Radiant Silvergun emulation?

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komatik
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by komatik »

Xyga wrote:For instance I quote you there;
I (along with like probably 99% of retro gamers) only really care about playing a game the same way it played originally
komatik wrote:I care that the resulting colored dots on my screen and vibrations from my speaker cones are the same as what the original hardware would have done (or better).
Playing these old games they way they originally played is a good thing, but people have this idea that "don't speak ill of the dead" somehow also applies to home consoles. As though nobody is allowed to acknowledge these systems had tons of bugs and compromises. If there's a way to play these games but improve the experience by using modern technology to eliminate the problems then I'm all for that. If you want to go to a renaissance festival and wipe your ass with a dried corn cob because "they didn't have toilet paper back then it's not accurate" then you're welcome to do so, but I am more than happy to experience the good parts without the bad. Again, there's no legitimate reason that shit like input lag should ever be desirable and you will never convince me otherwise.
tomwhite2004 wrote:The MAME core is up to date in Retroarch, the numbered versions are only there to serve people with less capable hardware.
Yeah I based that statement on the last-modified dates from buildbot. Last time I checked a week ago when I was trying to figure this all out the MAME2015 and vanilla MAME cores were dated from 2016 so I assumed work had stalled then and didn't really look into it any further. I guess it was just a transient bug.
WelshMegalodon wrote:You'l have to excuse me if I ended up countering a related, but not identical, stance since it isn't always clear where one ends and the other begins.
No that's fine, apology accepted. I've certainly had my fair share of dealing with those people who Just™ Don't™ Care™ when it comes to accuracy and it can certainly be frustrating.
WelshMegalodon wrote:it's very much a deliberate decision on their part.
Arrrrggghhh.....
Libretro is NOT RetroArch. I know it was Xyga who wrote it not you but RetroArch does not have "toxic retardation" just because the MAME and Libretro crowds have a feud going on. It is not RetroArch's fault, and RetroArch did not (AFAIK) make any decisions that caused this. I'd have lot more sympathy for the MAME crowd if you stopped acting like these two sister projects are a single uniform entity and stopped blaming the wrong people for things.

RetroArch has a lot of problems; it's buggy and unstable, its interface was designed by a lobotomized monkey, and it takes at least a day to work out the configuration quirks on a new system; but bad MAME cores isn't one of them.
Xyga wrote:IMHO RA should have stayed a frontend
IT IS
(at least, if you don't limit the concept of frontend to just a rom selector slideshow)
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Xyga
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by Xyga »

komatik wrote:Playing these old games they way they originally played is a good thing, but people have this idea that "don't speak ill of the dead" somehow also applies to home consoles. As though nobody is allowed to acknowledge these systems had tons of bugs and compromises. If there's a way to play these games but improve the experience by using modern technology to eliminate the problems then I'm all for that. If you want to go to a renaissance festival and wipe your ass with a dried corn cob because "they didn't have toilet paper back then it's not accurate" then you're welcome to do so, but I am more than happy to experience the good parts without the bad. Again, there's no legitimate reason that shit like input lag should ever be desirable and you will never convince me otherwise.
Contradiction; you're all for accuracy but you want to eliminate even the portion of the lag that's legitimate and therefore accurate. An improvement over the original is not accurate rendition, and it's a problem for fair-play too period.
I know I won't convince you, after all I still haven't witnessed a single supporter of the careless/abusive use of run-ahead settings actually discuss the topic seriously, all just say 'input delay is bad' and elude, refuse to discuss in details how it works both on the hardware and software side with emulators, of what the lag chain is made of, and of course also elude the fairness/cheating aspect of the issue.
komatik wrote:I know it was Xyga who wrote it not you but RetroArch does not have "toxic retardation" just because the MAME and Libretro crowds have a feud going on. It is not RetroArch's fault, and RetroArch did not (AFAIK) make any decisions that caused this. I'd have lot more sympathy for the MAME crowd if you stopped acting like these two sister projects are a single uniform entity and stopped blaming the wrong people for things.

