TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and more!
TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and more!
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/ ... p-goodness
Zaxxon
Action Fighter
Wrestle War
Desert Breaker
Raiden
Batsugun
Dogyuun
V-V / Grind Stormer
Same! Same! Same! / Fire Shark
Outzone
Tatsujin / Truxton
Tatsujin / Truxton II
Kingdom Grandprix
Armed Police Batrider
Battle Bakraid
Strikers 1945
Gunbird
Moon Cresta
Cosmo Police Galivan
Sonic Wings
Very nice line up of games!
Zaxxon
Action Fighter
Wrestle War
Desert Breaker
Raiden
Batsugun
Dogyuun
V-V / Grind Stormer
Same! Same! Same! / Fire Shark
Outzone
Tatsujin / Truxton
Tatsujin / Truxton II
Kingdom Grandprix
Armed Police Batrider
Battle Bakraid
Strikers 1945
Gunbird
Moon Cresta
Cosmo Police Galivan
Sonic Wings
Very nice line up of games!
It begins in deep space warped by evil power
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Amazing games lineup, quite a few titles I've always wanted to play there or don't get much mention nowadays which is always nice to see.
...But I'm not sure if I'll get one. I was deeply disappointed by the Astro City Mini last year and sold it within a day of receiving it. The external chassis was almost perfect if it weren't for the mismatching display size and cheap faux chrome. The microswitched stick was also good and a huge improvement coming from the NeoGeo Mini, so good that I cancelled my order for the external stick.
But that's where the positives ended, the terrible image quality on the display and via the HDMI out is what killed it for me. The three biggest issues were:
* Lack of interpolation caused extremely obvious pixel crawl on every single game
* One of the worst scanlines filters I've seen, literally thick black lines across every other in-game 'line', but the image itself wasn't properly integer scaled so it's just one big mess.
* Even with the scanlines filter off you don't get a crisp image, since it's not integer scaled, instead of being pixel doubled to 640 x 448 the entire 800 x 480 display was filled, aspect ratio preserved.
If Sega improves upon the in-built screen resolution and output resolution, as well as the image quality, they'd be on to a winner. M2 wasn't involved with the Astro City Mini though, so I'm not holding my breath. The Game Gear Micro was also a disappointing cash grab with emulation and image quality far worse than 3DS Virtual Console that M2 themselves worked on.
If this disappoints in a similar way I'm sure it'll make a mean desk toy though. I'm not sure playing these games on a device with that form factor - with such a small display that you can't hold up to your face like a handheld - is actually desirable, you see. This is why the HDMI output and image quality really has to be spot on here, I'd love to have this as a fun desk toy that's versatile enough to be used in anger hooked up via HDMI. The games lineup is too good for them to mess this up a second time.
...But I'm not sure if I'll get one. I was deeply disappointed by the Astro City Mini last year and sold it within a day of receiving it. The external chassis was almost perfect if it weren't for the mismatching display size and cheap faux chrome. The microswitched stick was also good and a huge improvement coming from the NeoGeo Mini, so good that I cancelled my order for the external stick.
But that's where the positives ended, the terrible image quality on the display and via the HDMI out is what killed it for me. The three biggest issues were:
* Lack of interpolation caused extremely obvious pixel crawl on every single game
* One of the worst scanlines filters I've seen, literally thick black lines across every other in-game 'line', but the image itself wasn't properly integer scaled so it's just one big mess.
* Even with the scanlines filter off you don't get a crisp image, since it's not integer scaled, instead of being pixel doubled to 640 x 448 the entire 800 x 480 display was filled, aspect ratio preserved.
If Sega improves upon the in-built screen resolution and output resolution, as well as the image quality, they'd be on to a winner. M2 wasn't involved with the Astro City Mini though, so I'm not holding my breath. The Game Gear Micro was also a disappointing cash grab with emulation and image quality far worse than 3DS Virtual Console that M2 themselves worked on.
