Slowdown is PS2 games- modded or not

DBH87 · Post by **DBH87** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 5:28 pm

is it me or is there supposed to be lots of slowdown in the likes of mushi arrange and espgaluda, im using a PAL console with swap magic 3.6 to boot them up, although ive never had any problems with Jap Raiden 3 with swap magic, anyone have any comments ??

AVT · Post by **AVT** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 5:59 pm

I have modded PAL PS2, espgaluda and Raiden 3 works perfectly, without any slowdowns. Well, I can remember only one small slowdown in espgaluda, when last boss battle begins.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 7:37 pm

ESPGaluda has emulated slowdown. It's there on purpose, as it's found in the PCB. Mushi has slowdown as well in Maniac & Ultra modes (and I'm sure Arrnage too) but it's not handled nearly as well as in ESPGaluda. Don't freak out when it jerks around and you run right into a bullet.

AVT · Post by **AVT** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:16 pm

Frankly speaking, I dont belive into emulated slowdowns, until I see the option to turn them off (like "WAIT") and I turn them off permanently. Other way, its just poor programming, some people still dont know how to make PS2 produce 60fps in 2D! I am programmer and I never would implement that special uncontrollable "emulated slowdown", wasting valuable perfomance and lowering FPS, just because some other programmer was lame enough and couldn`t program properly that original PCB! After all, many innocent people (like me) has never seen original, and they must suffer from slowdowns too just because PCB version wasn`t good?!

landshark · Post by **landshark** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:51 pm

The emulated slowdown is likely there because the game would not be possible without it.

Have you seen the true endboss of Mushi-Ultra?

EOJ · Post by **EOJ** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 1:47 am

Yeah, you don't want to be playing Mushi Maniac or Ultra mode with zero slowdown. You wouldn't get past the 3rd stage in Ultra, and I doubt you could get through stage 5 in Maniac. Cave puts the slowdown in to make the game manageable. If you don't like that, don't play Cave games. Play Raiden 3 all day. Or if you must play a Cave game, play Ibara on the PS2. They cut all the slowdown out of that (it's a horrendous port).

Fighter17 · Post by **Fighter17** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 1:54 am

Mod Chips just breaks the region protection bullshit. I don't believe it effects the PS2's CPU at all.

Pixel_Outlaw · Post by **Pixel_Outlaw** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:06 am

By slowing down the shots intentionally you can let the player process all the data and find the best path. I have programmed some fast bullet hell type stuff and i get a bad headach.Although as a programmer you should know how high resource danmaku games are. They are RAM hogs because they need to keep track of collision data for all the shots. Each shot must be tested to see if it is offscreen and if it hits ths ship. Plus you probably have scaling, blurring, rotation and alpha channels. It's not much of a memory hog untill you have 500 shots onscreen all doing realtime transformations and collision checking. My guess is it's probably to be "fair" to the player.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 3:34 am

Other way, its just poor programming, some people still dont know how to make PS2 produce 60fps in 2D!

If by poor you mean good, then you're right. The whole idea behind a port is to replicate the original. In this case, the slowdown is there to encapsulate the arcade experience. In ESPGaluda, it does it almost flawlessly, which is no small feat.

I am programmer and I never would implement that special uncontrollable "emulated slowdown",

No offense, but I don't think you're going to find any sympathy here. The internet is filled with people that think they can program better than most game developers. And well, most of them are tools.

asting valuable perfomance and lowering FPS, just because some other programmer was lame enough and couldn`t program properly that original PCB

After all, many innocent people (like me) has never seen original,

Why not just remake the whole fucking game? By your logic, the original has no bearing on the outcome of the port.

Pixel_Outlaw · Post by **Pixel_Outlaw** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:32 am

^ Smart person.

Most of us here are purests, the closer to the original you can get the more like having the real arcade game in your house.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:41 am

Game slowdown is practically nonexistant if you use HDD.

zakk · Post by **zakk** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 7:07 am

Blade wrote:Game slowdown is practically nonexistant if you use HDD.

That's not the type of slowdown we're discussing

eretsua · Post by **eretsua** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 8:33 am

DBH87 wrote:is it me or is there supposed to be lots of slowdown in the likes of mushi arrange and espgaluda, im using a PAL console with swap magic 3.6 to boot them up, although ive never had any problems with Jap Raiden 3 with swap magic, anyone have any comments ??

i play mushi arrange on both a modded chunky pal ps2 as well as a ntsc-j slimline and both consoles have the same amount of slowdown.

~eretsua.

