2 questions about old technology on new technology

[JerryGreenwood]

Both of these questions boggle my mind, the first one more than the second...

Question #1  - I recently bought Final Fantasy Chronicles on PSX. It's 2 discs. One is Final Fantasy 2 (SNES) and the other is Crono Trigger (SNES). These games basically have the same technology. FF2 plays normal, like a cart. Why does Crono Trigger have 6-8 second load times for doing something simple like entering a house? Even opening the menu seems like an eternity.

Question #2 - It's probably a money issue, but how is it possible that I can DL very fast action games like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 or a Street Fighter game (or basically any game) and play with my friends online, but there is no online play for the Game Room games (the Atari and Intellivision DLable games) or that Capcom set that came out last year?

[Shadow Kisuragi]

Question #1: Seek times on optical media. Even optimized, it'll take longer to seek and load data on optical media. If I had to guess, the Chrono Trigger disc is likely less optimized.

Question #2: Development and support time. It's much easier to port over something that's already written than to spend time writing up entirely new features.

[JerryGreenwood]

Cool thanks, but even still...

Why is the Chrono Trigger less optimized? They're both SNES games. Chrono Trigger IS a bigger game than FF2, but it's not THAT much bigger. FF2 is seamless. When you do anything in Chrono Trigger, you'll be sitting there thinking to yourself "Ok, there's no way it's taking this long.......................how is this STILL loading?!"

Development and support time points to money. I figured that. But Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 on Dreamcast wasn't online. Neither was Golden Axe, TMNT, The Simpsons arcade, etc.  What's the difference between writing up new features for those games and writing up a new feature for Combat on Atari?

[Shadow Kisuragi]

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 utilized an existing engine that was developed by Capcom for fighting games. Same with the others.

[blcklblskt]

What's the difference between writing up new features for those games and writing up a new feature for Combat on Atari?

Millions of lines of code compared to, I don't know, several thousand for an Atari game.

[techwizard]

is your chrono trigger disc scratched more than the FF2 disc? i've had some games that loaded really slowly on badly scratched discs (though still functioned), and when i replaced them with a less scratched version i noticed improved load times

[SirPsycho]

Chrono Trigger in Final Fantasy Chronicles is notorious for having bad load times. I've had it since it released and it always took about 8-10 seconds just to load a battle, let alone screen transitions.

[Shadow Kisuragi]

What Psycho said - it's notoriously known for the loading problems.

[JerryGreenwood]

What Psycho said - it's notoriously known for the loading problems.

I thank you and appreciate you answering me, but I'm still not sold. Why is FF2 good and CT bad? Same system, same developers. It's almost unplayable.

I also understand your "Marvel vs. Capcom 2 utilized an existing engine that was developed by Capcom for fighting games." answer. So are you saying that for TMNT, Konami utilized an existing engine developed by Konami, and for Golden Axe, Sega utilized an existing engine developed by Sega?

To me, it seems Atari (or Microsoft) could've made a lot more money if they developed a similar engine that could play Atari games online. I know I would've bought a lot more games for Game Room and the Capcom collection if they had done this. With technology today, it seems like a single Atari game could've been done in 1/1,000 of the time as it took to do something like TMNT.

[Shadow Kisuragi]

The other games utilized an engine developed by Digital Eclipse, I believe.
For fighting games, GGPO is the standard for netcode middleware, especially for Capcom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGPO

[JerryGreenwood]

The other games utilized an engine developed by Digital Eclipse, I believe.
For fighting games, GGPO is the standard for netcode middleware, especially for Capcom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGPO

Thanks again. I kinda get it, but don't know why Atari/Microsoft didn't do something similar. The only answer I can think of is, I guess they figured the money spent on creating it wouldn't be made up by the amount of extra sales that online play would garner.

I still don't see a reason why FF2 is good and CT is bad. But it's okay, you've answered enough 

[bickman2k]

I wonder if they had 2 different teams porting the games and one optimized their game for the disc better than the other.

[Cobra]

Perhaps, they were under a deadline and while they had enough time to optimise Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger had to miss out. I don't think there is an official answer... but then I guess you could always tweet Square and see if your lucky enough to get one.

[JerryGreenwood]

I don't think there is an official answer

It's probably this. Thanks guys.

[kaysow]

for the Chrono Trigger PSX "port", for some reason they went with a dedicated emulator running a modified version of the original SNES rom file on PSX hardware, most likely to save time and money. but that doesn't explain why their proper PSX port of FFVI is so awful.