If this disappoints in a similar way I'm sure it'll make a mean desk toy though. I'm not sure playing these games on a device with that form factor - with such a small display that you can't hold up to your face like a handheld - is actually desirable, you see. This is why the HDMI output and image quality really has to be spot on here, I'd love to have this as a fun desk toy that's versatile enough to be used in anger hooked up via HDMI. The games lineup is too good for them to mess this up a second time.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
My Dog(yuun), that's a damn fine lineup.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Want to like this but surely the emulation on atleast Armed Police Batrider & Battle Bakraid will be disappointing. Hope im wrong and probobly will buy it anyway since i skipped previous astro mini and i own a new astro cab so i cant resist this one but i will wait till the reviews are in.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
haha, what an embattled community we are: "it's too good to be true, surely it's going to suck."CRP wrote:Want to like this but surely the emulation on atleast Armed Police Batrider & Battle Bakraid will be disappointing.
Anyone know who's handling everything under the hood? I saw a Hamster Corp. trademark on the Sega site where the preorders are presumably up, but it was buried in with a bunch of other company trademarks. Anyone able to pull this info out of the announcement?
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I think the Hamster logo is because they have the rights to Nihon Bussan's portfolio of games, and Moon Cresta is on there. Not sure about the rest, but I'm worried that whoever is handling the emulation will be spread too thinly here and the quality will be inconsistent depending on game. And even then they'll be programming a low power ARM chip which might not have a GPU (the Game Gear Micro was powered by a 600Mhz ARM9 without any GPU, which explains its ridiculously short battery life and worse emulation compared with 3DS virtual console).jehu wrote:haha, what an embattled community we are: "it's too good to be true, surely it's going to suck."CRP wrote:Want to like this but surely the emulation on atleast Armed Police Batrider & Battle Bakraid will be disappointing.
Anyone know who's handling everything under the hood? I saw a Hamster Corp. trademark on the Sega site where the preorders are presumably up, but it was buried in with a bunch of other company trademarks. Anyone able to pull this info out of the announcement?
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Just trying to be realistic about the expectations here, if M2 cant emulate Batrider well on ps4 then i dont have any hope if will run well on astro mini.jehu wrote:haha, what an embattled community we are: "it's too good to be true, surely it's going to suck."CRP wrote:Want to like this but surely the emulation on atleast Armed Police Batrider & Battle Bakraid will be disappointing.
https://www.siliconera.com/m2-discusses ... -and-more/One of the bottlenecks for a rerelease of Armed Police Batrider by M2 is that it runs even slower than Battle Garegga, as the game came out afterwards. Overall, games from the latter half of the 90s are barely able to run with the PS4’s specs in M2 rereleases.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I might have to get involved with this. I see the purchase links currently point to Segatoys.com. Is this likely to be available on Amazon Japan, do we think? The last one was, right?
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Pretty neat, and surprising. I quite like my Astro City Mini, been playing Alien Syndrome on it. This would make a nice companion to it.
No matter how good a game is, somebody will always hate it. No matter how bad a game is, somebody will always love it.
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Sega Toys are handling the emulation again. Expectations should be appropriately set given the sheer breadth of games that they are supporting, the dubious performance from whatever off the shelf ARM chip they throw in, the limited budget the project is bound to receive, and the questionable results achieved in the previous Astro City Mini.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Love the video at the link, the narrator is stoked! Awesome lineup, Batrider finally gets a release!
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I guess what I'm wondering is whether this is "eek, these games run like actual shite" type emulation problems or "actually, these run fine for normal humans and it's just them hyper-critical online types getting uppity because the input lag is 1ms worse than the original, the slowdown is slightly off and colour palette isn't precisely 100% spot on" type emulation problems?
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I like my Astro mini. Not as good as some dedicated ports, but not a disaster either. Defo picking this up.
XBL & Switch: mjparker77 / PSN: BellyFullOfHell
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Damn, so many games I want in a format that I don't want them in.
These could make a cool gift for a younger gamer that hasn't been exposed to the genre yet.
I was just thinking about how people sleep on Zaxxon. Sure it's archaic now, but it was so innovative and original for its time. Rumor has it that the subcontractor who programmed Zaxxon also quietly did Donkey Kong and others. It was much more exciting for the era than Scramble IMO.
