Best shmups for shit PCs

[RNGmaster]

Recently I was at a relative's house where the only PC had a 6-year old CPU. Computer speed was 0.7 gigaflops, MAME lagged unbelievably, I couldn't find the USB port, all sorts of horrible issues with video...

In short, first world problems.

What sorts of shmups are there that take up a small amount of room on a flash drive and run on a crap pc? I have Kenta Cho's games, but I'm thinking hidden gems here.

[Bananamatic]

http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/

[JGcontraman]

Raptor: Call of Shadows
Demonstar
Tyrian 2000

[BIL]

Not exactly a "hidden" gem, although more people should post scores for it, but Kamui (Siter Skain) is fucking brilliant and should run on old-ass computers.

[Moniker]

Probably...

ChoRenSha
Raiden II
Guxt
Ring^-27
The Venerable Space Phallus

Maybe...
Hydorah
Zen Ichi
Warning Forever
Touhou 6 & 7

None of these are really hidden, but beggars can't be choosers. You'll probably do better with indie shumps than with doujin. Check the annual Best Of's on Indiegames.com. Most are pretty lofi.

[Udderdude]

XOP should easily run on a PC that old.

[AntiFritz]

eXceed 3rd jade penetrate

[shmuppyLove]

Crimzon Clover
Jamestown
Raiden III

[Leandro]

Use Final Burn Alpha on that pc instead of MAME....An old MAME version like 067 will run Raiden and Flying Shark just fine on this pc too. Just let the cave, pgm, raizing, toaplan, cps1,2, neo geo, truxton, parodius etc to FBA

[shmuppyLove]

Actually, I shouldn't make fun. My desktop recently went T.U. (Athlon X2 7750) and now I'm stuck with an old Toshiba laptop with an Intel T2310 1.46GHz that is rubbish for PC games. Emulation luckily fares much better, seems to have no trouble with everything except the most recent SH3 stuff, where MAME simply crashes after loading.

I can't remember which version it happened, but I think there are some older builds of MAME that are much more forgiving on older hardware. The down side is not as many games are supported, and you'd likely have to use clrmamepro to "fix" any current romsets you had, but I think it's doable.

[RNGmaster]

Jade Penetrate would have run well? Damn, I missed out.

[Moniker]

Should be able to handle 8 & 16 bit console emulation, if you get emulators that are pretty fast. Pretty sure I played games on nesticle and zsnes on a pre-GHz laptop back in the day.

Edit: Yeah, that was at least 10 years ago. Never felt old before.

[Nifty]

ChoRenSha

I have my doubts about this - I get occasional chugging even with my 2.33 gigaderps, especially during the opening with all the exploding shrapnel

[AntiFritz]

Jade Penetrate would have run well? Damn, I missed out.

I was joking, it doesnt even run 60fps 100% of the time on my 2.4ghz dual core.

[rancor]

Kamui is about 6 years old, so I think the system requirements for it are quite low. Still a damn fine game too!

System requirements are a pentium 233 w/ 32mb RAM. See the lower left of this pic:

[Rex Cavalier]

Radio Zonde should work (and maybe Hellsinker 0.95)

[BPzeBanshee]

I find ShmupMAME v3.0b does a lot better for performance than new builds of MAME, otherwise real older ones for simple stuff like Raiden would surely work. For other mentions, Tyrian's good too, though have a go at OpenTyrian as well to see how they compare.

Should be able to handle 8 & 16 bit console emulation, if you get emulators that are pretty fast. Pretty sure I played games on nesticle and zsnes on a pre-GHz laptop back in the day.

Edit: Yeah, that was at least 10 years ago. Never felt old before.

I've run Kega Fusion and Gens (2.11, one of the last official releases of it) on a Windows 98 machine with similar specs and they've worked fine - just don't use stuff like HQ2X and that.s

I dont suppose you feel like having a go at trying GMOSSE MK-V on the machine next time you're at your relatives? It was originally coded on a 1 Ghz legacy PC and I'm curious as to how well it would work on the machine you describe.

[nZero]

Jade Penetrate would have run well? Damn, I missed out.

I was joking, it doesnt even run 60fps 100% of the time on my 2.4ghz dual core.

It also doesn't seem to run at all on any Intel integrated graphics chipsets. Not sure if it's a problem with the game's code or just terrible drivers.

[AntiFritz]

Jade Penetrate would have run well? Damn, I missed out.

I was joking, it doesnt even run 60fps 100% of the time on my 2.4ghz dual core.

It also doesn't seem to run at all on any Intel integrated graphics chipsets. Not sure if it's a problem with the game's code or just terrible drivers.

I think the games not coded overly well, the game has flash graphics but not THAT flashy that a dual core computer should have trouble running it.

[ZacharyB]

I used a Windows 98 desktop computer for ten years without upgrading. I can't remember the processor speed, but it was not even close to 1.0 Ghz. More like half that. It had an ATi RAGE 128 graphics card. It ran these games:

Normal command line MAME. For some reason, it would also run MAME32 with good speed, but my newer computer (also Windows 98) doesn't.
8- and 16-bit emulation
The Kamui trial, so Kamui in full should work.
ChoRenSha 68k. It ran perfectly. I'm not sure what's going on inside DoubleThink's computer.
Some obscure doujin games, like G-Type and Minishoter RS.

