Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by PerishedFraud ឵឵ »

The intro seems fine. Of course, it's now ruined (or improved?) forever with that dick-sucking line.

However.

No Out Zone fix, no cigar.

At least the part about contining to update the games is there. But isn't it easier to just use the correct rom for Out Zone instead of modifying things?
Last edited by PerishedFraud ឵឵ on Fri Mar 03, 2023 9:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Steven »

Eh, I actually rather like the new Zero Wing intro after watching it a few times. I'm actually rather glad that the Japanese typo is still there, although I'm not sure if I should feel that way or not.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by SavagePencil »

has anybody cracked this thing open to actually inspect the ROMs that it's running
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by MJR »

Manualmartin wrote:
MJR wrote:To me this does not sound like the kind of attitude that they are listening to the players. I don't think I want to be supporting these versions any more.
It’s been 2.5 weeks since the release. Note the patch notes says:
“We'll continue to add improvements, fixes, and features in the future, so please stay tuned for more!”
So there will be more.
If the oldest rom set had been added by mistake, they could have swapped the roms on day one; I doubt it could have taken more than what it takes you to replace one single file. Duh.

However, their message was clear: "We used the rom we found to be the better version". They think the prototype beta is better than the final version. They have heard people complaining about it, but they will stick with this old version. Why should I care what kind of fixes they are planning to do in the future, if they refuse to budge on this issue? The whole thing feels so backward and weird that I have frankly lost all interest to what they are doing.

To Steam's credit, I received the refund already & uninstalled the games. This whole thing is dead to me now.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by BEAMLORD »

Well done, that man :mrgreen:
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Manualmartin »

MJR wrote:If the oldest rom set had been added by mistake, they could have swapped the roms on day one; I doubt it could have taken more than what it takes you to replace one single file. Duh.
I’m not the developer but to my understanding it’s not just a button push or swap. There’re Steam features and achievements with hooks and connections. Each ROM is its own work so just swapping wouldn’t work. I don’t think we heard the last here, but I’ll leave it to Bitwave to communicate their plans with Tatsujin.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by MJR »

Manualmartin wrote:
MJR wrote:If the oldest rom set had been added by mistake, they could have swapped the roms on day one; I doubt it could have taken more than what it takes you to replace one single file. Duh.
I’m not the developer but to my understanding it’s not just a button push or swap. There’re Steam features and achievements with hooks and connections. Each ROM is its own work so just swapping wouldn’t work. I don’t think we heard the last here, but I’ll leave it to Bitwave to communicate their plans with Tatsujin.
I am aware of this. This does not change anything I said. They could have swapped the rom set in day one, and then proceeded to test it in the following two and half weeks - or more, if needed. The issue was communicated to them in launch day. Their reply was that they think the rom in their version is the "better version". How much clearer can you get than that? They are sticking with this rom version because they CHOSE so. And now they think they can remedy the situation with trivial fixes.

Therefore, it is obvious that there is no point to wait for any further updates. All your hopes that things will get patched in future updates are just wishful thinking. Bitwave communicated very clearly their stance on this issue, and the fact that this update has nothing but trivial fixes shows that they havent changed their minds about it. If they had planned to choose the "normal" rom set, they would have told us so by now. Therefore, I want nothing to do with these guys any more.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Manualmartin »

Do you work in game development? Would require a big team to do that fast turnaround with implementation. That’s maybe the case with Epic and Fortnite when you have a live ops team but not a small studio. Any way, we’ll see in future updates or not you as you’ll be in the sauna being done with these guys. :)
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by MJR »

Manualmartin wrote:Do you work in game development? Would require a big team to do that fast turnaround with implementation. That’s maybe the case with Epic and Fortnite when you have a live ops team but not a small studio. Any way, we’ll see in future updates or not you as you’ll be in the sauna being done with these guys. :)
Now that you asked, yes, I have worked on game development for 29 years. I think your comparison to Fortnite is slightly exaggerated. The biggest testing when changing roms would be to test achievements. These can be usually triggered with save states and cheats. Also, game is very short so using aforementioned tools it actually shouldn't take a long time. After all, the game logic or such is not being tampered with; it's an emulation, not a port.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Manualmartin »

Touché! Now I’m curious. Which studios?
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by MJR »

Manualmartin wrote:Touché! Now I’m curious. Which studios?
Housemarque and others. But please, lets keep on topic :)
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Manualmartin »

Sure, but must say that I played a lot of Dead Nation!
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Jeneki »

Grabbed the Zero Wing patch on steam, but not seeing the new intro. Tried all three regions. Is there a setting hidden somewhere to enable it, or did it not make it into this patch despite what the notes say?

