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

[Chilly Willy]

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

At the time, I would expect those games to have sold for $69.99, which would be $10 to $20 over plain small carts.

[sheath]

At the time, I would expect those games to have sold for $69.99, which would be $10 to $20 over plain small carts.

About the same price as N64 carts cost throughout that generation then. I could see a premium Sega CD 32X game with a Lock-On style 32X RAM cart selling in the $80 range, like Donkey Kong 64 did, and then any further releases could simply use the RAM cart as an optional upgrade.

But again, we are talking about near perfect ports of PC games, rather than simply down porting them like they usually had to for consoles at the time. If I am not mistaken, the Doom port that Chilly is talking about would be superior to the PS1 and Jaguar versions in that the levels and textures and enemies would have seen no cuts at all.

This is a different discussion than simply supporting the Genesis 32X and 32X CD alone with a few dozen more games would have been a lot better than not doing so. Even if Doom 1.5 and Doom 2 were on their own carts and were still windowed using YM2612 sound, that would have been better.

[Chilly Willy]

About the same price as N64 carts cost throughout that generation then. I could see a premium Sega CD 32X game with a Lock-On style 32X RAM cart selling in the $80 range, like Donkey Kong 64 did, and then any further releases could simply use the RAM cart as an optional upgrade.

Yes, one more expensive game bundled with a ram cart, then cheaper games that used the cart as well. That's what Nintendo did with their ram expansion.

But again, we are talking about near perfect ports of PC games, rather than simply down porting them like they usually had to for consoles at the time. If I am not mistaken, the Doom port that Chilly is talking about would be superior to the PS1 and Jaguar versions in that the levels and textures and enemies would have seen no cuts at all.

This is a different discussion than simply supporting the Genesis 32X and 32X CD alone with a few dozen more games would have been a lot better than not doing so. Even if Doom 1.5 and Doom 2 were on their own carts and were still windowed using YM2612 sound, that would have been better.

Doom on the 32X could have been "perfect" with 16 MBytes of rom and 1 MByte of ram in the cart. About 12 MBytes for the PC wad file with NO CHANGES, and another 4 MBytes (over-estimation) for superior MOD music replacing the crappy FM music. I'm probably over-estimating how much ram would be needed as well since nearly everything would be in the ROM. You would need more ram if you compressed the stuff in the wad file to save on rom, but I think trading less rom for more ram would be more expensive.

[EclecticGroove]

I think I would have just liked to have seen them do a full traditional Sonic game on the 32x before it died out. Baring that, some of their other franchises could have seen an excellent last hurrah for cartridge. IE: Phantasy Star (an updated/expanded PSIV would have been stellar). There was certainly a great deal of potential with the system, it just never had a chance to come into its own.

It would have been cool if the 32x would have been feasible as something like the SuperFX chip that they could have simply included with high profile games to provide a huge boost to the system. Or if it had been a much smaller and sensibly priced upgrade they could have done the same way Nintendo did with the Ram cart upgrade on the n64, pack in with 1 game, then start making more using it.

[chinitosoccer]

Doom on the 32X could have been "perfect" with 16 MBytes of rom and 1 MByte of ram in the cart. About 12 MBytes for the PC wad file with NO CHANGES, and another 4 MBytes (over-estimation) for superior MOD music replacing the crappy FM music. I'm probably over-estimating how much ram would be needed as well since nearly everything would be in the ROM. You would need more ram if you compressed the stuff in the wad file to save on rom, but I think trading less rom for more ram would be more expensive.

Yes but what about screen size and frame rates, can that be improved adding more RAM and/or a bigger cart with more data compressed in ROM?? I can live without the missing stages from the PC but the tiny screen of the 32X Doom is the biggest issue for me.

[Chilly Willy]

Yes but what about screen size and frame rates, can that be improved adding more RAM and/or a bigger cart with more data compressed in ROM?? I can live without the missing stages from the PC but the tiny screen of the 32X Doom is the biggest issue for me.

I'm not sure what the top end would be, but given the speeds I get from Wolf32X, which doesn't use a half-width screen, I'd guess a fully optimized Doom would run at acceptable speeds at full size. They didn't really spend much time optimizing the rendering - it was mostly all devoted to editing the levels to fit in the ram without crashing.

The frame rate would not be affected by the rom or ram, merely by how much effort was put into optimizing the code. The original Doom was fully assembly for the rendering to keep speeds up on the 386/486. When Id eventually made the code open source, it was the linux code that was released - code that had virtually none of the assembly left as it had all been converted to C to be more portable. Ditto for Wolf3D - it was originally ALL assembly! The code most people work from for modern Wolf3D ports is either Wolf4SDL or NewWolf, both of which have little to no assembly.

[Tanegashima]

I think Doom runs pretty well, its smooth and is very playable...

but thats me...

[Chilly Willy]

I think Doom runs pretty well, its smooth and is very playable...

but thats me...

Yeah, but they dropped the resolution to 128x144 to keep the speed up. The lines are doubled horizontally, making the display 256x144. Jaguar Doom is 160x180, and doubled horizontally to 320x180.

[Tanegashima]

meh

it's still doom, it works, I enjoy it.

I don't play it on anything else so...yeah...fun times.

[kevro]

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

Although I appreciate what a RAM cart could do for the 32X and that it would have been cost effective in the unit's later life cycle it would have been simply too much add on, at the time. A RAM cart for the Saturn made sense as did the N64, but to have to purchases a Genesis, Sega CD, 32X and an extra RAM cart is terribly consumer unfriendly.

However that was then, let's talk about now! What about a modern produced RAM cart for the 32X with SD card support?

Say 32MB of RAM, make sure that this cart will also benefit the Genesis by it self as well and make a run of 1000. With the SD card support a Sega CD (As much as I've loved it) would not even be necessary and the true potential of the 32X could be explored as well as making some show case games for the Genesis.

[Chilly Willy]

However that was then, let's talk about now! What about a modern produced RAM cart for the 32X with SD card support?

Say 32MB of RAM, make sure that this cart will also benefit the Genesis by it self as well and make a run of 1000. With the SD card support a Sega CD (As much as I've loved it) would not even be necessary and the true potential of the 32X could be explored as well as making some show case games for the Genesis.

Yeah, a cart like that would be great for homebrew. The problem is all the carts that come out just try to barely support existing games and don't take into account what they COULD do for a few pennies more.

[Drakon]

I'm sure this has been said before but I would have loved to see castlevania bloodletting on the 32x.

[sheath]

StarMist alerted me to another one Galactic Storm:



Also, Blood:

[muteKi]

I'd have loved a proper port of Turbo Outrun or something. (I prefer not to acknowledge the existence of that Tiertex version, certainly.)

And, hey, let's go full-on absurdist while we're at it!

[sheath]

As long as that Xevious 3D intro is FMV I don't see a problem translating the game. It would need to be toned down polygon wise for the background and 320x224 but it should be totally possible.