Lol
well it's cuz it's not like they are just loading the rom on the playstation and running it.

They had to program an emulator that will take the original rom, and take the playstation 2...fool the ps2 into thinking its the actual arcade board and that runs the rom.

It took the power of PS1 to run an emulator that would emulate pac-man so obviously it needed something beefy like PS2/xbox to run an emulator that will fool PS2 into thinking it's an MK3 arcade machine

All of this information is based upon MKT for PSX.

In general, all systems that ported a version of MK I believe had some kind of access to original files, and were all modified to fit the respective systems. In many cases you can tell when they directly redrew things, usually backgrounds.

Using the arcade roms doesn't necessarily eliminate loading time, but it puts a constraint on how things are loaded. It is possible to alter how they call upon files however because of budget and resources, so if they wanted to port something like UMK3 which is exactly 32 megs raw, and so is PS2's ram, they could do something like load up all the characters and segway screens (like selection, vs, line up, and choose your destiny) permanently, and load the backgroundIn this case, using the roms is ideal due to how much space they take up. If you count the audio tracks and the way they stored files on MKT for PSX, it's pretty much a full CD, somewhere around 550 megs. If the actual game was ever in the arcade, with arcade animation, sound quality and graphics quality, it would take up around 80 megs. It was easier for them to use audio tracks for the music because they don't have to be loaded into memory and if they made midi versions of the songs they would have sounded similar to N64, however the arcade has it's own midi sound system and the music files take up next to no memory compared to that of a CD track which is approximately 9 megs a minute.

The reason why loading would be gone by porting the arcade versions intact is because the raw files take up less space than the available ram storage for each current system. Playstation had 2 megs of video and I think 256K for audio ram. Ram accessing is instantaneous and anything can be called, and looped, or doubled up by text coding which takes up virutally no space. They even had alternate sound effects, and did corner cutting here and there by recycling sound effects to other characters, like using Sub's freeze sound for MK2 Jax's projectile, and I believe Jade' projectile protection never has it's original noise in anything but one on one. This is also why if you select 4 male characters all with different voices, or even 3, they will all have Kano, Shang Tsung, and Jax's voice, or as I call "The villain voice." You'll also notice how some characters voices sound sped up here and there, and that's because they take up less space if sped up. This way they can get all the sounds in by sacrificing sample rate.

They also sacrificed character quality and size as well. Characters in MKT are 85% the height and width, perhaps even a little slimmer, and the quality is much less as well. This was able to break every character down to about 250K each.

So to sum it up, for the CD games, the only thing limited load time on things like morphs was the amount of ram available vs how much space the games took up. It was always way more than they were capable of, but now, things have evened out and we could even see an arcade quality MKT on the home systems with no visible loading time. The loading time between stages would be practically nonexistant just because of how fast it can access small amounts of data, but if they still had to load a character every time Shang morphed, it would still take a couple seconds, so they are better off loading all necessary data at once, and only what can be disguised as preloaded should not (stages can be loaded during the vs screen).

Hope that helped!

Matt

The Sega Saturn and Playstation didn't have enough RAM to run an emulator, which is why they had to port the games to those consoles instead of emulating them like they are with Midway Arcade Treasures 2. Emulating is much better because it gives you a truly arcade perfect port while at the same time emulated games take up much less room on the disc.

The older disc based systems just didn't have enough RAM. RAM is needed for emulating to run the emulator and the ROMS. The ROM's can take anywhere between 5 MB and 10 MB or RAM and the emulator requires at least 20MB of RAM.

yea what they said lol. plus all the systems before the ones thats out now wasnt completely capable of producing true arcade perfection, a good example being x-men vs. street fighter (on ps1 it was complete crap and the saturn version needed an addon ram cart for arcade perfection). ram is one of the most crucial elements in running a game. its so much i wanna say but its been said already, damn. lol but back then most arcade games were ahead of what home systems were capable of. im sure that if arcades were still booming there would be quite a few games that had to cut corners for the current systems out now. has anyone ever paid attention to the specs of the game systems when they get them?

I'm kinda confused how can MKT or any other MK game made for playstation 1 be like 300-550 megs.....but an arcade perfect/actual arcade rom is only 32 ??

The emulator for the MK games itself will not be 20 megs, probably not even 5, maybe a copule hundred K. It only has to emulate one game, so there is no overhead, no options, no bloated overprogramming. A program like Mame is huge when in ram because it's one program emulating over 3000 games. Each game on the disc will probably have it's own emulator, or at least, the games that don't need the ram space could all have one. It's more efficient for them to do an emulator per game, but on a PC, it's not because of virtually zero limitation. The only reason MK3 and MKT were over 500 megs was because of the CD tracks. Otherwise, had they used their own midi synthesizer, the musics would have been terrible, they would have been able to load even less per match, but the games themselves would be less than the arcade pound for pound.

Matt

Games like MKT for PSX are big because they use CD tracks. If you look at MKT for the PC (basically the same graphically as MKT for PSX just different gameplay), it is very small if you just have the files to play and not the cd audio tracks.

Also, I think the emulator would add very little to the overall ram usage. On a computer, when games are emulated the emulator appears to take up a lot of space because it is actually loading the roms up into memory. An actual emulator for just one game would be pretty small and take up very little memory. Like MK2KB said, it'd probably be a couple of hundred K.