My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Fri Feb 12, 1999

I completed IA-6, leaving only IA-8 to go!!!

Well, I worked late last night, and didn't intend to play too much Gran Turismo. I thought I'd just fail the IA-6 test, time trial of Trial Mountain with a Viper GTS, for practice.

Before warming up, my natural lap time seemed to be about 1:39, well above the require 1:33. But after warming up I found myself putting in frequent 1:34.xxx, with only the occasional attempt over 1:36. And, occasionally I would put in 1:33.xxx as well.

So, eventually, after persisting a bit too long, I managed 1:32.768. The lap was not entirely tidy. I actually ran onto the concrete apron in the first tunnel, and really didn't have comfortable control of the car until I had rounded the sharp right at the bottom of the hill. I did do a very smooth run through the next set of corners, drifting wide on one corner to the edge, but not onto the grass, and my entrance into the long tunnel was very good and clean. I cleanly took the near hairpin at the bottom of the hill, but dropped one wheel into the grass and threw up some dirt exiting the next series of corners. By now I had a real nice boxed drift approach for the next corner, and I found an appropriate line through the final esses to finish just in time.

Completing the test was a combination of a little thinking and a lot of practice to just absorb things subconsciously--throwing the car into the corner leading to the penultimate straight, for instance.

So now there's just the final to get my International A-class license. I tried that test just once--a lap of Grand Valley II in the Viper--and did not complete it. I looped while exiting the hairpin esses, so the run was a wipeout. But I never finished it, coming off at the second-last hairpin--i.e. not the one just after the tunnel, but the next one after that, following the relatively high-speed section.

I have now finally correctly read the documentation for the InterAct Performance Mega Memory card. If you're very unlucky, it could hold as little as 4 regular cards. 24 cards is the absolute maximum.

What the megacard does, I think, is store the currently active card uncompressed in a buffer, and compress it into sort of an archive when you ask to swap in another card. The upshot of this is that it can get into a state where you cannot swap cards without deleting data. The indicator to show that this has occurred is a tiny little "ER" on the LCD display. Data can only be deleted from the currently active card, so you should always have an empty regular card ready to take the data of the current page should you get into this situation. Of course, you need to be in the Sony memory card monitor to do that. But you remember how the documentation told you not to switch the active card anywhere else?

The card has nothing to indicate what proportion of actual memory you have used up. It has a little 3x8 array of pixels to indicate which pages contain some data. It might have been easy for them to add another 1x8 line to indicate to the nearest 8th how full the card was actually getting.

Most games use only one block to store their saved states. Gran Turismo uses 5 for its basic state, plus the optional 2 for car settings and any amount you wish for replay files. I suspect a lot of compression of one block files will occur because not all of that block is actually used. In multi-block files, however, one can assume that 100% of all but one of the blocks is used. So compression should become poorer. An empty Gran Turismo Replay file probably compresses really well, and more real memory will be needed each time a new replay is saved. On the other hand, I would imagine most replays contain a lot of repeated data and so probably compress relatively well.

But, in any case, once you have 4 cards stored on the megacard, you cannot guarantee that you can swap in another card. In my case, it is difficult to read the display on the card, so it is even more awkward to use, since ideally you want to be able to observe the tiny LED indicators.