Raiden legacy PC

[BPzeBanshee]

MAME handles the game's original framerate versus the monitor res just fine (game's 54hz and all my monitors are 60hz), and it's not that difficult to set up. Like a bicycle. The only disadvantage MAME has versus Raiden Legacy at this point is the "HD music" which is a sample hack and what I've been hitting a wall at trying to do myself for the last week. I think it saves scores to NVRAM these days, if not there's the unofficial hiscore.dat (look it up in Google to find the site) which can be added to some MAME builds to allow for saving scores to file (like every version of Shmupmame). Being a full arcade emulation, you get your name entry, dipswitch settings and everything else. Note that Shmupmame does a lagless hack to the Fighters games which results in sprites looking a bit out of sync of the background - do not get this confused with the piss poor frame/refreshrate I'm talking of in Raiden Legacy and the bad-quality videos around most of YouTube.

1) Download MAME (Shmupmame v4.2 is ideal, see above)
2) Get the ROMs
3) Stick ROMs in ROMs folder
4) Run MAME (if it's the UI version, find 'Audit all games' and go to Available folder)
5) Run your game, TAB opens a menu for configuring controls

As for why I asked, here's my experience. I had an 'acquaintance' install Raiden Legacy on my computer running 1920x1080. I switch it to Windowed @ 1024x768, it crashed. Switching from RF1 to RF2, it crashed. Going into an options menu somewhere, it crashed. Transition to some stages, it crashed. When playing it ran like shit (AKA iOS version for me) regardless of window/fullscreen resolution, had no option to select slaves, had no arcade-accurate settings, had no TATE, and worst of all RF1 goes to airport stage TWICE in the stage order. Sometimes it did that, other times it just crashed, other times it worked fine. Oh, and Raiden (plain Raiden) has no HD music, it's shitty emulated version (that MAME does just fine normally btw) regardless of whether you turn HD music on or off - at least it didn't play random sfx at the beginning too like the iOS version.

I hate to sound like I'm bitching all the time but there is so many things wrong with this port that frankly the only reason anyone would sanely buy this if they knew what was wrong with it is to justify having the ROMs to run in MAME instead.

[NZA]

MAME handles the game's original framerate versus the monitor res just fine (game's 54hz and all my monitors are 60hz), and it's not that difficult to set up. Like a bicycle. The only disadvantage MAME has versus Raiden Legacy at this point is the "HD music" which is a sample hack and what I've been hitting a wall at trying to do myself for the last week. I think it saves scores to NVRAM these days, if not there's the unofficial hiscore.dat (look it up in Google to find the site) which can be added to some MAME builds to allow for saving scores to file (like every version of Shmupmame). Being a full arcade emulation, you get your name entry, dipswitch settings and everything else. Note that Shmupmame does a lagless hack to the Fighters games which results in sprites looking a bit out of sync of the background - do not get this confused with the piss poor frame/refreshrate I'm talking of in Raiden Legacy and the bad-quality videos around most of YouTube.

1) Download MAME (Shmupmame v4.2 is ideal, see above)
2) Get the ROMs
3) Stick ROMs in ROMs folder
4) Run MAME (if it's the UI version, find 'Audit all games' and go to Available folder)
5) Run your game, TAB opens a menu for configuring controls

As for why I asked, here's my experience. I had an 'acquaintance' install Raiden Legacy on my computer running 1920x1080. I switch it to Windowed @ 1024x768, it crashed. Switching from RF1 to RF2, it crashed. Going into an options menu somewhere, it crashed. Transition to some stages, it crashed. When playing it ran like shit (AKA iOS version for me) regardless of window/fullscreen resolution, had no option to select slaves, had no arcade-accurate settings, had no TATE, and worst of all RF1 goes to airport stage TWICE in the stage order. Sometimes it did that, other times it just crashed, other times it worked fine. Oh, and Raiden (plain Raiden) has no HD music, it's shitty emulated version (that MAME does just fine normally btw) regardless of whether you turn HD music on or off - at least it didn't play random sfx at the beginning too like the iOS version.

I hate to sound like I'm bitching all the time but there is so many things wrong with this port that frankly the only reason anyone would sanely buy this if they knew what was wrong with it is to justify having the ROMs to run in MAME instead.

On my end, the game is very stable, no crashes no matter what settings I go with. And you're not just bitching; there really are not a lot of good excuses for these old ports not being done well.

[BPzeBanshee]

Well, for what it's worth, I'm glad you're having a better experience with it than I. More exposure for the game either which way, I guess.

[Gespenst]

At least they tried to fix it. Plus:

Hidden ships can now be used (including slaves in Raiden Fighters 2 & Raiden Fighters Jet)
Displays high-scores (by difficulty) in the "Select Mode" menu & in-game (if base high-score is beaten)

Although honestly, no problem at all on my computer. Haven't experienced any slowdown/lag/crashes or whatsoever so far.

