M2 Toaplan collection

[Sumez]

Backwards compatible doesn't mean a Switch 2 title can be played on Switch 1. So they wouldn't have a large user base if they were releasing it as a Switch 2 title. Though they've talked in the past about some stuff being harder to do on Switch, so they may be waiting for that higher power of a Switch 2 to do the next titles they want to do.

If M2 can't make Tatsujin run well with the power of a Switch, don't ever come telling me again that they are the "gold standard" of anything XD

[MJR]

Backwards compatible doesn't mean a Switch 2 title can be played on Switch 1. So they wouldn't have a large user base if they were releasing it as a Switch 2 title. Though they've talked in the past about some stuff being harder to do on Switch, so they may be waiting for that higher power of a Switch 2 to do the next titles they want to do.

If M2 can't make Tatsujin run well with the power of a Switch, don't ever come telling me again that they are the "gold standard" of anything XD

Pretty much this. I hope this silly talk of "can't do 90's game on current gen" would just stop, especially when we're talking about 2D games. Good grief.

[Steven]

I'm still baffled at how they can get Teki-Paki and Tatsujin Ou running on Switch but can't get Batrider running on PS4 even though they already made the single best version of Garegga on PS4 and all four of those games' PCBs are (mostly?) the same exact hardware. Like WTF are you kidding me?

[MJR]

I was playing Batrider on Mame on PC back in late 2000, and it was quite playable. I would assume that the PC I had 24 years ago was perhaps not as powerful as current generation consoles are.

[Acid]

OutZone and FixEight please.

[Johnpv]

If M2 can't make Tatsujin run well with the power of a Switch, don't ever come telling me again that they are the "gold standard" of anything XD

Run well and running to the standard that they want may be two different things. I don't work at M2, but I've seen them make various comments about different games not running how they would like on PS4, and on Switch. Your gold standard comment is literally the opposite of that. Putting out something that runs well enough is what most other places do, putting out stuff that runs perfectly would be the gold standard.

[brokenhalo]

I'm still baffled at how they can get Teki-Paki and Tatsujin Ou running on Switch but can't get Batrider running on PS4 even though they already made the single best version of Garegga on PS4 and all four of those games' PCBs are (mostly?) the same exact hardware. Like WTF are you kidding me?

Something similar happened with Arika porting Cave games back on PS2. They made fantastic ports of Espgaluda and DOJ, but Ketsui kicked their asses. For whatever reason, they couldn't get the reverse scrolling section of stage 5 to run right, and eventually gave up on the port. Could be something as simple and nitpicky with Batrider.

[Rastan78]

I think part of the idea that they can't run Batrider on PS4 was a translation issue by Siliconera. They did sort of an abridged translation based on the original interview by Denfaminicogamer.

From Siliconera:

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

Original interview via Translate:

Kubota:
　This is true for Battle Garegga as well, but when we port arcade games from the late 1990s, we always try to push the PS4's processing power to its limits .

Horii:
　Rather than "bringing out" the full potential, we're trying to make the feel of playing on an LCD monitor and PS4 similar to the sensation of playing on a CRT cabinet at an arcade .

Horii:
　Regardless of whether it will be released or not, if we were to simply port it, it's actually already finished . No adjustments or arrangements have been made, though.

──And again...are you serious? (laughs)

Horii:
　"Batrider" has a lot of different elements, such as branching courses, and trying to come up with gadgets and plan everything that would encompass them all would seem to be extremely difficult, so we've stopped at just porting it.

[MJR]

OK, so it was just some kind of made up trajectory from Siliconera? Wow.. well at least that explains where that misinformation came from.

Consoles and PC's have been able to emulate pretty much all 90's arcade games -at least 2D ones- for a very long time now. If something is not right in the emulation, it's not because the platform running it is not powerful enough, it's because there is a glitch or bug in the emulation, and the people doing the port did not have enough time / resources / skill / whatever to do it correctly, or they didn't notice it, or perhaps thought no one would notice.

I am myself pretty sure that we will get all the expected Toaplan titles to Switch from M2, even if Switch 2 bumps to shops somewhere down the line. If not, I think it's more of an issue whether M2 has enough time to finetune them up to the quality they are known for. Quality does not take incredibly powerful hardware, it takes time. Anyone who has worked on development longer than a year can tell you that.