DBH87 · Post by **DBH87** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:29 am

ok thanks for the info, least now i know its normal.

AVT · Post by **AVT** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:29 pm

GaijinPunch wrote: The whole idea behind a port is to replicate the original. In this case, the slowdown is there to encapsulate the arcade experience.

Well, I think that word "slowdown" is not equal to "slow motion". I like when boss emits hundreds of bullets and they slows down, so I can easily dodge it. But its not because original PCB was overwhelmed with so many bullets and had to lower frame rate. What I see in most cases is just (I think), is bad programming and cheap arcade hardware. Most shmups are fps-depedent (which is bad style of programming - ask any game programmer), so they slows down when ported NTSC->PAL (30fps->25fps) and, of course, there is slowdowns, when too many bullets appears on screen. NOT because developers loves us, but they CANNOT keep stable speed of the game in that case, thats all. If shmups was programmed as fps-independent, there would be just frame dropping, but overall speed of the bullets and ship will stay intact.

No offense, but I don't think you're going to find any sympathy here. The internet is filled with people that think they can program better than most game developers. And well, most of them are tools.

tools=fools ?

I wasnt looking for sympathy just because I`m working in game industry neither I think that I can program better than most game developers, I just mentioned it to explain my angle of view and way of thinking. Oh, well, my English are really really poor

Why not just remake the whole fucking game? By your logic, the original has no bearing on the outcome of the port.

Thats cool idea! As soon as Cave will send me all graphic sources of their games

Really, I`d like to redraw that awful explosions in Gigawing Generations (I like GG, even if its not the Cave`s) and add analog support in some of the PS2 games.

The original is the first version of the game, the port may be second. Bugs may be fixed, graphics updated. Otherwise, all Packman games must contain blinking sprites for "arcade experience" (the original hardware wasnt capable to draw so many sprites in one frame, so half of them had to wait for their turn in next frame).

I was playing R-type Final on "Bydo" difficulty two days ago. I managed to get to end of level 3 just because of slowdowns. But I wouldnt thank the developers for that. They programmed the game badly.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 8:21 pm

What I see in most cases is just (I think), is bad programming and cheap arcade hardware

Well, I hate to break it to you, but it's not 1993. These types of games don't warrant the income to come out on the most cutting hedge hardware. But then again, they don't really need to either.

Anyways, don't play ESPGaluda II. There's tons and tons of slowdown in it -- a mechanic of the game, and yes, some of it is due to hardware limitation.

benj · Post by **benj** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 8:27 pm

AVT wrote:If shmups was programmed as fps-independent, there would be just frame dropping, but overall speed of the bullets and ship will stay intact.

I rather have slowdown than dropped frames.

AVT · Post by **AVT** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 9:00 pm

I want to play espgaluda 2 anyway

Well, dont you feel that developers force you to cheat in some way, because there is slowdowns in tough moments of the game? And everybody is happy, but you cannot win the game without that small cheats, and you call that "arcade perfect"

I feel myself like cheater. The game should kill me in that moment, but hardware was too buzy drawing hundreds of sprites, so I managed to flee away...

One day I managed to finish Ikaruga with 5 credits just because Chancast emulator produced 40fps instead of 60, because of my old PC (I dont have Dreamcast). Several months later I couldnt repeat that at full speed

Anyway, "Arcade perfect" for me means : no skipped animations, full speed, full (or updated) resolution, all levels, all bosses. Otherwise it must be called "arcade imperfect"

Well, I should wait for PS3 shmups ports, then we will see thew truth. PS3 will be powerful enough (I hope so

) to handle 2D properly.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 9:03 pm

You need to talk another look at the word then. Arcade Perfect has nothing to do w/ the quality of the arcade port, no matter how good/shoddy it may be. It has to do with how faithful the port is to the arcade version. In the case of ESPGaluda, it's the most accurate port this gen (or most gens for that matter) where the underlying hardware is not the same.

One day I managed to finish Ikaruga with 5 credits just because Chancast emulator produced 40fps instead of 60,

Well, if you're credit-feeding in the first place you're already missing the boat in that respect as well.

gameoverDude · Post by **gameoverDude** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:14 pm

benj wrote:
AVT wrote:If shmups was programmed as fps-independent, there would be just frame dropping, but overall speed of the bullets and ship will stay intact.
I rather have slowdown than dropped frames.

So would I. If you want to see how badly dropped frames can be a game killer, just look at PS1 Viewpoint. During the 3rd boss battle, the frame rate drops into the teens or lower- making for a choppy mess.

