Mame has not been working on accuracy as a priority for a long time now.
The MAME project are more into preservation and anything else, and the game play of roms where a “happy accident” rather than their actual goal (for legal reasons).
The Mame team lately actually been not focusing on accuracy at all, but adding alot of non-Arcade hardware into the preservation side of their on going project. Like handhelds and 80s microcomputers, and mostly the stuff that being ignored by the larger emulation community as of late.
Historically Mame was the last holdout for emulators to support proper PC game pads, for the longest time people used to hack keyboards to make arcade controllers. And back in the day the hardcore Fans of Mame felt that Game Port and USB HID devices went against the spirit of Mame.
Mame
It’s why for alot of Capcom, SNK and other 90s stuff, Final Burn Alpha is preferred over Mame.
FBA does CPS1,2, Neo Geo and a few others more faithfully than Mame.
The downside and it’s obvious for the few games that have overlap, you can tell M2 did not do any of the Emulation for the Astro City. Like if you compare the Astro Mini’s Space Harrier to the M2 port of the same Arcade title on modern consoles. The Emulation on the mini inferior to what M2 is capable of but its still better than MAME. So it more likely Sega did the emulation in house. To be fair to the Astro City Mini even M2 could not hit perfect accuracy on certain boards/systems (like the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini can’t get the sounds right). And Sega hardware always been difficult to get accurate emulation from.
Final Burn Alpha was always my favorite emulator back in the day. I am glad I wasn’t crazy for thinking it was superior to Mame on Capcom/SNK stuff.
It’s also remarkable how hard Genesis sound is to emulate accurately. Even some original Genesis hardware sounds very “wrong” compared to the early models. And those early models sound incredible… I’ve never heard anything quite like it in any emulator.
I don’t really get why it’s so hard to do. There’s something magical about the full bass and treble of the model 1 that fills the room that everything else lacks.
That is why its so hard to point down am accurate sound reproduction, especially for the Genesis. Even in Low level emulation and FPGA cores sometimes gets the Genesis sound wrong.
That why the MDFourier project started, to try to get more accurate sound reproduction from emulation and FPGA.
Really cool games lineup, there’s quite a lot of titles I haven’t seen for a long time or haven’t heard of at all which is always good to see, along with familiar staples like Raiden, Batsugun, Strikers 1945, Moon Cresta and so on.
Hopefully the team can overcome the issues with image quality that plagued last year’s model - the pixel crawl was severe enough that it detracted significantly from playing the games, and the scanline filters were some of the worst I’ve seen. Not using integer scaling to fill the 480p display at 448p was baffling, too.
Was just watching @Yakumo’s video on the new Astro City Mini V (whose release actually passed me by, didn’t realise it was out so soon!) and I’m delighted that Sega Toys appear to have improved the image quality this time around. Some proper CRT filters instead of the terrible sharp thick black lines last time, and with filters off there seems to be proper interpolation so no shimmering this time.
Nice! Mine shipped yesterday, hopefully it doesn’t take too long to arrive. I unwisely sold my Batrider and Bakraid PCBs in the early 2000s before the PCB market went to hell so am really excited to be able to play them again (not to mention other rare games like Tatsujin Oh). Btw how is input lag? Seems like a lot of conflicting reports with some saying it’s really bad and others saying it’s fine or barely noticeable.
So it turns out that getting a better power supply is essential according to someone in the ResetEra thread who pointed out this remedy which apparently helped reduce input lag greatly on both the original Astro City Mini and the Egret Mini, this solution should also work with the Astro Mini V:
Your phone and laptop work this way. Their CPU have low power mode. Activated by a software setting or low battery situation.
Or Switch handheld/ TV mode.
Same here, it’s just that low power is a result of using a power supply that is not delivering enough. And when the emulator is running on a cpu in low power mode it’s like it is running on a weaker pc, if the emulator is written expecting to only run at full power.
It would probably be helpful for the manufacturers to at least recommend or specify ideal AC adapters on the packaging.
iirc, certain AC Adapters would fry the controller ports on the PC Engine Mini series, so I can sort of understand why enthusiasts buying these boutique mini consoles would be careful not to use more powerful AC Adapters to begin with.
Good to know the system isn’t inherently laggy though!
It does say on the back of the box (you can see in Yakumo’s unboxing video) as well as in the manual, which is also on the official website: https://sega.jp/astrocitymini/v/img/manual/astro-v_manual_jp.pdf, that the specs are 5V/2.0A or higher. There’s no need for barrel adapters as suggested in the FirebrandX tweet posted before, and definitely not the USB-C adapter posted in his reply to himself, considering the cable end that connects to the adapter is USB-A.
Just need to check your USB adapter meets the minimum requirement, as many phone USB adapters won’t.
I ordered last Thursday from Amazon JP and paid a bit extra for expedited international shipping (I had to cancel my original order and place another as for some reason it was stuck on an old address I no longer live at and I couldn’t get it to update to my current shipping address), as of today the tracking is still stuck on the initial “shipped” status with ETA of either August 9th or 10th. Never had these issues with my other Amazon JP orders over the years.
Limited Run has the US Mini V for $150 today. Borderline the same as shipping from Japan and I hadn’t gotten any gaming things this holiday so I bit on it. Looking forward to some Truxton II!
