There’s no doubt that a cartridge like this would have been very expensive to mass-produce for game distribution back then, but perhaps Amstrad could have made one as a spectacular demo to showcase at trade shows and promotional events. That would likely have boosted sales and increased interest in ROM cartridges.
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Just to compare with the 16-bit Street Fighter 2 saga, which pushed the standards higher each time:
1992: Street Fighter 2 SNES 16mb => 2MB
1993: Street Fighter 2 turbo SNES 20mb => 2.5MB
1993: Street Fighter 2’ Megadrive 24mb => 3MB
1994: Super Street Fighter 2 SNES 32mb => 4MB
1994: Super Street Fighter 2 Megadrive 40mb => 5MB
1998: Street Fighter 2 Master System (Tectoy) 8mb => 1MB
On the Master System, after the launch of the Mega Drive, quite a few 4mb games came out that greatly improved game quality: Mickey 2, Donald 2, etc. Cartridge size isn’t just a marketing gimmick.
I have another question about Vespertino: since the game is only coming out on cartridge with dedicated hardware, would it be conceivable to have a “Vespertino Multiplayer” featuring a connector on the cartridge to link multiple CPCs together? Like with Vroom, Lotus 2, etc. on 16-bit?
A CPC 464 motherboard inside an actual arcade cabinet in 1986… just imagine that!!
Vespertino is just like an Outrun arcade game in Mode 0. Imagine walking into an arcade and finding a machine powered by a CPC 464 motherboard at a time when so many people were playing games like Sorcery and Cauldron II. And this was before Outrun arrived later in 1986.
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Why on earth would you do it? Z80 based arcade games were ancient by 1986. The only thing the Z80 was any use for was as a sound co-processor on the System 16 boards. Ironically as used for Outrun.
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Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I know 4M of ROM, 512K of RAM is a huge amount of extra memory. It’s part of what makes Vespertino so remarkable and perhaps controversial. It would have been way too expensive for the average home user in 1986, but perfectly feasible for a dedicated arcade machine.
Vespertino isn’t cheating by using this cartridge. It’s using hardware that could have been built into an arcade cabinet. And that’s what I was getting at: considering the absolutely astonishing result, delivering an experience worthy of an arcade game like Outrun, I think this cartridge is entirely justified.
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I can at least still be very impressed by the smooth full road rendering at 25hz which is on plain z80 and CRTC so that part not enhanced. The extra ROM/RAM might be for smooth animations and other things. Also makes me wonder what can be made in GX4000 with the extra ROM (even 512k is a lot to me) and Sam Coupe with 512k RAM.
512k ROM and 64k RAM in a GX4000 is a respectable chunk of memory for an 8 bit system. Almost nobody has made full use of it so far, which comes back to my point that more memory opens up possibilities, but doesn’t actually produce anything impressive without a lot of extra work to fill that memory with something worthwhile.
Memory aside, I think Rhino has proved his point that CPC architecture isn’t too slow if used skilfully. Or at least, it can create the illusion of not being slow.
I think everybody can see that the top 3rd of the screen is mostly static, the middle 3rd is being hardware scrolled using very little CPU, and the bottom 3rd is where all the action is.
When the project was first teased I wondered if it maybe was updating the road with deltas and using palette-swapping to add the stripes. But running at 25hz would make this less efficient as any raster effects have to be done every frame regardless. And with no PRI it would be a real nuisance to maintain the timing without wasting a lot of CPU.
Also now since the sprites aren’t masked I can see it isn’t doing that, so I guess it’s just redrawing that whole portion of the screen very fast, going through the stack no doubt and using some other trickery to make the drawing as efficient as possible.
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Well, Amstrad was at least mentioning it in advertisements.
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