I still love the background scrolling effect on stage 2. So much weird movement throwing off my depth perception. I kinda wish the grab/throw mechanic was a bit more interesting though.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by BrianC »

Jeneki wrote:Grabbed the Zero Wing patch on steam, but not seeing the new intro. Tried all three regions. Is there a setting hidden somewhere to enable it, or did it not make it into this patch despite what the notes say?
It's an option in the menu named "Intro". I didn't see it at first either. It's separate from the main game.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by emphatic »

What if they only have the rights to use the beta rom of Outzone for some reason. If so and they tried to explain it away as "the better option", they are screwing themselves pretty hard.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by BIL »

Maybe they meant to say "the beta option" >__>
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Steven »

I highly doubt that Tatsujin would only send them the prototype/beta. There's no way that Tatsujin would do something that strange. I just hope that everything gets fixed soon. I told Sato-san to go play Out Zone on Steam because he's never played it before, so now when I go see him at Tokyo Game Music Show in April I'll have to fucking be like "yeah, sorry dude, they put out some super broken and super strange version of the game".

Uemura-san's going to be there too, so that's going to be awkward as fuck. Like I REALLY REALLY REALLY do NOT want to have him ask me about what I think of the PC versions while they are still broken and have to tell him that they still haven't fixed them yet and that I hate them.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Sumez »

emphatic wrote:What if they only have the rights to use the beta rom of Outzone for some reason. If so and they tried to explain it away as "the better option", they are screwing themselves pretty hard.
This is kinda what it sounded like to me. Maybe a licensing conflict between the PC release and the upcoming M2 one?

Though, that would imply that the M2 port won't default to the best version of the game, since that one is included in Bitwave's release, and that's a sadness D:
RobHimself wrote:So if there exists different romsets for Out Zone, how do you know which MAME ROM comes closest to the original PCB?
AFAIK all of them come from original PCBs.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Manualmartin »

Steven wrote:I highly doubt that Tatsujin would only send them the prototype/beta. There's no way that Tatsujin would do something that strange. I just hope that everything gets fixed soon. I told Sato-san to go play Out Zone on Steam because he's never played it before, so now when I go see him at Tokyo Game Music Show in April I'll have to fucking be like "yeah, sorry dude, they put out some super broken and super strange version of the game".

Uemura-san's going to be there too, so that's going to be awkward as fuck. Like I REALLY REALLY REALLY do NOT want to have him ask me about what I think of the PC versions while they are still broken and have to tell him that they still haven't fixed them yet and that I hate them.
Yes, it can be really awkward since Tatsujin is the licensor and approves everything. All decisions might not be done by Bitwave, and if it's a decision by Bitwave, then it's approved by Tatsujin. It has been many years since the games were developed so I'm not sure they always remember every detail themselves, which this tweet (that was referenced before) implies: https://twitter.com/TATSUJIN_Games/stat ... 19840?s=20. I'm sure we'll see more updates on which ROM:s are included as Tatsujin also gathers feedback in Japanese.
Steven wrote:Maybe, and hopefully, they'll bring in Jaimers or some of the other really good players, or even just really knowledgeable players, to test everything. I'd gladly playtest Slap Fight or Hishouzame for them if they asked me to, even though I am not a super great player or whatever, but I know both of those games very well, especially Slap Fight. I do have both of those PCBs, too, which makes it pretty easy to check those games against the PCBs to see how they compare.
I think that is one of the more constructive pro-active feedback I've seen for the next releases.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Steven »

Manualmartin wrote:
Steven wrote:I highly doubt that Tatsujin would only send them the prototype/beta. There's no way that Tatsujin would do something that strange. I just hope that everything gets fixed soon. I told Sato-san to go play Out Zone on Steam because he's never played it before, so now when I go see him at Tokyo Game Music Show in April I'll have to fucking be like "yeah, sorry dude, they put out some super broken and super strange version of the game".

Uemura-san's going to be there too, so that's going to be awkward as fuck. Like I REALLY REALLY REALLY do NOT want to have him ask me about what I think of the PC versions while they are still broken and have to tell him that they still haven't fixed them yet and that I hate them.
Yes, it can be really awkward since Tatsujin is the licensor and approves everything. All decisions might not be done by Bitwave, and if it's a decision by Bitwave, then it's approved by Tatsujin. It has been many years since the games were developed so I'm not sure they always remember every detail themselves, which this tweet (that was referenced before) implies: https://twitter.com/TATSUJIN_Games/stat ... 19840?s=20. I'm sure we'll see more updates on which ROM:s are included.
Yeah, I'm at this point I'm just not going to say anything to him about the PC versions and hope he doesn't ask me about them lol. Hopefully they will be fixed by then just in case.
Manualmartin wrote:
Steven wrote:Maybe, and hopefully, they'll bring in Jaimers or some of the other really good players, or even just really knowledgeable players, to test everything. I'd gladly playtest Slap Fight or Hishouzame for them if they asked me to, even though I am not a super great player or whatever, but I know both of those games very well, especially Slap Fight. I do have both of those PCBs, too, which makes it pretty easy to check those games against the PCBs to see how they compare.
I think that is one of the more constructive pro-active feedback I've seen for the next releases.
I'm not a superplayer like Jaimers or any of the other great players on this forum or elsewhere who play ridiculous games like Tatsujin Ou, 1P Same!, or pretty much any CAVE game for score, and those are the players who would be the best to bring in to test, but I would definitely be interested in beta testing the games that I have PCBs for and the experience playing to make sure they are in the condition that they should be in. I'll do that shit for free, too, just because I love Toaplan that much.

