Topic: New Cube.. questions about disc encoding

[alacrity024]

so i've had a $75 Best Buy giftcard in my wallet for about a year.. i finally decided "what the hell, i'll buy a $25 video game system" and bought a cube.  pretty cool little device, but i have yet to decide if i should take the system as seriously as i would treat a ps2.  

i think it was a super-bonehead move on nintendo's part to make the system incompatible with standard-sized cd's.. even if it DIDN'T play DVD's, it should be able to play music cd's.  i figure that the reason for their choice to use the mini-cd is either:

1) just because it looks cool

2) they've developed a significant compression algorithm and don't need any more disc space

so what's the deal??  are they just using normal CD compression and cutting details from ported games?  there are ps2 games which occupy an entire DVD worth of space.. how would a game like this get ported onto a tiny little gamecube disc??

..and if they were gonna use such a miniscule disc with such tightly-packed information, the least they could've done was make it cartridge-based (you know, like a sony MD)

-adam

[alacrity024]

..just answered my own question..  apparently a tiny little 3-inch GC disc is good for 1.5 GB of information!! w00t!!!!!!!!!! that's pretty freakin' good..  so it's basically a mini-dvd................  

-a

[Pikkcuber]

Hey the reason is simple, a mini disk is harder to pirate.

[Shift Key]

Yes, its a mini-DVD medium. But the beauty of its design is that the disc is encoded with a code at the beginning, to recognise it as a real GCN game. Also, it spins in the opposite direction, making piracy impossible to the average user.

Quote
it should be able to play music cd's

How did you come to that conclusion? Just because I have a toaster, doesn't mean I want to put a steak in there, right?

As for your compression question, the FMVs (full motion videos - anything that is pre-rendered, like the movie clips in Rogue Squadron and clips in Resident Evil Remake) can be compressed down using codecs, like DivX. Factor 5 designed a DivX-like compression specifically for the GC.
You can't compress the source code of the game per se, but the amount of space that it consumes is small compared to the FMVs. FMVs are the reason Resident Evil is over two discs, the FMVs are realistic and uncompressed too!

[Grey Ninja]

GameCube has a divx codec that was coded in assembly by Factor 5, meaning that it is very fast, and very good.  GameCube has 6:1 texture compression in hardware, meaning that more textures can be shown on screen at a given time, AND they take far less space on disc.

And 1.5GB isn't a small amount of space.  There have been VERY few games on GameCube that needed 2 discs.  The reason being that it is very hard to get a game to use more space.