public was already mind washed to accept the prices.

LOL, sheath you're a mess.

[Chilly Willy]

RAM upgrades are generally successful, and if the RAM was just put inside the cart for a "premium" title the public was already mind washed to accept the prices.

Not to mention, ram prices dropped FAST in the late 90's. By the end of the life of the 32X, it would have been cheap to make a 4 MByte ram cart, or have 1 to 4 MBytes of ram in a rom cart... along with 16 to 32 MBytes of rom as well!

But I think maybe the upgrade he was referring to was my mention of a new port of Doom to the Saturn. The thing is, making a Saturn port of Doom would allow for things like mods, TCs, deh files, etc. It wouldn't be JUST Doom, but more like how I did my PSP and DC ports of Doom.

[sheath]

LOL, sheath you're a mess.

I do need a shower, especially after this.

[Da_Shocker]

Not to mention, ram prices dropped FAST in the late 90's. By the end of the life of the 32X, it would have been cheap to make a 4 MByte ram cart, or have 1 to 4 MBytes of ram in a rom cart... along with 16 to 32 MBytes of rom as well!

But I think maybe the upgrade he was referring to was my mention of a new port of Doom to the Saturn. The thing is, making a Saturn port of Doom would allow for things like mods, TCs, deh files, etc. It wouldn't be JUST Doom, but more like how I did my PSP and DC ports of Doom.

Yeah let's give the 32X 8MB rom carts that have 4MB of ram added on. And sell the games for 29.99.