[Steven]

lol fucking Siliconera.

If anyone has the original Japanese text, which I am too lazy to find myself, post it and I'll translate it for real.

[Bassa-Bassa]

That should be this.

Best wishes.

[Bassa-Bassa]

Consoles and PC's have been able to emulate pretty much all 90's arcade games -at least 2D ones- for a very long time now. If something is not right in the emulation, it's not because the platform running it is not powerful enough, it's because there is a glitch or bug in the emulation, and the people doing the port did not have enough time / resources / skill / whatever to do it correctly, or they didn't notice it, or perhaps thought no one would notice.

Emulation went a step forward a few years ago - it requires powerful hardware to solve (or compensate) the v-sync issue and minimize input lag with that, I think I told you about frame delay and run ahead in this thread? For most devs, latency is not a major issue, but for M2 it always was.

[Steven]

That should be this.

Best wishes.

I didn't find any instances of Batrider anywhere in there. Maybe I missed it, but I did find something else important:




GET STAR

[Bassa-Bassa]

Sorry, it should be this.

It's the only interview I recall them ever mentioning Batrider together with this.

[Rastan78]

Sorry, it should be this.

Yeah that's it

[MJR]

Consoles and PC's have been able to emulate pretty much all 90's arcade games -at least 2D ones- for a very long time now. If something is not right in the emulation, it's not because the platform running it is not powerful enough, it's because there is a glitch or bug in the emulation, and the people doing the port did not have enough time / resources / skill / whatever to do it correctly, or they didn't notice it, or perhaps thought no one would notice.

Emulation went a step forward a few years ago - it requires powerful hardware to solve (or compensate) the v-sync issue and minimize input lag with that, I think I told you about frame delay and run ahead in this thread? For most devs, latency is not a major issue, but for M2 it always was.

Sorry, but I think this is utter bullshit. Emulation has not taken "steps just few years ago", most of the concepts have been around for a long while now. There are no magical uber routines that take modern consoles to their knees, thats just utter rubbish. Emulating old hardware properly down to the finiest detail with lag and everything takes TIME, and emulating everything properly from 90's / 00's hardware must be a nightmare.

But your post is so ludicrous that I regret that I even started writing here, I should have known already that this forum has delusional lunatics.
I do not wish to continue this conversation with you.

[Some-Mist]

c'mon, you know you wanna hang out with us

[Rastan78]

But your post is so ludicrous that I regret that I even started writing here, I should have known already that this forum has delusional lunatics.
I do not wish to continue this conversation with you.

I'm not very knowledgeable about it, but isn't runahead something that came in like the last 5 or 6 years and requires significantly more processing power to implement? Some people have speculated that M2 probably uses some form of runahead to reduce latency.

[MJR]

But your post is so ludicrous that I regret that I even started writing here, I should have known already that this forum has delusional lunatics.
I do not wish to continue this conversation with you.

I'm not very knowledgeable about it, but isn't runahead something that came in like the last 5 or 6 years and requires significantly more processing power to implement? Some people have speculated that M2 probably uses some form of runahead to reduce latency.

All that internet talk is just bullshit with people who have zero knowledge of anything waving their arms. Ask anyone who has written emulators themselves and clearly people here have never written any.

Input lag can be eliminated by putting little more thought when the joystick input is being read, for example, start of every scanline instead of every frame. Most of the emulation (not done by M2) is just simply badly implemented, because people doing it didn't take the to study the hardware properly, or they didn't have the documentation, or just didn't understand what good solid gameplay experience even means.

While some very old arcade hardware has unique quirks that can be real trouble to emulate, modern ARM and x64 chips are able to emulate perfectly any 2D arcade hardware.

[Steven]

It's even more interesting when one considers that the fucking Saturn (happy 30th anniversary, Saturn! You still are one of the top 2 best game consoles ever made!) is capable of at least partially emulating the arcade boards that Garegga/Batrider/etc. run on, as Saturn Batsugun is mostly running in emulation. I believe Saturn Garegga also is, but I'm less sure about this one than Batsugun. Batsugun runs on the same arcade hardware as Garegga, of course, so it wouldn't surprise me.

Sorry, it should be this.

It's the only interview I recall them ever mentioning Batrider together with this.

Cool. I'll take a look when I get a chance later tonight.

