Namco Museum - why not the 16-bit era?

[Atarileaf]

I've been wondering about this for a while. Maybe the simple answer is they just didn't want to, but why did Namco only start with their famous Museum compilation with the PS1? After all the Genesis and SNES had good compilations like Williams Arcade Classics and Atari Classics 1 so these kind of compilations were certainly technically possible. Just seems to me like the 16-bit era would have been a great place to start.

[sloan]

Genesis saw a port of Ms. Pac Man

[FrankSerpico]

So did the SNES, came out pretty late in its lifetime. I figure they just were confident that a lot of consumers in the 16-bit era woud still pay for straight up ports of '80s games so they didn't really need to bother with collections

[Atarileaf]

Yep, I have both the SNES and Genesis versions of Mrs. P and they are great. I know back then, when my wife and I first bought our SNES, The Williams collection was probably my favorite, and I would have loved a collection that had Pacman, Dig Dug, Galaxian, and Bosconian on it. Of course they're common now on pretty much every system out there. Just seems to me they missed the boat by one generation.

Not a big deal, just something I was thinking about.

[ccovell]

Japanese programmers had little experience making emulators in pure assembly (which a 16-bit museum would have to be programmed in). The 32-bit era meant that finally CPUs were fast enough to run general-purpose emus written in C (or a mix of C/asm).

Yuji Naka famously made an NES emulator on the Mega Drive, but he's probably the exception. There were no Yuji Nakas at the right time on the right team over at Namco.

[SparTonberry]

They'd have to actually port the games.
I guess at the point, for the effort, they wanted to sell them separate.
I know Pac-Man was included in Pac-Man 2, as well as Ms. Pac-Man in the SNES version (as the Tengen version was only released on Genesis at that point, Namco wrote a separate port for SNES and included a different game in the Genesis Pac-Man 2).
Namco made a game called Cosmo Gang: The Video for the Super Famicom that's like a cutesy Galaga (as well as Cosmo Gang: The Puzzle, which got turned into Pac-Attack for the west).
No Dig Dug port/clone that I know of, though.

[CRV]

Japanese programmers had little experience making emulators in pure assembly (which a 16-bit museum would have to be programmed in). The 32-bit era meant that finally CPUs were fast enough to run general-purpose emus written in C (or a mix of C/asm).

I was always under the impression that Namco Museum on PS1 wasn't emulation. I can't think of any Japanese-developed collections that are emulation before M2 started doing them.

[Graham Mitchell]

I was always under the impression that Namco Museum on PS1 wasn't emulation. I can't think of any Japanese-developed collections that are emulation before M2 started doing them.

Those would be some impressive ports if indeed they are ports. The System 2 boards like Assault, Legend of Valkarie and Ordyne are very powerful, and the Namco Museum versions are 100% accurate as far as I can tell.

[BlastProcessing402]

Without even getting into programming issues, compilations on disc based systems are cheap. Just throw as many of the games as you want on a disc, still gonna cost the same to make. But the more you put on a cart, the larger ROM size you're going to need for the cart, and thus the more expensive it's going to get.