Paprium

Paprium is a side-scrolling beat 'em up video game for the Mega Drive developed by studio WaterMelon and released in 2020¹. It was announced as part of a crowd-funding pitch in 2012. Development took eight years, with little to no communication with game's backers or the press, and the game was widely considered to be vaporware.

Paprium is a side-scrolling beat 'em up video game for the Mega Drive developed by studio WaterMelon and released in 2020. It was announced as part of a crowd-funding pitch in 2012. Development took eight years, with little to no communication with game's backers or the press, and the game was widely considered to be vaporware.

Soundtrack

The Paprium soundtrack was composed by David Burton aka Groovemaster303 and Trevin Hughes aka Jredd. Tulio Goncalves originally reached out to Burton for Paprium because of his prior work on Pier Solar, and his work on the Streets of Rage Remake fan-game. and was approached by WaterMelon for the soundtrack for what then was known as Project Y. Burton approached Hughes for a collaboration as the two had worked together in the past on other projects. The soundtrack takes advantage of the Mega Drive's native Yamaha YM2612 sound chip as well as utilizing the Zilog Z80 included in the Mega Drive for Master System backwards compatibility, along with the extra hardware included in the Paprium's DATENMEISTER chipset for additional audio capabilities like increased audio channels and samples. The soundtrack was completed sometime in 2013, with minor changes and tweaks to the tracks occurring during the development lifecycle. Hughes has mentioned that games like the Streets of Rage series as well as the Mega Drive's Terminator game, along with works by Yuzo Koshiro and Tim Follin, were used as inspiration for Paprium s soundtrack and sound design.

Cartridge hardware

The Paprium cartridge hardware is unique among both commercially released Mega Drive games as well as homebrew releases. The cartridge contains a custom chipset named "DATENMEISTER" or referred to by WaterMelon as the "DT128M16VA1LT" chipset. This is not the first time a Mega Drive game has been released with additional hardware to improve the console hardware's graphical ability, with the Sega Virtua Processor (SVP) chipset created for the Mega Drive release of Virtua Racing being the first; but this is the first time a homebrew release cartridge has been released with its own custom chipset . This chipset is under a metal heat sink on the cartridge printed circuit board (PCB); however, initial shipments of the cartridge had reports that the heat sink was improperly secured onto the PCB, with WaterMelon releasing a statement in the game's online support page that users should open up their cartridge case and remove the heat sink to not damage the PCB, as the heat sink is purely for aesthetics and not needed for function. Users that have removed the heatsink found epoxy covering the DATENMEISTER chipset, put there by WaterMelon to prevent chipset reverse engineering. Removing the epoxy reveals several additional chips such as an Altera FPGA (10M02SCU169C8G), a STMicroelectronics microcontroller (STM32F446ZEJ6), a Spansion microcontroller (GL064N90FFIS2), an ISSI semiconductor RAM (IS42S16100H), and two logic gates from ON Semiconductor (74LCX245 and 74LCX257), which is used to handle the additional audio channels and capability, and to assist the console in various game tasks (managing VRAM, generating sprite table...). The cartridge uses flash memory for save data, and does not need to rely on a password save feature or rely on battery saves like many Mega Drive games that came out during the console's release lifespan. The cartridge also features a phone connector on the top of the cartridge dubbed the "MegaWire 4" in marketing materials. While functionality does not exist for this yet, it has been mentioned by WaterMelon that this will be used as an expansion port for future downloadable content along with an online high-score board or possibly for compatibility updates. The cartridge features 64 Megabits of storage (8 Megabytes) making it one of the largest Mega Drive cartridges ever commercially released, alongside Pier Solar, which was also 64 Megabits.

Grand Stick III

WaterMelon developed an arcade stick alongside of Paprium called the "Grand Stick III". This arcade stick works on both the Mega Drive and PC, and features an arcade quality joystick and eight buttons, mimicking that of a Mega Drive 6 button controller (A, B, C, X, Y, Z, Start, and Mode). When the stick is hooked up to the Mega Drive and used for Paprium, the stick will illuminate the A button to let the player know when the BLU pill is available for use, along with sound effects from a built in speaker when the player character is knocked down. The Grand Stick III connects to the Mega Drive via the DE-9 controller port, or to a PC via the device's USB-B plug. The Grand Stick III also has an additional DB-9 controller port which when paired with an additional Grand Stick III and two Mega Drive controllers can allow up to four players in Paprium s unlockable Arena mode. The stick has a set of DIP switches on the bottom of the device, which can be used to change the button layout, unlock certain modes in the Paprium game, or enter debug mode.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1328043617 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.