[Zeether]

Oh, nice of them to add the hidden ships! I might pick this up when it goes on sale now

[Danny]

At least they tried to fix it. Plus:

Hidden ships can now be used (including slaves in Raiden Fighters 2 & Raiden Fighters Jet)
Displays high-scores (by difficulty) in the "Select Mode" menu & in-game (if base high-score is beaten)

Although honestly, no problem at all on my computer. Haven't experienced any slowdown/lag/crashes or whatsoever so far.

Awesome, everything I wanted.

[The Coop]

Is there a way to find out which version you have? I don't see a 1.0 or anything anywhere.

And I hope this patch gets released to the other places that sell it (GOG, Green Man Gaming, GamersGate, etc.). I got my copy from Green Man Gaming for $6.48, and while half the time it runs fine, the other half it has a rather choppy framerate. So this potential fix would be nice to get.

[Fudoh]

patches on the other sites are usually out within 48 hours... GOG doesn't have it up yet.

[DocHauser]

Yeah, I bought it on Gamersgate. Nothing on there yet, either.

[Mischief Maker]

Argh! What the hell did they do? The original gog release ran smooth as silk. Now that it's patched it runs like herky-jerky stuttering crap! Changing resolutions, switching to windowed mode, adjusting filtering and scanlines, nothing works!

Also, the highscore display doesn't differentiate between 3-lives mode and 5-lives.

[Danny]

Argh! What the hell did they do? The original gog release ran smooth as silk. Now that it's patched it runs like herky-jerky stuttering crap! Changing resolutions, switching to windowed mode, adjusting filtering and scanlines, nothing works!

Also, the highscore display doesn't differentiate between 3-lives mode and 5-lives.

Just checked out the game without the "HD Music", seems like they have added some frame skipping to the game...

WWWWWHHHHHHYYYY!!!!

So fucking close to a good port!...

EDIT: Just wrote them an e-mail hopefully I will hear back from them soon...

[clairobskur]

i know that there are few mac users here, but anyway...
mac app store version has working online leaderboards with the latest update

[Marc]

Gah, conflicted feelings on this. On one hand, it's the only way I can play these legally, the price is excellent, and the games are wonderful. On the other hand, it's such a bare-bones, shoddy effort. Sadly, I installed the patch from the get go, it crashed on first booting up, there's some pretty obvious frame skipping, and some background glitching - score and shadows flicker like mad at times.

A few questions if I may:

I'm playing via an LG 1080p TV, is there any point/benefit with me messing around with resolution options?

Charge shot worked OK in RF1, holding down the button in RF2 and Jet slowed my fire to a crawl but did little else - do some ships not have one?

What's the Slave ship on/off option for?

Anyway, despite the problems it's at least playable unlike the shitty (even on a Note 2) Android port, and the games themselves are quite possibly my favourite shooter in a long time, so I guess it's all good.

[BPzeBanshee]

There might be a benefit, some were saying they got a bit more performance out of the piece of shit by lowering the resolution in the game. I can't say I noticed anything myself, however, apart from a crash when first setting it to 1024x768 windowed.

The Raiden MK-II, Judge Spear and its variants have no charge shot, but instead have two weapons at once that level up separately. The rest of the ships (that aren't variants of these two) all have charge shots.

Slave Ship On/Off I believe allows you to pick the Slave of whatever ship you pick. In the arcade, you would've had to hold BOMB button after inserting coin and pressing START.

[Mischief Maker]

Changing resolution post-patch did nothing.

I solved the problem by uninstalling the game, including savefiles, then re-installing using the vanilla installer and refrained from using the patch. Framerates are back to silky smooth.

[mortified_penguin]

Was about to hit the purchase button on GoG but...might be worth waiting. Hope they get this figured out, Raiden Fighters was my first arcade cab and the nostalgia is killing me.

[Fudoh]

Buy it already!

I bought it first day on GOG and updated it yesterday.

In my eyes the collection is a solid port and easily worth the money. Are the MAME versions better ? Of course they are, but this can be said about almost every port on any system, can't it ?

I'm running this on an older Quadcore with a 9600GT and XP. Runs perfectly, no crashes whatsoever over several hours. The update added 5 lives per CC, the slave ships and better hi-score tables.

TATE mode (if you want to call it this way) is still kinda broken. "Up" will be always be what Windows defines as up, in other words, if you want TATE you have to set Windows to pivot mode (which is a pain in the a**). If you're running Windows in standard Yoko mode, the game will always run Yoko, no matter what the in-game options say (landscape <> portrait).

Auto-Fire is still "automatic fire" in the european sense (= the ship fires on it's own). I say european sense, because over here we had both "autofeuer" and "dauerfeuer", while I can't think of proper english terms to differentiate between the two (maybe auto-fire versus rapid fire).

The 54 to 60Hz conversion is done ok. I'm picky about that and I don't see any difference before and after the patch. Of course the scrolling is not perfectly smooth as in a genuine 60Hz title, but then again it's as good as it gets. An option to run the games 11% faster v-locked at 60Hz would have been nice, but I didn't expect it. At least we don't get tearing.