RetroArch has a lot of problems; it's buggy and unstable, its interface was designed by a lobotomized monkey, and it takes at least a day to work out the configuration quirks on a new system; but bad MAME cores isn't one of them.
Oh come on now, separating the entities like it excuses anything, I've explained well and so did mamedev themselves what the problem is; those old cores RA support are obsolete builds/drivers and dumps/roms which mamedev are legitimately against since their presence and popularity support less accurate, dated emulation, it's retarded yes, it is very naturally at the core (intended) of the feud, because it's working against the progress of emulation so it is obviously toxic, and wiping its ass with mamedev's years of valuable actual dev work.
Trying to find some kind of excuse in separating libretro and retroarch responsibility-wise, that's not valid, even if you do that changes nothing; it is both their fault, their choice to keep going against mamedev's will.
komatik wrote:I've certainly had my fair share of dealing with those people who Just™ Don't™ Care™ when it comes to accuracy and it can certainly be frustrating.
It's certainly people who don't see the problem with supporting obsolete emulators and roms, and have no problem with blindly eliminating even the portion of the input delay that's legitimate, who are the people who Just™ Don't™ Care™? it's RetroArch and supporters.
komatik wrote:
Xyga wrote:IMHO RA should have stayed a frontend
IT IS
It goes much beyond by supporting vacuumed-in emulators as cores even without their legitimate developer's consent, so it's not just a frontend.



If there is one constant in RA and its supporters narrative, it's that they really like to rewrite the definition of things and re-arrange facts in a fashion that fits their biased reading of reality.
While mamedev even if they're right in substance, fighting the good fight, are so stubborn and prejudiced to extremes on some topics that it ironically makes them ridiculously biased too, just in another direction.
So yeah arguing again and again is going nowhere, I know that when I post on the topic, I know that it's like two completely different cultures clashing, there will be no understanding nor compromises ever, even though they're very well achievable but require reason from both sides, not manichaeism and dishonesty.

Thankfully while it's only a minority that understands and gives a damn, and it is of interest mainly only for the bulk of the arcades category, GroovyMAME keeps on advancing and improving at a nice pace, and since the end purpose of it is to integrate its progress to baseline MAME after its proofed and validated enough, it means things will get better with time for official MAME too. Not that I think it'll be enough to save it because of all the other issues they leave be and don't seem in a hurry to fix/modify anytime soon nor ever.

Lastly, anyone can skip the whole debate and issues almost entirely just buying a variable refresh setup, fire MAME and whatever emu or games hands off and profit.
The only reason why we keep arguing is because freesync/gsync/hdmiVRR or whatever variable refresh tech alternative or future, still has a low/slow adoption ratio. Way too many people buy shit hardware because they think retro emulation = fucking Pi crap or low end igpu laptops, and unfit displays.
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MameHaze
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by MameHaze »

Well even I consider the Saturn emulation in MAME to be too slow at the moment, and acknowledge the driver is full of awful code.

I actually vetoed the marking on Decathlete as working, even after I worked with Peter and Morten to fully emulate the protection in it simply because the current state of the driver means there are no machines that can run it at full speed. You might think that it's a very black of white thing when it comes to MAME and development, but there are times we'll say "that's ridiculous and needs work" too.

The driver did slow down as the result of more Saturn features being emulated (especially ones needed by the likes of Final Fight Revenge) but the way things are done in that driver does need redesigning from the ground up. When the driver was first started nobody was really even emulating the Saturn to a meaningful degree, it's since been surpassed, but as the driver has never been rewritten based on the new understanding, only built upon, it does struggle. What were suitable optimizations 15 years ago when it was started now actually cost performance when trying to do things properly instead.

As for people feeling abandoned, or MAME's non arcade stuff being pointless etc. I did just emulate the Plug and Play "GeiGeki Go Go Shooting"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BMiCuQ90sM

I'm somewhat certain that had MAME not expanded into doing other stuff then that would have never been emulated. It's taken many steps of people coming together to get us where we are with the emulation of those things. Likewise the emulation of Taito Nostalgia with "Slap Fight Tiger" (which wanting to have emulated in MAME is what started my interest in researching this hardware family) Interests might shift, but there is common ground in most areas.
garbanzox
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by garbanzox »

Have you tried Bizhawk? It's my go-to emulator for Saturn (and many other older systems).

