RF2: "DEAD POINT!" -- The plot thickens...

[MrArgent]

Hi! Registered just to ask around since this seems to be the only place anyone has asked before...

So, you guys know the elusive DEAD POINT! award in Raiden Fighters 2: Operation Hell Dive? I've had a few run-ins with it! It seems to trigger pretty frequently (well, relative to the original SPI version) in the Raiden Legacy port for Android... Any of you have the Raiden Legacy ports, and have you seen the 'DEAD POINT' weirdness popping up? Data related to the iOS and Windows ports would be appreciated!

To prove it, here's 800*1280 of whoa courtesy of my first-generation Nexus 7! (As far as the practicality of playing Raiden Fighters on a touchscreen goes? It's more doable than one might think!)

[BPzeBanshee]

I had no idea this thing existed until now, but Raiden Legacy as a port in general is pretty terrible. Considering I've managed to get Level 1 in RF1 to appear *twice* in stage order, I'd suspect a bug in the port causing it to trigger more regularly than on the board.

EDIT:
Had a look further in the Japanese thread that Alluro linked to which you linked to, and found this:

死んだ直後にスタートを押すと出てくるよ。
意味があるかは不明。

I'll come out when you press the start immediately after dead.
Unknown whether there is a meaning.

Sure enough I gave this a spin today, press START after I died and it did just that, pretty consistently too. Perhaps it's a in-joke, or a debug test they left behind, who knows.

[MrArgent]

I'll come out when you press the start immediately after dead.
Unknown whether there is a meaning.

Sure enough I gave this a spin today, press START after I died and it did just that, pretty consistently too. Perhaps it's a in-joke, or a debug test they left behind, who knows.

Cool, a new development! I was able to replicate the behavior in MAME using the Raiden fighters 2.1 romset. Thanks!

I'm starting to suspect the DEAD POINT! may be some debugging behavior Seibu mostly dummied out yet failed to disable completely... It'd be cool to get in touch with the devteam and ask about that, if any of 'em are still floating around at Moss or something. Either way, the bonus itself appears to not do anything...

Here's some documentation of this: Billy the Miclus Intern "Volunteered" to die a few times in the name of science.





(Also, honestly? only reason i like Raiden Legacy is that it runs better than the ROMS in Mame4Droid. Still a mediocre DotEmu port, though...)

[BIL]

DISCOVERED THE DEAD POINT!

Maybe it's like Under Defeat telling you off if you try to mash the fire button? "Why hitting start button?! You dead, baka gaijin!"

[BPzeBanshee]

Try and get RetroArch's MAME component running on your Android, if their performance tweaks are any good it should run pretty much on par. MAME4Droid isn't as well optimised from what I've heard.

[rjosal]

I had to check this too, to believe it, and yes, every time I hit start, Dead Point. Seems to have a pretty long window of time where it works too, maybe 500ms. Tried it on RF1, it's not there. Apparently 1 Dead Point = 0 Regular Points. It almost seems like something to record the point you died at.