As a standard the game uses a shoddy nearest-neighbour scaling engine which causes artefacts in the backgrounds. Doesn't matter if you set the aspect ratio to original or fullscreen (one leaves a little border, one scales over the full monitor height). Filtering is available and looks ok - pretty much about the same what DDPDOJ or Ketsui on the 360 look like.

Scanlines are a joke. I can vividly imagine how dotemu tried telling the indian programmer how to add scanlines First of all, they don't properly align with the pixels and second, they're horizontal scanlines (which makes hardly any sense on a vertical game). Haven't tried them in TATE mode - maybe they look better this way, but I wouldn't dare to hope so.

Nevertheless, I you want a port of those games, this one's perfectly solid. Just don't complain about MAME being the better choice....

[mortified_penguin]

Should have known better. Crashes when you change the options and runs terrible all around. Runs worse with the patch, as stated above. Oh well...

[Fudoh]

really wondering what you guys do different from me ? a friend was over tonight and while I was watching soccer, he played all the titles in the collection for about two hours. ZERO problems, tried all the options. So psyched about it that he already bought it, when he was back home.

I cannot even provoke a crash by jumping between menus and options as fast and crazy as I can.

[mortified_penguin]

Wish I knew as well. My PC locked up not 30 seconds from first install when I tried to change the res. Had to hard reset

Then I tried with the patch and every time I clicked 'play' or 'options' it'd fade out and then come right back to the same screen again. The only thing that seems to negate stutter is changing my desktop res to something 16:9, (mine is 16:10 by default), but even then it's not a huge difference at all.

[BPzeBanshee]

In my eyes the collection is a solid port and easily worth the money. Are the MAME versions better ? Of course they are, but this can be said about almost every port on any system, can't it ?

Going from the Irem Arcade Hits collection and Raiden Legacy's iOS port whatever engine DotEmu's using seems to be inconsistent at best dealing with different machines, whereas MAME is pretty damn consistent all around. 'Solid port' is a bit of a stretch.

Frankly I think that they already know about it, have known about it for ages, and just don't want to fix it. They didn't fix the iOS port nor did they fix Irem Arcade Hits, where some had it working fine and others had a ton of issues. If it works fine for you, good, but it seems like a lottery gamble to have it working properly for most, and in this day and age (and considering where they're using portions of code from) we should be able to expect better.

In fact I'm that fed up with it all I'm about 70% done on a MAME hack that plays samples for the music in the Raiden Fighters games rather than emulating them - not quite stereo OGGs like DotEmu does (the best MAME natively supports is mono FLACs) but a lot better in every other department. Once that's done I'll make a MAME Plus build and everyone having issues with Legacy can just run that instead.

[Fudoh]

In fact I'm that fed up with it all I'm about 70% done on a MAME hack that plays samples for the music in the Raiden Fighters games

that's good news! For those of use with the Legacy collection, why not let us use those audio samples ? Can't be too hard to write a little batch to convert the Legacy ogg files into somethine useable for MAME.

[lettuce]

Is Raiden 2 or DX ever going to be emulated on anything (other than PSX) including MAME??

[IseeThings]

I don't know.. we might leave it to the DotEmu guys

[BPzeBanshee]

In fact I'm that fed up with it all I'm about 70% done on a MAME hack that plays samples for the music in the Raiden Fighters games

that's good news! For those of use with the Legacy collection, why not let us use those audio samples ? Can't be too hard to write a little batch to convert the Legacy ogg files into somethine useable for MAME.

Bit out of my area of expertise, and I'm handling loops differently (ie. perfect loop or none at all), but if someone was game to try and cobble something together I won't stop them by any means.
They'd have to be splicing files together, converting the OGGs to mono and then to FLAC format, rename them to name convention I've used in the sample file and ZIPping it up.

[Danny]

Just got an email back from dotemu this morning they said they are working on a fix, hopefully this means a hotfix patch or something.

[pestro87]

I just bought this and I guess I should have read this thread first... The video is pretty choppy, it's almost like they're not even using Double Buffering (it doesn't have any flickering though so it's probably an issue with the loop itself... did they not test this prior to releasing it?) :/ I'm glad to hear that they're working on a patch. Hopefully it won't take too long before it's released.

[mortified_penguin]

After trying Legacy on three different machines in the house I finally narrowed it down to the culprit, my virus protection.

I'd added the game to the exception list in AVG which did nothing but after switching to a different program all together the game runs fine. Something to consider for anyone else having issues.

[Austin]

Holy shit this collection sucks.. The visuals I can deal with, but the sound is awful in the original Raiden, and it (along with the game itself) is sped up. The Raiden Fighters games fare slightly better, but the sound keeps cutting up and is faster than it is supposed to be. Man, I really should have read this thread before shelling out the money for it on GOG.com. Total impulse buy when I saw it there earlier tonight.

[tinotormed]

Alright, since I just bought this game on GOG.com, (after winning the $9.99 gift code contest on Facebook) I had a question. How do you suppose to get the slave ships here?