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Stupid Question
MegaManMarchek - Mar 14, 2025
  MegaManMarchek Mar 14, 2025
I was playing some of the Saturn's FMV games, such as Road Avenger, Time Gal, Quarterback Attack, etc. when an idea popped into my mind. Is it possible to hack/patch these games to use the MPEG Card? Would you have to place new video files into the games? Or would a project of this caliber require building a "new" game from the ground up? I have no programming knowledge whatsoever, so feel free to educate me!

 TrekkiesUnite118 Mar 15, 2025
You'd have to completely reprogram the games to use the MPEG card and get higher quality video files to re-encode everything. Honestly looking at Road Avenger, Time Gal, etc. the FMV quality looks more than acceptable for 5th gen consoles.

 MegaManMarchek Mar 15, 2025

TrekkiesUnite118 said:

I completely agree with you on your video quality assessment. I posted this question more out of curiosity than anything else. I still think MPEG patches may be a worthwhile endeavor for some of Saturn's FMV games, as many of them never saw release past the 5th generation.

 TrekkiesUnite118 Mar 15, 2025
Assuming you got the code modified to use the MPEG card, the main problem you'd have is tracking down higher quality video sources to re-encode if there's no higher quality version available. If you re-encoded the Cinepak files in MPEG they wouldn't magically look better. The other issue is you'd be limiting them to a very niche accessory that not a lot of people have.

 MegaManMarchek Mar 15, 2025
Ah, so basically the best-case scenario would be if higher-quality files already exist, such as the Arcade version of Road Avenger, and then re-encoding said files to work in MPEG. I have only used the MPEG Card on original hardware, so I have to ask, is it possible to use MPEG card features in Saturn emulation? Also, how easy/difficult would it be to make aftermarket MPEG Cards?

 TrekkiesUnite118 Mar 15, 2025

MegaManMarchek said:

The only emulator I know of that can support it is Nova. As for making a new MPEG card it would entirely depend on if you wanted to copy it 1:1 or if you wanted to make something completely new and custom with new hardware. The problem with the former is you'd need to distribute it with the copyrighted ROM that has the player software, the latter would involve completely rewriting all that stuff from scratch. The other side of the coin is there doesn't seem to be much demand for it.

In all honesty you can get more than good enough FMV quality with Cinepak if you know what you're doing.

 MegaManMarchek Mar 16, 2025
I have seen the snippets of the Cinepak demos from one of Pandamonium's homebrew competition videos and they look quite impressive. I will definitely look further into it. Thanks for all the info!

 MegaManMarchek Mar 27, 2025

TrekkiesUnite118 said:

One last, slightly less stupid question. Is there any way to get NTSC-U/PAL copies of Gungriffon to recognize the MPEG card? Or would that require a patch?

 TrekkiesUnite118 Mar 28, 2025
US and PAL versions don't even have the MPEG videos on the disc contrary to popular internet rumors. So there's no real point.

 MegaManMarchek Mar 29, 2025

TrekkiesUnite118 said:

Man, that was all misinformation?! Guess I'll have to check and see if it is worth playing the Japanese version or not.