GD: Raiden I&II

[BPzeBanshee]

PC port of Raiden II for me runs at some strange as fuck resolution and has no music (the latter being due to obvious download with incorrect formatting rather than owning the original audio CD).

I also heard PC version has no alpha blending for shadows which IIRC Raiden Project had, so you could argue it's visually inferior as well, but I'm not 100% sure on this. [Citation needed].

[Despatche]

If I remember right, the "strange as fuck resolution" is just trying to match the game's silly native resolution, which for the record I certainly don't have a problem with.

I'm not sure about the visual effect, but that's the kind of thing you've really got to know to look for... I never noticed it, at least.

[nZero]

I also heard PC version has no alpha blending for shadows which IIRC Raiden Project had, so you could argue it's visually inferior as well, but I'm not 100% sure on this. [Citation needed].

This is true. The arcade game and Raiden Project have alpha blended shadows, but they're done with MD/Genesis-style dithering on the PC port (same as transparencies on many other Cyberfront PSX⇒PC ports, like Darius Gaiden)

[BPzeBanshee]

If I remember right, the "strange as fuck resolution" is just trying to match the game's silly native resolution, which for the record I certainly don't have a problem with.

I'm not sure about the visual effect, but that's the kind of thing you've really got to know to look for... I never noticed it, at least.

I'd understand if it was native res but IIRC Raiden II arcade ran at 240x320. PC version runs closer to a squashed 4:3 mode for me.

[Despatche]

i'm pretty sure raiden ii and dx run at some weird almost-square format like the original does. i think it's a slightly different actual resolution though.

[BPzeBanshee]

MAME and real arcade cabinet disagrees with you. And while MAME's emulation of the Seibu COP is nowhere near perfect they do have a thorough understanding of the screen size and pixel aspect, which is plain 3:4. The original Raiden on the other hand has a non-standard pixel ratio, perhaps either this or the abnormal refresh rate of Raiden II which is some 55ish hz may be what you're thinking of.

Funnily enough one of the PC versions I tried allowed fullscreen TATE, and on that mode it actually ran at the correct ratio - but I'm not sure if it was aspect corrected stretch seeing as I was using a 4:3 LCD monitor at the time.

[trap15]

Despatche is half correct. The games do run at a non-square pixel aspect ratio. But when you run it on an arcade machine, you are supposed to adjust the CRT sizing to display it at 3:4. There's no easy way to simulate this, so I imagine they just took the cop-out with the ports and just displayed at pixel aspect (which is wrong). If you are able to get it to display at 3:4 in the ports, then that is how it is supposed to look, and how you are supposed to play it. If it's not 3:4 it's wrong.

[Despatche]

both are correct behaviors, even if one is supposed to be better than the other. both should always be available. not at all a compromise.

(oh, sorry, i didn't mean square pixels, i just meant the weird overall squarish look you'd get if you used square pixels.)

[BPzeBanshee]

That's super weird. I guess the driver being broken as hell they never bothered to correct the aspect ratio for the driver like they have for Raiden 1.

Hey trap15, I don't suppose you and austere's old UberMAME build had a setting for running at "weird box mode"?

[Despatche]

in newer mame it's easiest to just go into the tab menu, hit video options (?), and then select pixel aspect in the... first option? i forget the exact terminology for everything :3

you can also use directdraw and just turn its stretching off.

edit: v(or just use it because it's more fun and not entirely incorrect :3)v

[trap15]

Yes, in MAME 'pixel aspect' will give you the weird boxy ratio. But I must re-iterate, this is incorrect and wrong. Only use 3:4 and 4:3 for arcade games (unless you know for a fact the game was displayed on a different monitor aspect; you won't find many games like that).

[BPzeBanshee]

I know of the MAME option, but standard MAME has both set to the standard 3:4 ratio rather than this other weird one present in the PC port.

[trap15]

Hm, maybe I'm misremembering the pixel aspect on the PCB then. Now I'm curious wtf

[BPzeBanshee]

Btw, is there a track list of the order that the music on the CD plays? I'm thinking of reconstructing the audio portion of the disc with MAME recordings (since the sound emulation is fine) but I know it's not in human-logical order (like stage 1 was track 7 or something when I stuck a random audio disc in).

[nZero]

IIRC (I'm not going to bother checking right now) the "strange" resolution of Raiden II PC is the same as the yoko resolution in Raiden Project, and you need to use tate mode to get the correct arcade resolution (was a 240x320 window so hard to create?)

Track order starting from track 02:
Level 3
Level 4
Level 6
Level 1
Level 5
Level 2,8
Level 7
Clear
Boss
All Clear
Name Entry

You might need a cuesheet with the correct lengths if the game addresses by sector instead of by track.

[BPzeBanshee]

Okay, I cheaped out and used MagicISO to make an audio image with mp3s from my Galbadia Hotel-assembled shit copy of the Raiden II soundtrack just to see what worked and what didn't. Used a 30 piece of silent audio generated from Audacity for track 1 and put the other tracks in the order nZero stated.

Game does it by track so having the audio in the right tracks got it to play at the right places. I got some delay between some songs like going from stage to boss, which I deduce is likely mp3 pause + CD Audio switching streams + some setting I missed somewhere. Most importantly, it does not do any loop handling whatsoever, so for songs to loop the song length has to be that of what would've played originally. I'm assuming the tracks on the actual CDs had a far longer length (likely at least 5 to 7 minutes on average) than my mp3s did and made a significantly higher portion of the data on the disc.

As for the video resolution, after running it in fullscreen it does actually look just like Raiden Project in Yoko. I heard somewhere that the PC port was basically a port of Raiden Project rather than the original game data, which would explain the similar behaviour. It remembers the window resolution you set it to using the Windows Registry, but you'll need to do a search with regedit as I think the HKEY_USERS-S-xxx section name is specific to different users. I tried to do it by hand but I got shaky hands and the game kinda runs like horseshit if you don't get it *just* right.

[Obscura]

Does anyone have the Raiden II replay from page 1? Rapidshare no longer exists, so those links aren't valid, and the only replays I can find online are a ridiculous TAS and a 1cc vid of someone playing the Windows 95 version on Very Easy difficulty.

[Shepardus]

First result searching "Raiden 2" on YouTube.

Not the same replay, but it's from the same guy and it's a 3-loop clear, so even better.

[Obscura]

Ah, I was putting "1cc" in my search term, which was causing it to not come up; thank you!

Can anyone explain what he's doing on the stage 2 boss to cause the more difficult patterns to not happen? It's not a speedkill (and I know from experience that speedkilling him causes him to switch to those patterns earlier, so I didn't think there was a way to skip them entirely), but it's clear that he's timing the kill somehow, and I've got no clue what he's going for on the kill timing.

EDIT: Ok, I've got an answer for this. If you do too much damage to him before the eighth volley of drones, he goes "critical", unleashes the rest of his drones at once, and goes into his second phase. If you play nice with him until he's fired eight volleys, you can speedkill him with impunity and not let him go to the second phase, since he only checks his health to see if he should go critical when he fires the eighth volley.