Many hours later edit: Alright, Horii said in this interview that although Garegga and Batrider share the same hardware, Batrider is able to use more of the PCB's potential than Garegga. I'm guessing that's a super vague way to say that Batrider is super optimized in a way that Garegga isn't.

Then, Kubota says that M2 Garegga pushes the PS4 to its limits, and Horii clarifies that they did this to replicate the feeling of playing Garegga as accurately as possible.

Uh... what.

Is Battle Fucking Garegga so difficult to emulate as to really need almost the full power of the PS4 just to emulate a glorified ROM hack of a game that runs on ancient hardware that's more or less from 22 years before the PS4 launched?

[Lord British]

OutZone and FixEight please.

And Knuckle Bash as one of the bonuses

[Lander]

I'm not very knowledgeable about it, but isn't runahead something that came in like the last 5 or 6 years and requires significantly more processing power to implement? Some people have speculated that M2 probably uses some form of runahead to reduce latency.

I'm not 100% on the timeframe, but yes - runahead scales multiplicatively based on the amount of frames that need to be compensated, and the complexity of the emulated hardware.

Which is why even a top-line modern CPU will exhibit noticeable stutter on input when simulating a non-trivial amount of extra frames for an expensive system; it'll eat as much performance as you ask it to.

Circa now, PS1 and up (and comparably-powerful arcades) put a ceiling on how many frames you can reasonably shave off without introducing issues. Modulate that down to account for the PS4 processor, and it's not unbelievable that achieving arcade-perfect presentation (i.e. lagless, accounting for all the modern sources of it) would be tougher for later 2D arcade titles.

All that internet talk is just bullshit with people who have zero knowledge of anything waving their arms. Ask anyone who has written emulators themselves and clearly people here have never written any.

Input lag can be eliminated by putting little more thought when the joystick input is being read, for example, start of every scanline instead of every frame. Most of the emulation (not done by M2) is just simply badly implemented, because people doing it didn't take the to study the hardware properly, or they didn't have the documentation, or just didn't understand what good solid gameplay experience even means.

While some very old arcade hardware has unique quirks that can be real trouble to emulate, modern ARM and x64 chips are able to emulate perfectly any 2D arcade hardware.

Smartly-designed input polling is not comparable to runahead. The former reduces lag within a single frame by staying in-sync with the emulated hardware, the latter is a higher-order time travel process that uses entire frames of emulated hardware (plus associated expense) as primitive computational units. Runahead subsumes the gains made by sensible polling and other traditional optimizations.

Modern chips can handle traditional frame-at-a-time emulation just fine, but there's only so much cost you can shave off within that problem space. Hence the introduction of 'magical uber routines' to brute-force the issue by spending oft-plentiful spare host cycles on speculative execution.

I'm guessing that's a super vague way to say that Batrider is super optimized in a way that Garegga isn't.

That likely comes down to speedhacks; if Garegga doesn't use all of the cycles the hardware provides, whatever's left on the table can be skipped without consequence by a sufficiently-specialized emulator.

It's even more interesting when one considers that the fucking Saturn (happy 30th anniversary, Saturn! You still are one of the top 2 best game consoles ever made!) is capable of at least partially emulating the arcade boards that Garegga/Batrider/etc. run on, as Saturn Batsugun is mostly running in emulation. I believe Saturn Garegga also is, but I'm less sure about this one than Batsugun. Batsugun runs on the same arcade hardware as Garegga, of course, so it wouldn't surprise me.

The Saturn was never trying to run N instances of a game at the same time to cut down input lag, though. I expect the port developers were happy to see their work run playably at all, let alone be arcade-perfect.

Stick Retroarch on a jailbroken PS4 and it'd probably run playably under default settings, but I doubt trying to dial in an M2-standard experience by turning on all the expensive latency reduction features would be as trivial.

All that said:

I measured to make sure I'm not talking total shite

Batsugun
- Has 1 frame of internal lag
- Is cheap enough to run that cranking runahead to ~12 frames does not exhibit telltale 'too expensive' stutter on a good modern CPU

Batrider
A. Has 3 frames of internal lag
B. Can also be raised to ~12 frames without exhibiting stutter

Which is a far cry from games that challenge emulation in practice, like CV1K stuff and 32-bit; Batsugun is ideal-case, and Batrider - while ~3x more costly for equivalent results on top of any PCB power differential - still scales well.

