Steam vs MAME

[siemien]

Hello. I was wondering recently when I saw Raiden 4 on Steam and Raiden Legacy. Legacy had mixed opinions about it, so I thought I would ask. For you all it's better to buy a port on Steam or get a Mame original? I would go for Mame, but if Steam port is 99%-100% ideal than it suits me

[soprano1]

Raiden IV doesn't work in MAME, and probably won't for a while.

[siemien]

But I'm saying about games that work like all previous Raiden games (not 3 & 4). Let's say R-type or Gradius. Stuff like that

[zakk]

It's a DotEmu release, which are not known for their quality.

[soprano1]

But I'm saying about games that work like all previous Raiden games (not 3 & 4). Let's say R-type or Gradius. Stuff like that

Raiden, Raiden II and Raiden DX work nicely for MAME right now.

[ZellSF]

I would go with MAME. As a general rule, publisher backed emulator releases are usually pretty mediocre. That's certainly true for the Raiden games.

As for Raiden IV, I would buy a DRM free version from GoG rather than a DRM locked one from Steam.

[siemien]

I would go for mame, but if some games are not working than Steam for sure;)

[copy-paster]

Someone should compare Mushihimesama Steam vs MAME.

[gray117]

1. Buy it.

2. Then play on whichever you find better.

3. Provide feedback/reviews.

Objectively the truer/better like arcade versions tend to be mame + you can more easily apply screen/scaling filters to suit your personal taste.
Which is best for you may depend; for myself convenience means steam is often best. But you have all kinds of options gog / console ports / emulation etc. .. Just make sure you buy it somewhere.
You're not going to be wasting much time and this is the only way to support and encourage further shmup development/ports.

[Bananamatic]

Someone should compare Mushihimesama Steam vs MAME.

mushi steam is shit
mushi mame is unplayable

i'm more curious if mushi 360 is just as bad

You're not going to be wasting much time and this is the only way to support and encourage further shmup development/ports.

with how fucking awful cave's ports are you are better off just waiting for good emulation and not giving them anything
i'm pretty sure we get good deathsmiles emulation before they fix the slowdown on steam too

[Blinge]

Mushi works fine for me Banana. For the sake of newbs, can you specify why it's shit? Because it's not accurate to arcade slowdown?

[WelshMegalodon]

I would go with MAME. As a general rule, publisher backed emulator releases are usually pretty mediocre. That's certainly true for the Raiden games.

As for Raiden IV, I would buy a DRM free version from GoG rather than a DRM locked one from Steam.

Agreed on both counts. Emulator releases generally seem to be aimed at people not in the know and I'm always hearing complaints about poor sound emulation in releases like Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection.

Also, support GOG. Games like Dark Sun and Betrayal at Krondor at ridiculously low prices are hard to top (at least legally).

mushi steam is shit
mushi mame is unplayable

i'm more curious if mushi 360 is just as bad

You're not going to be wasting much time and this is the only way to support and encourage further shmup development/ports.

with how fucking awful cave's ports are you are better off just waiting for good emulation and not giving them anything
i'm pretty sure we get good deathsmiles emulation before they fix the slowdown on steam too

This is probably true, but I'm also curious as to how Mushihime-sama is unplayable in MAME. The fact that it can run on my underpowered laptop most likely betrays some deficiency in the emulation...

[siemien]

I played mushi on mame. The original of course and it's not 100% constant frames. Some drops are huge... I have an old AMD x2 4200+, 4gb ram and 8600gt. Still not enough for mushi

[trap15]

The performance is garbage, the slowdown is entirely incorrect, and the input lag is atrocious. Not sure how that's very playable.

[WelshMegalodon]

...the slowdown is entirely incorrect, and the input lag is atrocious.

Ah. I figured as much.

Someone should let the MAME devs know...

[trap15]

They already know, a few of them visit here. It's not trivial to fix.

[Bananamatic]

Mushi works fine for me Banana. For the sake of newbs, can you specify why it's shit? Because it's not accurate to arcade slowdown?

input lag, like every cave port except for futari I've played

play futari first, set the lag to 0, then set it to 2 and see if you can feel a difference
then play dfk and mushi on steam and see if it's more like 0 or 2
then play sdoj and throw up because it's even worse

2 (PCB) already affects the gameplay and is worse than pretty much every doujin shmup out there, if 5pb wasn't the one porting futari it would probably be the default and only option
sdoj is a special case as it's even worse somehow

[Nasirosuchus]

Raiden III and Raiden IV don't work in MAME but they've been playable on PC for several years via the Taito Type X loader being hacked.

The Cave SH3 games work in MAME but the hardware slowdown doesn't yet work properly enough for most to consider it to be playable.

[MathU]

Emulation is simply more accurate and featureful than PC ports almost a full 100% of the time. I like to support ports when publishers try though--Cyberfront used to do some quality arcade-to-PC porter for instance, it's a real shame they died.

One interesting thing about the Raiden Legacy collection is that DotEmu may have violated MAME's license in using some code from the project back when it used a strictly non-commercial license. It only contains the Raiden games that were emulated by MAME at the time--Raiden II and DX finally got their encryption cracked/had their chips fully dumped not long afterwards. Arcade anthology/compilation developers often take "inspiration" from MAME code in fact since the publishers tend to be extremely stingy with helping the developer (which is usually outsourced) port the games or often have lost the original source code entirely.