Edit: The developer of Zaxxon and Donkey Kong was company called Ikegami Tsushinki.
http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php ... _Tsushinki
These could make a cool gift for a younger gamer that hasn't been exposed to the genre yet.
I was just thinking about how people sleep on Zaxxon. Sure it's archaic now, but it was so innovative and original for its time. Rumor has it that the subcontractor who programmed Zaxxon also quietly did Donkey Kong and others. It was much more exciting for the era than Scramble IMO.
Edit: The developer of Zaxxon and Donkey Kong was company called Ikegami Tsushinki.
http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php ... _Tsushinki
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
The emulation on the original Astro City Mini wasn't bad, it was more accurate than Mame for many of the games. The problem was the image quality was really quite bad, lacking both integer scaling and interpolation, leading to distracting pixel crawl on both the Mini's 480p display and the HDMI out. The scanlines option didn't help either, one of the worst implementation of virtual scanlines I've seen. It really will depend on how sensitive your eyes are to it, and whether you swear by filters or don't mind raw pixels with pixel crawling artifacts all over the place.banjoted wrote:I guess what I'm wondering is whether this is "eek, these games run like actual shite" type emulation problems or "actually, these run fine for normal humans and it's just them hyper-critical online types getting uppity because the input lag is 1ms worse than the original, the slowdown is slightly off and colour palette isn't precisely 100% spot on" type emulation problems?
The worry with this new unit, beyond them repeating the same mistakes with the image quality, is some of the games are more ambitious and there are a lot of them, so Sega Toys are likely to be spread thinly again working on reproducing them. I hope they do a good job and the display options are significantly better. Will definitely get one if so but after the first Astro Mini being rather disappointing I'm not going to preorder this.
Last edited by harborline765 on Fri Dec 17, 2021 4:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I wish Congo Bongo made the cut. It's not as interesting a game as Donkey Kong, but it's a fascinating history piece and the arcade version is much better than the SG1000 port: https://nintendosegajapan.com/2016/01/2 ... go-sg1000/Rastan78 wrote:Edit: The developer of Zaxxon and Donkey Kong was company called Ikegami Tsushinki.
http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php ... _Tsushinki
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I really wanted to love the first AC Mini, but the game selection relegated it to shelf status within a few weeks. THIS though... THIS is goooood. Can't wait!
Formerly known as 8 1/2. I return on my second credit!
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Gsk https://twitter.com/gosokkyu/status/1471816918075985921condolences to everyone waking up to the realisation that Batrider & Bakraid have been consigned to a desk toy
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TransatlanticFoe
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Both are on the PS360 Mega Drive collection as bonuses. I miss when this sort of thing got an actual release for consoles and not a weird standalone device.harborline765 wrote:I wish Congo Bongo made the cut. It's not as interesting a game as Donkey Kong, but it's a fascinating history piece and the arcade version is much better than the SG1000 port: https://nintendosegajapan.com/2016/01/2 ... go-sg1000/Rastan78 wrote:Edit: The developer of Zaxxon and Donkey Kong was company called Ikegami Tsushinki.
http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php ... _Tsushinki
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
This will be an essential purchase. Even if it's relegated to occasionally playing with/on the actual hardware, and still mostly emulating, just having legal licenses to play many of these games and a legitimate means to do so are reason enough.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Same here. They can't create the same fear of missing out that will drive scalpers and collectors to hoard these things with an easily available console release. Gotta drive up those preorders.TransatlanticFoe wrote:I miss when this sort of thing got an actual release for consoles and not a weird standalone device.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I quite liked my original Astro Mini, even though I questioned some of the choices for inclusion when Sega has so many awesome arcade games from the 80s/90s that have never had a proper home release.
I also agree that the scanlines are terrible... why they thought that was ok, I don't know.
Great selection of games on this tate version of the AC, but what the hell is Wrestle War doing in there? Wrestle War and Batrider... eh?!!
I also agree that the scanlines are terrible... why they thought that was ok, I don't know.
Great selection of games on this tate version of the AC, but what the hell is Wrestle War doing in there? Wrestle War and Batrider... eh?!!
