Nice spot, it is! I’ll be sad to leave the form factor behind because I don’t think next month’s SE 2 will be as tiny.
Alas Cave has only updated Dodonpachi Blissful death and DFK, and Deathsmiles to 64 bit, leaving Espgaluda II, Dodonpachi Maximum, spinoff Mushihimesama Bug Panic and both Mushihimesama games behind. Hope they make the jump as well though!
However, it was well worth picking up an Xbox One again just for the game, and I can confidently say it’s Qute’s finest designed work to date…if I hadn’t enough times already! The level design and balancing are both spot-on. Considering arcade mode is (almost) a full tour of all the game’s stages it’s quite impressive how they pulled it off in the first place considering given the dozens of weapon and shield unlocks in Chronicle Mode. I look forward to playing this again on a future Xbox.
You might have seen in the other thread but I revisited Red Alarm on Virtual Boy, which really is a game that was ahead of its time while still being a very fun yet challenging shooter with full 3D movement. Wouldn’t have been possible without the VB’s two D-Pads and triggers, or its stereoscopic 3D effect. Made it to the final stage for the first time but it’s tough, really tough. I was lucky to make it to the final boss if at all, you just can’t afford to make silly mistakes when tackling both the moving environmental hazards and the hoards of enemies with lock-on laser attacks…
I’ve also been playing more Mushimesama Futari. I’m slowly improving, the best I can do now on a single credit is get through to the boss of stage 4.
Really regret not seriously playing a home version of the game earlier, every element of the game is fantastic. I love how, from stage 3 onward, there’s a constant consideration in your mind over whether to pick the most effective shot type for dispatching enemies, and their bullets, or scoring more gems. The scoring counter, combined with the ferocity of the bullets, gives every bomb in your inventory significance as well. Often using a bomb is more effective than gambling a death, and the drop in score counter makes it a worthy sacrifice over dying.
Well the patched versions aren’t doing the GSM forced 240p thing. My understanding was most of these games the art and everything else was handled at 240p and then interlaced after the fact, but maybe my understanding of it was wrong.
I can say with Ibara it doesn’t make a huge difference because you still have the blurry filter they added to it that can’t be turned off, but it does seem improved. I can try and do some captures through my framemeister comparing standard and patched Raiden III next weekend or something.
Yeah, it would be neat to see how that looks, because if the base graphics are supposed to be 240p, one assumes that a upscaled or line-doubled version of that would look pretty clean.
I’ll try to grab some screen shots of some of the games I’ve already modded and are on the hard drive this week.
Also I am really surprised this hasn’t been posted or talked about here yet, but M2 is making their own Cave-esq shmup hitting arcade this year.
Looks freaking amazing and I hope it gets a home release.
Wait… what? I recently redownloaded Dodonpachi Maximum on iOS. It was one of the fixed releases. I’ve played it on my iPhone 8.
Oh my bad it is indeed updated and showing on the publisher’s App Store page. I had it on Windows Phone 7 and remember it was capped at 30fps there, did they lift the cap for the port?
Tonight’s Sunday Night Shmup is Tatsujin or of course as it’s better known in the West, Truxton. I’m playing the excellent PC Engine port which I bought about a year ago:
Battle of the Ports episode comparing the arcade, PCE and Genny/MD versions:
The good old Classic Game Room HD episode we all know and love. How “metal” can one shmup be? Answer: Very.
Truuuuuxtonnn!!
I had forgotten about the “metal band” known as Truxton from that video. So low key. Mark probably had no idea he was creating the 2nd major shmup meme, after the Zero Wing “ALL YOUR BASE” thing blew up.
So I know I am super late with this but I’ve been stupidly busy and haven’t had the time to get it done. I managed this morning to grab a couple of quick screen grabs to compare Metal Slug 4 on the PS2, one interlaced and one running the 240p hack of the game. All of these were run through the framemeister, using FirebrandX’s profiles. I used the interlace profile for the interlace version and the progressive one for that version.
