I recently moved my installation of Bionic Commando from an old hard drive to an SSD. I wanted to know how big a difference this made to the load times and I'm sharing my findings here, in the event that someone else might run the game and find it useful.
I timed the loads on my most recent PB run (SSD) ( https://www.speedrun.com/bc09/run/y6ddn26m ) and a run from a bit over a year ago (HDD) ( https://www.speedrun.com/bc09/run/y21ng19z ).
- SSD: 40 load screens totalling 1m 37s ~100ms
- HDD: 40 load screens totalling 2m 03s ~867ms
So based on this it looks like SSD saves around 25 seconds over HDD.
A deathless run will have 39 loading screens. One for each of the 37 levels, plus 2 extra before cutscenes at the start of the game and before Buraq Armada. Each of these runs had a death in them, so I timed 40 load screens in each. I'm not 100% sure that the HDD run only has 1 death, but I only found one when scrubbing through the video.
For completeness, here are my computer specs:
- CPU: i5-2500k
- RAM: 16GB DDR3
- GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070
- HDD: Samsung HD103UJ (1000GB / 7200RPM)
- SSD: Kingston SA400S37480G (480GB)
Yeah, there should probably be a mod that's more active than me.
I had originally intended to do more runs, but got distracted by other games.
Sure, I'll add it.
I'm thinking it makes sense to not have to show the file select until after the credits, as long as the video does show it. Though I'm not sure what is most common for 100% runs of other games.
The only mod for Bionic Commando (2009) hasn't been online in weeks. Is there an admin that can approve my run instead?