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Cheers for that. This all sounds pretty fair tbh. I'm certainly not a big fan of aggressive scanlines. I may possibly be able to tolerate the crawl, but is definitely something I need to ponder. Thanks.harborline765 wrote:The emulation on the original Astro City Mini wasn't bad, it was more accurate than Mame for many of the games. The problem was the image quality was really quite bad, lacking both integer scaling and interpolation, leading to distracting pixel crawl on both the Mini's 480p display and the HDMI out. The scanlines option didn't help either, one of the worst implementation of virtual scanlines I've seen. It really will depend on how sensitive your eyes are to it, and whether you swear by filters or don't mind raw pixels with pixel crawling artifacts all over the place.banjoted wrote:I guess what I'm wondering is whether this is "eek, these games run like actual shite" type emulation problems or "actually, these run fine for normal humans and it's just them hyper-critical online types getting uppity because the input lag is 1ms worse than the original, the slowdown is slightly off and colour palette isn't precisely 100% spot on" type emulation problems?
The worry with this new unit, beyond them repeating the same mistakes with the image quality, is some of the games are more ambitious and there are a lot of them, so Sega Toys are likely to be spread thinly again working on reproducing them. I hope they do a good job and the display options are significantly better. Will definitely get one if so but after the first Astro Mini being rather disappointing I'm not going to preorder this.
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To Far Away Times
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
I would be all over this if it was Arcade 1-UP sized.
I can't imagine using something this small to play the games for more than a casual credit or two.
I can't imagine using something this small to play the games for more than a casual credit or two.
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
That's not saying much if 32bit games are included like in that case.harborline765 wrote:
The emulation on the original Astro City Mini wasn't bad, it was more accurate than Mame for many of the games.
As I've read elsewhere, most games here use originally 320x240 (240x320, to be precise) and that should simplify the matter a lot for both - the device's monitor and the TV ouput, in comparison with the first ACM (which had even a 25khz game), but the problem is that it doesn't seem these people care enough, even for Japanese developers standards. It doesn't seem there's nothing more ambitious here than say Virtua Fighter or GA Revenge of Death Adder and most have glitches-free emulation in Mame, but these developers are not reliable and it's indeed a shame this likely implies we won't get say, an M2 Batrider on a proper system in many years now. But as this thread shows, people are happy with anything, so we'll get more of this instead of more of the other as it's been happening for some time now.harborline765 wrote:The problem was the image quality was really quite bad, lacking both integer scaling and interpolation, leading to distracting pixel crawl on both the Mini's 480p display and the HDMI out. The scanlines option didn't help either, one of the worst implementation of virtual scanlines I've seen. It really will depend on how sensitive your eyes are to it, and whether you swear by filters or don't mind raw pixels with pixel crawling artifacts all over the place.
The worry with this new unit, beyond them repeating the same mistakes with the image quality, is some of the games are more ambitious and there are a lot of them, so Sega Toys are likely to be spread thinly again working on reproducing them. I hope they do a good job and the display options are significantly better.
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
To this note and others talking about it being just a desk toy, remember that it has HDMI out and supports a variety of USB controllers. It's just a mini console that happens to have a screen on it. I have my original AC mini hooked up to a monitor and it's great.To Far Away Times wrote:I would be all over this if it was Arcade 1-UP sized.
I can't imagine using something this small to play the games for more than a casual credit or two.
Formerly known as 8 1/2. I return on my second credit!
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEGA/comments/ ... atibility/
Seems like it's not that easy to find a USB controller that works with the first mini if you missed out buying the official pad? Although a few do work. Any chance you could remap the buttons on it?
Seems like it's not that easy to find a USB controller that works with the first mini if you missed out buying the official pad? Although a few do work. Any chance you could remap the buttons on it?
Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Sweet, done easily ?Jonpachi wrote:To Far Away Times wrote: I have my original AC mini hooked up to a monitor and it's great.
Last edited by CRP on Fri Dec 17, 2021 9:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BulletMagnet
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Re: TATE Astro mini with Batrider, Batsugun, Outzone and mor
Rastan78 wrote:Damn, so many games I want in a format that I don't want them in.