I’ll start with the interlaced ones
and now the 240p hacked progressive ones
I don’t know if it’s noticeable on here but when I open up similar images into photoshop and put them on different layers and go back and forth, there is a slight sharpness increase in the 240p images. It’s nothing omg major, but there is definitely an improvement, though its slight.
To me its most noticeable in the HUD elements of the gameplay screens where things seem much softer there. I also noticed there is a size/shape difference to the game play screen between the two.
Yeah, it seems like the interlacing makes the game look slightly less “chunky” than it actually is, and restores the pixel size and sharpness to the default. I don’t mind the soft look, but I do like 1:1 pixels whenever possible, so it’s kind of cool that you can do that. It would be interesting to try some hacked 240p games through the OSSC, and see if a 5x line double would look really clean on my 1080p TV.
Yeah I wanted to say, specially with the hud, it was almost like interlacing was applying one of those hq2x filters or whatever the hell they’re called that you see in emulators and such. You should do it and grab some screen shots, I do not have an OSSC to do that with though.
I know you’re on shmups forum but here’s the direct link to the how to and what games can be
Pop ‘N Twinbee is now available on the Switch SNES app for your hybrid console cute ‘em up convenience.
I’m still grinding away with Grid Seeker, and streamed some of that last night. I had my best run at the end of last week, and didn’t get anywhere close to that last night. There’s just enough RNG to keep you on your toes, even when you’re fully powered up, and doing well.
How hard is it to hack 240p into a PS2 game like this. I’m running a stock PS2 slim. What would I need to do?
The actual process of hex editing a game is SUPER simple, I think it was something like a minute or two TOPS per game. There is only a small selection of games that it works with and that link above I believe has the list.
All that said, you would need some way to rip your game disc (or grab an iso from somewhere). Ripping PS2 cds and dvds is super easy, I want to say I think img burn can do it, but don’t quote me on that. I did my entire PS2 library a couple of years ago and my memory says I used img burn.
Then its editing it with a hex editor, and its basically looking for specific code using a hex editing program, changing that (its just a couple of lines) and then saving the iso again.
Now to play it on a PS2, you would either need to have your PS2 modded to play burned games, or you would need to have FreeMcBoot and a hard drive plugged into it. Although FreeMcBoot might let you boot burned games, but I don’t remember off hand.
Since you have a PS2 Slim, you could either get a mod chip in it, or have it modded to support a hard drive. I know its possible to mod it for hard drive support but since I don’t have a slim I don’t know what to link you to or suggest for it. I’m not sure if you can use a USB external Drive on it for the same kind of thing.
If you have a Fat PS2, it would be as simple as freemcboot and buying the Network Adapter and either an IDE hard drive, or like I did, a SATA mod board for the Network Adapter and a SATA drive. This is what I did and once I ripped my entire PS2 library to my PC, I then used a program called WINHIIP to format the drive for the PS2 and copy the games over to it. This way I don’t have to worry about the laser on my ps2 or anything else all my games just run off the hard drive.
Free McBoot will NOT allow booting of burned discs, as far as I’m aware. However, if you have a home network, and an open share with PS2 ISOs, I know there’s a way through Free McBoot, OPL, or one of the utilities, to read ISOs from that over the network. Since the PS2 slim has a built-in network adapter, that’s one way to potentially go that route, but I haven’t explored it enough to know the specifics. I have a fat model I run with Free McBoot, and the network adapter fitted with a board that allows me to connect the IDE adapter with an SD card, to store my ISOs. I know you can boot from a USB drive, but I don’t know if an external USB hard drive is possible. It might be helpful to look up whether or not a USB thumb drive would be compatible. The method for getting data on there, as opposed to a HDD or equivalent, is different.
Uh, what? Free Mcboot does allow for burned discs to be booted, I do this with my own PS2 games as well, it even works for non US PS2 games to work on a US PS2!
Yeah I don’t bother with burned PS2 games since I set up the hard drive and freeMcBoot, and my PS2 is modded from back when the PS2 was current gen, so I could play my import shooters. Hence why I wasn’t sure if FreeMcBoot could play burned discs or not.