I am ever hopeful for the day when publishers knock some sense into themselves and begin selling literal ROM licenses to people. Then we can finally stop this silly charade of wasting effort and resources attempting in a port the almost insurmountable task of beating long-standing emulators at what they do best. In my eyes the potential of such an unrestrictive ROM license is worth more than any simple port in spite of the work put into it. If they would just give people the freedom to do what they want with a ROM I guarantee there's a sizable market of people who will pay good money for it. In the mean time, at the very least try not to support DRM-locked trash like CAVE's Steam releases.

[WelshMegalodon]

They already know, a few of them visit here. It's not trivial to fix.

I thought they could at least change the driver status from 'Good' to 'Imperfect' since most people aren't likely to have encountered the actual hardware.

[Shepardus]

That would be the sensible thing to do, but the MAME devs aren't exactly known for making sensible choices.

While we're on the topic of MAME accuracy, someone let the dev team know that the default extend settings for Parodius Da! are incorrect (or at least they're different from all the PCB gameplay videos I've seen) and the music plays slightly too slow.

[WelshMegalodon]

Wow, not even MAME can get Parodius Da! right.

I wonder if they ever fixed the speed issue in Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting.

[Blinge]

Mushi works fine for me Banana. For the sake of newbs, can you specify why it's shit? Because it's not accurate to arcade slowdown?

input lag, like every cave port except for futari I've played

play futari first, set the lag to 0, then set it to 2 and see if you can feel a difference
then play dfk and mushi on steam and see if it's more like 0 or 2

Haha damn, my poor gamer cred - I never noticed.
I don't own futari so i can't do your test.

[BrianC]

Even some early games like Galaga still have a warning that the emulation isn't 100% when booted up (not sure how the Namco Museum or other different versions fare compared to the AC game, though).

[Firehawke]

Even some early games like Galaga still have a warning that the emulation isn't 100% when booted up (not sure how the Namco Museum or other different versions fare compared to the AC game, though).

The Galaga issue is so minor as to have recently been brought up in a discussion on possibly re-categorizing imperfection levels. Basically, the starfield generator for Galaga runs at a much higher resolution than the game, and it's not quite being handled correctly. You'd have to really look closely at it to notice, though.

SF2 Hyper Fighting is, IIRC, due to wait states not being implemented correctly and isn't easy to fix.

Cave stuff is HIGHLY unlikely to get fixed while Cave's putting out official PC ports (and it seems unlikely further Cave stuff will be dumped right now as well), and it's also an extremely difficult task to get the slowdown right as it's increasingly clear that not even Cave really understands the limitations of their hardware.

[trap15]

CAVE can't get the slowdown right either because it's not entirely GPU-based slowdown. If that was it, it'd be fairly easy to do. But it's a combination of GPU and CPU slowdown, the latter of which is very hard to simulate in a port. And MAME doesn't perform correct CPU stalls (and I believe the clock rate is also far too high), so the performance is going to be far higher than the real hardware.

[Chaos Phoenixma]

What are the settings supposed to be on Parodius?

[Shepardus]

What are the settings supposed to be on Parodius?

30k/100k extends as opposed to 20k/80k extends, going by this and this video. Don't know if anything else should be different but doubt it. It doesn't really make a difference since with either setting you'll easily reach both extends if you get anywhere with the game.

While we're on the topic of MAME accuracy, someone let the dev team know that the default extend settings for Parodius Da! are incorrect (or at least they're different from all the PCB gameplay videos I've seen) and the music plays slightly too slow.

You (and everybody else) should submit a bug report to http://mametesters.org/ when you discover stuff like that. The devs address those minor issues very quickly once they know, the fix would probably roll out with the next MAME release.

Thanks, didn't know about that.

[OmegaFlareX]

Hello. I was wondering recently when I saw Raiden 4 on Steam and Raiden Legacy. Legacy had mixed opinions about it, so I thought I would ask. For you all it's better to buy a port on Steam or get a Mame original? I would go for Mame, but if Steam port is 99%-100% ideal than it suits me

Steam Raiden 4 is fine, you should definitely get that.

I bought DotEmu's Raiden Legacy when it first came out years ago (non-steam) and it was atrocious. Enough to make me swear them off forever. I can't comment on the Steam release, but I imagine it's the same. I can only hope someone someday buys the license out from DotEmu and ports over the Aces collection.

I am ever hopeful for the day when publishers knock some sense into themselves and begin selling literal ROM licenses to people.

I don't have a problem with these, but the emulation has to be at least on par with the good popular emulators. Raiden Legacy (and from what I've heard, all their Neo Geo ports) is unfortunately not.

[Keade]

<stuff>

I agree, but I bet most people don't care about DRM (or what a ROM is). They want something that "just works", integrates well with the distribution platform (Steam, GOG.com or whatever) and requires the minimal amount of configuration possible.
GOG.com DRM-free stance would seem to indicate that there is still hope, 'though most DOS games do not come with the original disks, but preinstalled I think.