Hi all, I just got my hands on a nice clean copy of Toaplan's ZeroWing.
I've played the hell out of whatever region ROM I have in MAME which is the same slightly clunky one player experience I remember from my Genesis port years ago, but I was blown away to realise that this PCB is simultaneous 2 player with an freshly designed ship for the 2nd player and for some reason seems maybe a little faster and fluid to play. Look I could be trippin about the faster/ fluid bit, but it sure as hell has the second player there. What's the story with this revision as I didn't know there was ever a simultaneous 2 player release? Kinda makes it easier too which is good and bad I spose as ya can just keep blasting away from where ya last died without the whole restart positions thang.
Any clarity on this would be great!
Cheers
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Just updating this post with the ZeroWing 2P video!!
The ship movement speed is definitely faster too, I just compared it to the ROM under MAME. No wonder it feels more fluid and responsive. It's easy to tell the difference when ya compare the instructional screen flight speeds side by side. Certainly provides some extra spice to this old shmup!
I've ben fiddling around with mame, and i haven't been able to make the romset do it. could you PLEASE send that board off to someone to dump? i wanna play that version.
zaphod wrote:I've ben fiddling around with mame, and i haven't been able to make the romset do it. could you PLEASE send that board off to someone to dump? i wanna play that version.
I would seriously consider doing that if it turns out no one has dumped it already. I'm sure someone out there has this version in their collection too or has at least heard of it and can tell us the story behind its existence. The longer this takes the more anxious I get to find out argh!!
Maybe I can get hold of a MAME dev or dumper to see what they can know about it.
you'll see this text:
"The Williams licensed version allows for two-player simultaneous gameplay."
so this 2-player version is known but is not dumped yet afaik.
Ah okay well that clears it up, kinda surprising as I got it from Cosmicco in Hong Kong, I'm surprised they had the Williams version. Cheers for the research Stefan!!
I don' tthink that williams go tthe 2 player version. the game does not appear to even mention it' sliscenses, and the territory dipswitches seem to hav eno efect that I can see. maybe they change the ending tesxt to jap if you set jap rregion? I jus think the export version was made 2 player, liek the differnece bet ween twin cobra and ultimate tiger, and "same! same! Same" and fire shark. Jap seem to like checkpoints at that time. (laugh)
zaphod wrote:I don' tthink that williams go tthe 2 player version. the game does not appear to even mention it' sliscenses, and the territory dipswitches seem to hav eno efect that I can see. maybe they change the ending tesxt to jap if you set jap rregion? I jus think the export version was made 2 player, liek the differnece bet ween twin cobra and ultimate tiger, and "same! same! Same" and fire shark. Jap seem to like checkpoints at that time. (laugh)
That's a good point, Williams or any other Licencee for that matter aren't mentioned on any of the title screens.
You certainly could be right with the comparison between Twin Cobra and Ultimate Tiger etc. I might ask Cosmicco about it...
2P Mode in Zero Wing? That would make things a lot easier.
By the way, I tried Zero Wing on MAME & noticed that when ever you shot something the screen flashes red & gets very annoying after some time.
Is it the same in the original arcade version or is this an emulation bug?
The real Genesis Cart that I have does not flash red either...
Not too familiar with this, but the red flashes show up on the Ultracade "arcade classics" version too, it seems. Of course, I think that's based on MAME, so it's probably the same behavior. My guess it that it comes from the ROM.