I'm at work now so I can't try Radiant Silvergun, and can't speak from experience because I don't like 3D graphics so I've never played it. But it's worth giving it a shot.
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tomwhite2004
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by tomwhite2004 »

garbanzox wrote:Have you tried Bizhawk? It's my go-to emulator for Saturn (and many other older systems).
Bizhawk doesn't have it's own original Saturn emulator, they use Mednafen.
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by null1024 »

general reply to stuff above:
Using old-as-shit versions of various emulators is basically a straight compromise between for actually being able to play the game. You explicitly make a trade-off between using a version designed when hardware was weaker [with the caveat that the knowledge or implementation of what the hardware was worse], or you get better hardware [often a complete non-starter].
Ideally, you'd base your work off a recent release and try to target the older hardware, but good is the enemy of better -- something that works to some extent already on the target is basically always going to be picked in favor of something that basically doesn't exist yet and is going to need to be massaged into working [and mightn't ever be as fit for purpose given whatever compromises you're going to have to make anyway].

really, I've probably got like a dozen different versions of MAME on my disk, from .128 to current -- half because I'm too lazy to move the romsets and update [really embarrassing sometimes, they were folders dragged off of older machines of mine], the other half because of actual performance or other issues from more recent releases [which is admittedly rare, it's mostly machines with 3D hardware]
komatik wrote:
gray117 wrote:In general, as a first introduction, I think you're going to find Ikaruga (spiritual successor to RS) more accessible
Hmm ok I'll have to look into that. Definitely much wider platform availability if nothing else. The white/black thing rings a bell, I remember people talking about that.
null1024 wrote:What machines do you have?
I've had extremely good success using GCDEmu to mount CDs and Wine to run SSF
Mostly Macs and Linux of various flavors. I'm not really a "gamer" in any realistic sense- 99% of what I play is through RetroArch so I rarely need a physical Windows machine and just use a VM when required.

Does Wine actually work now for games? Last time I tried it (which was admittedly many years ago) it had all sorts of wacky quirks and issues with anything realtime 3D, like vsync was impossible, it'd report I was playing at 400 fps when it was clearly more like 40, and there were lots of weird visual artifacts and glitches, etc. Games were certainly functional but the experience was less than enjoyable.
It's going to be all kinds of rough, especially since the way drawing is handled in Windows [like, anything to do with DirectDraw at all] doesn't really match up nicely to how drawing is handled under most Linux systems.
SSF seemed fine enough, but you'd have to judge for yourself.
Also, Ikaruga is a lot more accessible in general, whether in terms of platform availability or just getting to grips with the game. Definitely worth playing.
As for people feeling abandoned, or MAME's non arcade stuff being pointless etc.
Nah, MAME's non-arcade stuff isn't pointless. There's a bunch of stuff that MAME does beyond coin-op machines that just flat out isn't going to get emulated any other way.
hell, one thing that's caught my eye is that MAME finally can boot IRIX to desktop on an emulated Indy R5000 -- it's slow as hell and the driver does need work since IRIX seems to access things pretty differently than the boot ROM does, but it gets to the desktop and even some GL software works [depending on IRIX release picked], which is dramatically further than basically any other emulator

There are tons of machines and bits of hardware that loads of people aren't going to care about, but it's going to be interesting work to someone.
Come check out my website, I guess. Random stuff I've worked on over the last two decades.
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

MameHaze wrote:As for people feeling abandoned, or MAME's non arcade stuff being pointless etc. I did just emulate the Plug and Play "GeiGeki Go Go Shooting"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BMiCuQ90sM
Did you guys get this thing yet?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/2002-Takara-Po ... 2217581929
MameHaze
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by MameHaze »

let me check, we do have quite a stockpile
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

For posterity (since the link will eventually die) it's a listing for "2002 Takara Poko Poko Hammer Video Game & Mallet Boxed Set Japan Japanese."

Note the seller is not certain that this particular auction is 100% complete (lazily didn't include a shot of the contents which would be very helpful).

& let me also note that I'm really happy with the good work MAME devs are doing, as always. Getting a shot at trying out the cool SGI machines that I've never been able to justify plunking down the $$$/$ for is one, and those plug-n-plays is another. Hoping to see classic 2000s cell phone platforms (S60, BREW, etc.) added to the mix someday.
MameHaze
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Re: Radiant Silvergun emulation?

Post by MameHaze »

Yeah, we know it's a XaviX one. Assuming it's digital pads, probably woudln't even be difficult to emulate.

It's not an uncommon game tho, and we can pick it up in Japan for less, although postage will be slightly more. Since the guy who processes them for us is probably on a break for about 6 months now, and we already have a stockpile of items, we've decided to wait.
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