I think you are safe with playing games that were released before that computer came out.

[astroid]

Another GOOD shmup
Blaynix

[shmuppyLove]

Another GOOD shmup
Blaynix
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QZpQfxUWLV4/T ... aynixx.jpg

Hey this is good! Music is amazing, level designs are cool, and runs very very smooth.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

I would have expected just about all the doujins would work on a 6YO PC, apart from the ones released in the last 2-3 comikets. My previous PC (P4 640) is about the same age and I had no trouble playing shmups on the PC Before my upgrade 18 months ago.

For MAME try using an old version from before the change to C+ (Or ShmupMAME v1.5 / 2 which is what I used on my old PC) For console emulation I had no trouble with 8/16bit & PS1 stuff, PS2 and Sat was a no go, I never tried the later nintendo consoles

http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/

lol im not even gonna click on that link incase it rapes my computer.

[Observer]

Kamui is about 6 years old, so I think the system requirements for it are quite low. Still a damn fine game too!

System requirements are a pentium 233 w/ 32mb RAM. See the lower left of this pic:

Actually, Kamui is 12 years old (main reason it reached some sort of "legendary" status among the doujin games), with the very first version being released back in 1999... You even have it in the case there. The 6-year old version is a reprint and then Siter Skain began releasing compatibility patches for XP and reprinting the game more frequently. Hopefully, the game still works like a charm under Win7 and is as kickass as ever.

Anyway, let me think, my oldest PC at home is a 2003 model with a Celeron 2.0ghz, GeForceFX520, 1gb ram and a 40gb HDD, running WinXP. Mame ran perfectly, well, at least the older version up to 2006, heh. Are you sure that thing is only 6 years old? I have an even older comp I gave away: from 1997, Celeron 400mhz (originally 200mhz), Diamond 3D Monster Fusion (3dFx anyone? Vodoo Banshee? Remember? That), 128mb RAM. Running Win98 in a pretty solid fashion. And it has two dusty USB slots that barely worked...

Anyway, outside of shmups, you can check Good Old Games or something to find games that fit on that comp.

Check if the old PC-98 Touhou games work? That our you might want to try a NES emulator for Recca and such.

[null1024]

Hrm...

On my PIII 850MHz laptop [from 2002-2003 or so IIRC], I was able to run ePSXe fullspeed, so I had the PS1 library of games [although, having only enough free HDD space for one at a time on the disk was a bitch ;3], try MAME 0.85 [although, I used 0.128 personally, tried to run Radiant Silvergun on it, what a bad idea :<, good times trying to play it at 85% and a terrible frameskip [good thing the image was drawn by MAME itself and not done like on the Cave SH3 stuff, where the game just blits to a framebuffer and MAME just pastes that to the screen]], get Cho Ren Sha, SNES emulators, Genesis emulators, TG-16 emulators, I'd say N64 but it only has one semi-decent shmup, and a machine of that era will likely have an assy video card which will produce various video issues [like on my machine with an 8MB Rage Mobility, sometimes textures would be missing or whatnot, even though the game was fullspeed].

If you're wondering why I mentioned a PS1 emulator, keep in mind that the PS1's main CPU is about 33MHz, and just adjust sound and dithering settings to suit [turn off reverb, no dithering, lower your display depth and resolution, etc].

Also, in regards to Cho Ren Sha slowing down on newer hardware: I have no idea why it happens -- I remember it running like ass on a recent as hell machine, and it was flawless on my older one. Worst case scenario, you run the x68k version in an emulator, you should be able to handle that.

Also, Kenta Cho's stuff ran on that machine, but badly [notably, Torus Trooper was barely playable]. If they run fine on your machine, you can probably do slightly more advanced stuff.

Keep in mind, you'll probably have to enable autoframeskip in just about every emulator as well.

I'm assuming you have WinXP on here too.


Also, 0.7 GFLOPS?! That isn't as bad as you think.

[BrianC]

Chorensha had stuttering issues with my comp with Windows 7 (and it's a pretty recent one with second gen Core i5), but I set it to compatibility mode for Windows 98/Me and it works great.

I was thinking of listing some CGA shmups as a joke, but the only ones I can think of are Centipede, Zaxxon, some SI clone, an Asteroids clone, and Galaxian.

[Vamos]

Chorensha had stuttering issues with my comp with Windows 7 (and it's a pretty recent one with second gen Core i5), but I set it to compatibility mode for Windows 98/Me and it works great.
.

That stuttering has nothing to do with power , chorensha will run on a toaster.

[BrianC]

Chorensha had stuttering issues with my comp with Windows 7 (and it's a pretty recent one with second gen Core i5), but I set it to compatibility mode for Windows 98/Me and it works great.
.

That stuttering has nothing to do with power , chorensha will run on a toaster.

I was explaining how to make the stuttering stop on newer computers. I mentioned Windows 7 and Core i5 to show that I got the game working on a newer computer in Windows 98/Me compatibility mode. I know full well the game runs great on slower computers, but the compatibility issue is with newer computers, and I felt it was worth mentioning a solution.

[Vamos]

Course bruv .

[Zaarock]

Kamui, Chorensha and old MAME versions should do the job :p