All three of the Gulliver Boy advertisements—including Gulliver Boy Poster #2 (2600x1603 .jpg) ▼ below—display the rarely seen "HuVIDEO" logo (in the upper-right corner)…
WAIT! THERE'S MORE…
Gulliver Boy Poster #1 (2600x1597 .jpg) ▼ from May 1995 Dengeki PCE
Gulliver Boy Poster #3 (2600x1600 .jpg) ▼ from July 1995 Dengeki PCE
One reason why the HuVIDEO logo was "rarely" seen was because it appeared at the end of the PCE's life cycle. It was, arguably, the last major technical innovation introduced to the PCE hardware. HuVIDEO was a format for digitizing live-action footage or traditional anime/CGI animation as full-motion video (FMV). Most PCE games, therefore, had no need for HuVIDEO.
To produce fluid FMV, HuVIDEO must have been highly optimized for PCE's architecture (the aging PCE CPU/GPU, coupled with the RAM limitations of its CD format, could easily create a bottleneck when buffering video). HuVIDEO, therefore, is an impressive technical feat for the PCE.
Continued below…
HuVIDEO: COMPLETE FILMOGRAPHY▲
Only a handful of games officially employed HuVIDEO; sometimes the the game packaging acknowledged this, but not always. For example, John Madden DUO CD Football was never touted as employing HuVIDEO technology. Perhaps the term itself—HuVIDEO—had not yet been coined by Hudson's marketing department in December of 1993 (when Madden was released in North America)…
CONFIRMED HuVIDEO RELEASES:
| Title |
Release Date |
Duration |
Total Frames |
Total Seconds |
Video Sequences |
| Mr.Malle.O Demo | 11.22.1993 | XX:XX minutes | XXXXX frames | XXXX seconds | XX videos |
John Madden
DUO CD Football
| 12.01.1993 | XX:XX minutes | XXXXX frames | XXXX seconds | XX videos |
Gulliver Boy
| 05.01.1995 | 30:00+ minutes | 18405 frames | 1840 seconds | 38 videos |
Galaxy Fraulein Yuna
HuVIDEO CD Demo
| 06.01.1995 | 02:22 minutes | 01420 frames | 0142 seconds | 02 videos |
Galaxy Fraulein Yuna 2:
Eternal Princess
| 06.30.1995 | 01:11 minutes | 00710 frames | 0071 seconds | 01 video |
|
MR.MALLE.O: An internal Hudson demo of HuVIDEO with various FMV sequences (and a fully playable Dr. Mario clone!)…
NEW HuVIDEO, OLD GAME: In 1995, the original Galaxy Fraulein Yuna PCE game from 1992 was re-released with a brand-new, bonus HuVIDEO CD containing all of the cinema scenes from the first PCE game. Hudson frequently promoted its back-catalog of games—witness Hudson's full-price push of 1989's Ys I & II during 1993's promotion of Ys IV: Dawn of Ys.
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HuVIDEO: SPECS VS. SPECULATION▲
HuVIDEO SPECS: The FMV video in
Gulliver Boy is 10 FPS (at 192x112 resolution). SamIAm explains, "12 FPS is sort of the standard with cheaply produced animation, whether we're talking
Dragonball Z or
The Simpsons. It's a nice number because it can be doubled to fit the 24 FPS film standard, or quintupled to fit the 60Hz NTSC standard. That probably has as much to do with why so much PC-FX stuff is at 12 FPS…"
Tomeithous further explains, "The HuVIDEO player uses custom CD routines to access the drive. It bypases the system card. The system card functions are not really optimal for streaming video/audio. Plus, the normal system card cd_read function is slower than it needs to be. About 90k per second IIRC. HuVIDEO requires 122k/second transfer rate. Some of the later-generation CD•ROM2 games also use custom cd_read functions as well for faster access. I ripped the one from Seiya Monogatari and it worked great for all my tests…"
PC-FX FMV SPECS: Although 30 FPS FMV is supported by PC-FX hardware, it was rarely used (maintaining a full-screen image + high audio quality was taxing for the system). The introduction cinema to Battle Heat, for example, uses a constant 30 FPS "only during the moments that you see rocks and water." During the rest of the video, the framerate is "fluctuating like Tengai Makyo" at lower framerates (12-20 FPS).
SamIAm continues, "Bear in mind that the system is updating the TV screen every 1/60th of a second without fail, and it either repeats a frame or draws a new one. Thus, the frammerate has to be evenly divisible by 60, 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Sommething like 25 FPS would actually be fluctation between 30 FPS and 20 FPS very rapidly. This is similar to the video in Tengai Makyo, fluctuating between 12 and 20 FPS."
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BLOCKBUSTER: Was the logo for HuVIDEO inspired by Blockbuster Video? Upon closer inspection, no.▲
SPECULATION: Perhaps, while developing the compressed video format for the PC-FX, Hudson's engineers realized that they could implement a similar concept on the less powerful PCE hardware. To be clear—I am not arguing that the technical specifications or implementation of HuVIDEO is directly equivalent to the PC-FX video format. Rather, I am suggesting that development of the PC-FX served as an inspiration—a challenge even—for Hudson's engineers to revisit the PCE hardware and push it further.
CAVEAT: Of course, I could have it wrong: HuVIDEO for PCE could have been developed independently, having nothing to do with PC-FX, and was simply a response to the FMV fad of the early 1990's. Regardless, HuVIDEO remains an interesting footnote in PCE's legacy.
The real question: did development of the PC-FX have any influence on developmment of the PCE? Were the same engineers involved? If not, did the teams (or management) recognize opportunities to apply PC-FX insights to the PCE? Specifically, I am thinking about developments that appeared later in the life of the PCE: the Arcade System Card (improved BIOS for CD-ROM), HuVIDEO (more efficient FMV on old hardware—just compare early FMV releases, such as Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective to later ones, such as Gulliver Boy or Galaxy Fraulein Yuna 2), and perhaps some peripherals (MB132 for PCE vs. game-saving capabilities of PC-FX, for example). Food for thought.
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THANK YOU…▲
Thank you to all the technical gurus who share their findings with the rest of the Turbo community (including, but not limited to): dshadoff, bt_garner, tomeithous (bonknuts), Old_Rover, Chris Covell, SamIAm, thesteve, arkhan, etc.
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