I know you're not on the actual dev team staff, but if you could recommend to them that they should contact some superplayers to test the games, that would be greatly appreciated.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by MJR »

Developer commented on my post at steam discussion:
I don't want to start an argument here but it takes more than just swapping the rom. Our releases are closer to ports than pure emulation (even though they're built on emulation, to begin with).

The patch yesterday contained minor fixes (for example the soundtrack fix) as we wanted to get it out of the door and start working on the bigger issues. We'd rather patch often than let the community wait for weeks and weeks.

That said: We appreciate all the feedback. We love these games as much as the rest of the community.
It is interesting that they say that these are more like ports rather than emulation. I said that if they will fix the rom issue I will repurchase.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Steven »

Well, that certainly is interesting. People around here who are not me tend to describe things that are not ports as ports for some reason ("MAME port" is the most odd one I've seen, although "ACA port" shows up more often, but both annoy the hell out of me every time I see them), but if these are closer to being ports than just running in a software emulator, I am extremely curious to know the details.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

Have you compared how current Mame's Outzone behaves against your PCB in regards to slowdown accuracy and sound, Steven?
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Steven »

I didn't even think to do that! I do know that the sound in the attract demo when the text that tells the story appears is a bit broken on the MiSTer, however.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

Well, unlike with Mister, Toaplan's first hardware is supposedly in a quite good shape in Mame and has been for years, that's why I was asking.

BTW, not sure if this has been mentioned here, but Mame's outzonec set isn't even acknowledged as an original Toaplan PCB:
For this reason this set plays many different (and strange/inappropriate)
sound effects from the other sets. This is probably not intentional, but rather
this set probably should have a different sound CPU ROM, like 'hellfire1a' does.
The M68000 code in this set is definitely older than 'outzoneb', but the Z80 code
is newer than 'outzoneb', which seems very unlikely to be correct.
Most likely the board it came from was either bootlegged or repaired by someone
who used the wrong Z80 ROM and didn't notice or care that the sounds were wrong.
Because of this I've tagged the Z80 ROM as a BAD_DUMP and tagged this set with
MACHINE_IMPERFECT_SOUND until the correct Z80 ROM is found and dumped.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/ma ... aplan1.cpp
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by MJR »

Bassa-Bassa wrote:Well, unlike with Mister, Toaplan's first hardware is supposedly in a quite good shape in Mame and has been for years, that's why I was asking.

BTW, not sure if this has been mentioned here, but Mame's outzonec set isn't even acknowledged as an original Toaplan PCB:
For this reason this set plays many different (and strange/inappropriate)
sound effects from the other sets. This is probably not intentional, but rather
this set probably should have a different sound CPU ROM, like 'hellfire1a' does.
The M68000 code in this set is definitely older than 'outzoneb', but the Z80 code
is newer than 'outzoneb', which seems very unlikely to be correct.
Most likely the board it came from was either bootlegged or repaired by someone
who used the wrong Z80 ROM and didn't notice or care that the sounds were wrong.
Because of this I've tagged the Z80 ROM as a BAD_DUMP and tagged this set with
MACHINE_IMPERFECT_SOUND until the correct Z80 ROM is found and dumped.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/ma ... aplan1.cpp
Now this is getting interesting. So Bitwave used rom set that is not even considered a proper released PCB? :lol:
I wonder what was the reasoning behind it? If we consider their claim that this is more of a port, then it must have been something technical, like it was easier to examine the code in the roms, and they were thinking that they just fix the rest? Or they believed that it was better because "code in Z80 was newer"? This may sound crazy, but I have often worked with programmers who like to make decisions purely on technical angle. And judging from the quality of the emulation / CRT emulation itself, it is clear to me that these people are very technically minded (and technically competent too), despite all the bugs and problems.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by MJR »

Anyway, the reason I have been breathing fire on Bitwave (despite hearing recently from my industry contacts that these are good people and proper retro game nerds) is the frustration seeing something that has potential to be incredibly good but falls flat on its face because several factors were grossly overlooked. I wonder if they had a reason that forced them to release these things half-baked, like dire need of money. Or they just didn't have resources to extensively test them with expert players. In any case, they will need to work hard to repair their reputation.
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

Post by pulsemod »

aren't those the bitwave guys credited for technical info at the top of the mame driver anyways?
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Re: Toaplan games coming to PC (Steam, GOG)

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pulsemod wrote:aren't those the bitwave guys credited for technical info at the top of the mame driver anyways?
Yeah
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