You'd have to test on a PS4-equivalent box to say for sure, but both do seem fairly tractable.

[MJR]

All that internet talk is just bullshit with people who have zero knowledge of anything waving their arms. Ask anyone who has written emulators themselves and clearly people here have never written any.

Input lag can be eliminated by putting little more thought when the joystick input is being read, for example, start of every scanline instead of every frame. Most of the emulation (not done by M2) is just simply badly implemented, because people doing it didn't take the to study the hardware properly, or they didn't have the documentation, or just didn't understand what good solid gameplay experience even means.

While some very old arcade hardware has unique quirks that can be real trouble to emulate, modern ARM and x64 chips are able to emulate perfectly any 2D arcade hardware.

Smartly-designed input polling is not comparable to runahead. The former reduces lag within a single frame by staying in-sync with the emulated hardware, the latter is a higher-order time travel process that uses entire frames of emulated hardware (plus associated expense) as primitive computational units. Runahead subsumes the gains made by sensible polling and other traditional optimizations.

Modern chips can handle traditional frame-at-a-time emulation just fine, but there's only so much cost you can shave off within that problem space. Hence the introduction of 'magical uber routines' to brute-force the issue by spending oft-plentiful spare host cycles on speculative execution.

So you can emulate the entire system to apply runahead by running multiple speculative emulations to see if input did or didn't occur, so what? And why you didn't just say it in the plain english instead to begin with instead of showing me this paragraph of word salad?

This sounds like someone trying to explain why Stadia games don't suck, while trying too hard to sound impressively technical.

Fuck these savants here, I'm out.

[spmbx]

Maybe someone can merge the bullshit posts here combined with some other bullshit in the yuzo koshiro/earthion thread and make a huge thread named "narcistic technical superiority" or something

[Bassa-Bassa]

So this MJR guy didn't even know that frame delay or run ahead existed, much less what they consist of, yet his approach to the discussion is spouting insulting attempts to everyone who kindly tries to explain here? Can he be out in an official way, please?

[bobrocks95]

Don't get the pushback at all. Runahead is some weird magical stuff but it exists, is expensive for the CPU (PS4 uses a glorified mobile AMD chipset remember that- it had a crummy CPU out of the gate before AMD got their act together with Ryzen), and M2 is surely aware of it and using it.

Battle Garegga also has a "Lag Reduction" setting doesn't it? That could be turning runahead on/off unless they've explained it in more detail before.

[Bassa-Bassa]

I'd totally understand any pushback against run ahead, mind. Unlike frame delay, run ahead is plain out black magic which in my opinion shouldn't be used unless one knows very well how the original game lags in every instance so that the emulation doesn't get corrupted at some point. Stuff only people like M2 can do with reliability. That's not what the guy was arguing, though.

[Lander]

Pray, forgive my err, friends. I had laboured under the delusion that a good scholar posts not for himself, but to share knowledge with his peers, that they might benefit.

God forbid the enthusiast emulation studio thread should try to figure it out, lest they inadvertently unfold the endlessly-speculable möbius strip of why M2 (or whoever else) did or didn't do a thing yet

So you can emulate the entire system to apply runahead by running multiple speculative emulations to see if input did or didn't occur, so what? And why you didn't just say it in the plain english instead to begin with instead of showing me this paragraph of word salad?

This sounds like someone trying to explain why Stadia games don't suck, while trying too hard to sound impressively technical.

Fuck these savants here, I'm out.

You ever learn a thing, then outgrow simple terminology because the formal language is much richer and more descriptive than what you were using before? Yeah, that phenomenon - that's exactly what happened there.

And my word salad was a good 26 words lighter than yours, thank you very much! How about:

Modern emulation tech is not a magical uber-whatever myth disseminated by wacky wavy-armed internet tube men, can be elaborated as such [ed note: given a consenting audience], and has real measurable costs over traditional (mobile chipset-friendly) techniques.

[34 words. -At worst- an apertif, straightforward, but comes off as passive-aggressive absent upfront substantiation of points; needs work. -ed]

Whatever man, you're alright. I'd vote for clemency.

[BIL]

[samspot]

Lots of tech talk, but I still think the answer is much simpler. M2 simply doesn’t have time to port shmups. Shmups are side projects they use to keep busy between the money making projects. As their reputation for quality ports rises, they get more contracts from big publishers.