The 5th stage of Ketsui has a moment of frame dropping but this is mercifully brief- it's not a gamekiller.

Pixel_Outlaw · Post by **Pixel_Outlaw** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:36 pm

The problem with loosing frames is that bullets suddenly "jump" from point to point. One moment the bullet is 30 pixels away 4 dropped frames later it is right on top of the player.

Dandy J · Post by **Dandy J** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:28 pm

AVT wrote: Words

Hey, stupid, the slowdown is there on purpose. Cave uses multiple bullet sprites for the sole reason of making the hardware choke.

AVT · Post by **AVT** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:04 am

Dandy J wrote: Hey, stupid, the slowdown is there on purpose. Cave uses multiple bullet sprites for the sole reason of making the hardware choke.

This is the stupidest thing I ever heard ...

Who told you that?

Strider77 · Post by **Strider77** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:45 am

I don't think that's the stupidest thing I have heard. I don't know if its true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if a game like mushi was slowing down do to cave intentially pushing the hardware to the point of slowdown.

I thought of it was kind of a joke in a way. The fact they wanted to through so much at you the only way you could survive is b/c of the slowdown.

Now I have no idea if this slowdown in these newer shooters is programmed or do to the hardware be pushed or not. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that some are b/c the hardware is intentially pushed to that point.

For the record I'm not one who's super concerned about the slowdown being recreated flawlessly. It deffinately makes sense in mushi's case. But it sounds like you don't play shooters that much or very casually to say his comment is stupid.

Pixel_Outlaw · Post by **Pixel_Outlaw** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:21 am

It's probably not the best way to slow the game down because or overusing resources but if well tested I see no problems with that method. What is there really left to discuss?

Strider77 · Post by **Strider77** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:23 pm

I was never sure either way, but I had imagined in atleast some of their games they taxed the hardware enough to actually really slow down and left it in on purpose. dunno..... like i said before I am not that caught up on the emulated slowdown. I like it there if it is really supose to and makes a dramatic gameplay diff but I wouldn't sit and analyze it to make sure it's in all the exact same spots. I turn it off all the time in dodonpachi on psx.

AVT · Post by **AVT** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 5:35 pm

Pixel_Outlaw wrote:It's probably not the best way to slow the game down because or overusing resources but if well tested I see no problems with that method.

Its the WORST way, because of low fps. Its very painful, I couldnt play G-Darius on PSX because of that horrible slowdowns. The best way is to use the timer, because you can modify its delta value very smoothly and even change the speed of sound playback to increase the effect of slow motion in cool moments.

Well, I have to agree that slowdown is better than frame dropping.

I am casual shmupper, so I cannot judge by myself in such cases.

Anyway, I think they must reduce the number of bullets in cases of slowdown. They can choose some of distant bullets (from the current position of the ship) and remove them, keeping the maximum level of sprites resonable.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 7:11 pm

Yeah, we all know, you're a programmer. Why not mail Cave & tell them what a shitty job their doing?

bVork · Post by **bVork** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 7:53 pm

AVT wrote:Its the WORST way, because of low fps.

I think you're confusing framerate and slowdown. Just because everything slows down doesn't mean the framerate drops.

AVT wrote:I couldnt play G-Darius on PSX because of that horrible slowdowns.

G-Darius on PSX is a poor example, as it runs with a lot of slowdown that is not present in the arcade version (or in the Taito Memories version). The slowdown in that port is not an intentional part of the game - it's due to the game being a little too complicated for the PSX to handle.

AVT wrote:The best way is to use the timer, because you can modify its delta value very smoothly and even change the speed of sound playback to increase the effect of slow motion in cool moments.

Using "natural" slowdown means that the programmer doesn't have to work out the ideal level of slowdown for every bullet pattern. This means that every bit of slowdown is relative, so that slowdown scales smoothly between patterns rather than jumping around. It allows a player to predict how much slowdown will occur, rather than relying on the whim of the programmer.

On the other hand, it would certainly be possible to do timer-based slowdown by basing it on "natural" slowdown and then removing the overloading. I bet that's how a lot of home ports are handled.

Changing the way audio plays when a game slows down would just sound terrible.

Strider77 · Post by **Strider77** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:12 pm

Why not mail Cave & tell them what a shitty job their doing?

I kinda have to agree on this, not to be a dick..... But what wonderous works of art have you helped create yourself?

shmups.system11.org

Slowdown is PS2 games- modded or not

Slowdown is PS2 games- modded or not

Re: Slowdown is PS2 games- modded or not