Garegga, Saturn vs. PCB observations/questions

[Neon]

Keep it clean, kids...

Anyways, I'm still no authority on the game but I got it last week and I've been putting in a good amount of hours...should hopefully have something decent for the HS thread soon. Here is what I've noticed...

The PCB has an opening loadtime so long that I've made a savestate at the startup screen to skip past it, which I couldn't do with a genuine PCB. But it has no loadtimes...Saturn version has slight but nevertheless irritating loadtimes between levels.

PCB has slightly better graphics I think, look at the tanks at the opening of level 1...but the difference is not hugely noticeable for me at this point

Maybe it's just my lack of skill, but hitting all 3 buttons at once to get Golden Bat works as often as not...fortunately with the saturn version there's no loadtime to reset to the opening screen from that point...I wonder if I picked Iron Mackerel (B button for speed) and activated 'small hit size' in the option menu, this would be an equivalent to Golden Bat? Anyways, with a genuine PCB it would be an irritation.

Claims that the Saturn version has better control I've read here I'm starting to believe myself...again I point to the level 1 tanks...movement seems much less precise with the emulation, though that could be due to other reasons like input lag.

Aside from Stage 1, the arrange soundtrack is good, I prefer it at some points to the originals, pardon any blasphemy

If the worse control isn't in my head, I think I'll purchase the PCB, though I suspect it isn't, can any experts confirm this?

[Ord]

I'd be intrested in this as well, as i'm toying with the idea of buying the pcb at some point. I know about the added red ball option in the Saturn game, and I know that certain secrets don't work on the Tue Apr 2 1996 version of the pcb. Any other differences?

[BulletMagnet]

Maybe it's just my lack of skill, but hitting all 3 buttons at once to get Golden Bat works as often as not...

I was never able to get that selection method to work much either, I just wait the extra few seconds and let the thing select the ABC type automatically.

I wonder if I picked Iron Mackerel (B button for speed) and activated 'small hit size' in the option menu, this would be an equivalent to Golden Bat?

I don't think anyone's quite sure whether the small hitbox option makes the hitbox the same as the "C" or "ABC" planes or whether it somehow makes it even smaller...if there's a difference, it isn't very much, in my experience.

[Damocles]

If the worse control isn't in my head, I think I'll purchase the PCB, though I suspect it isn't, can any experts confirm this?

I think it's a Raizing thing. Dimahoo, Bakraid, and Batrider all have this weird, slightly touchy feel when emulated. I've never played the real thing, so I can't tell ya if it's correct or the emulation.

BTW, whenever I tried to create a savestate to skip the startup, I always ended up with garbled graphics. Then again...that was a long time ago...

EDIT: Oh yeah, the controls are just as touchy in Kawaks.

[Randorama]

I don't see all the fuss about loadtimes (maybe you're always in a hurry, who knows) but: the Saturn revision is better-than-perfect, as it lacks slowdown in most sections. Not that there's all that slowdown, but this makes the PCB version a bit easier. Beside that, Raizing games seem to...have skating controls, in MAME. The Saturn version has also a score attack feature (rank-less), and the secret menu with the ability to trigger various options, the most important being the Mahou characters without cheat.

[thesuperkillerxxx]

Aside from Stage 1, the arrange soundtrack is good, I prefer it at some points to the originals, pardon any blasphemy

Pardoned.

[hikarutilmitt]

From what I can tell, emulation vs Saturn, the only difference is the controls and obvious, but incredibly tolerable, loading times. It's true that all of the Raizing games tend to feel slightly "muddy" in that there's tiny lag or "thickness" to movement, and it's not present in other emulated games from what I can tell.

Also, if you wanna select the ABC craft easily on Saturn just set one of the button to A+B+C and select that way. It works perfectly.

[zinger]

Aside from Stage 1, the arrange soundtrack is good

Is the original soundtrack included too?

[Icarus]

Even from using a USB Saturn-like pad on my PC, I still get the laggy feeling when I play the emulation. Trust me, with Garegga the control lag is most definitely noticeable, so much so that I never touch the game in MAME any more, only to use the Service Mode's Map and Sprite Test for the guide.

On the Saturn version, you can actually set a button to do the ABC selection in one go. I think you have to use Edit type to be able to do so though. If you enable Easy Menu, you can make it easier to customise the controls, as the options are mirrored for both screens. You can also use the "Small Hitbox" option and B selection, like you suggested, to do the same thing. Or, as BulletMagnet commented, time out the select screen and you can get the ABC type.

Both the PCB and the Saturn have identical control precision, depending on whether you're using a pad or a stick for both.

As Rando stated, the Saturn version has no slowdown, and Raizing/EA actually added a Wait Mode option to simulate the slowdown, if you want a close-to-PCB game.

And the AST is indeed brilliant. It would be nice if you could mix and match tracks to create the perfect in-game soundtrack, but that's only because I think the OST has some better tracks than the AST and vice versa.

Well, I hope you enjoy the game, anyway. ^_^

[AWJ]

If the worse control isn't in my head, I think I'll purchase the PCB, though I suspect it isn't, can any experts confirm this?

I think it's a Raizing thing. Dimahoo, Bakraid, and Batrider all have this weird, slightly touchy feel when emulated. I've never played the real thing, so I can't tell ya if it's correct or the emulation.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the controls are just as touchy in Kawaks.

Yes, it's faithful to the real arcade hardware. Both the Toaplan-made hardware that Raizing's early games run on, and the CPS2 hardware that Dimahoo runs on, have "sprite lag"--the displayed sprites lag one refresh (approximately 1/60th second) behind the scrolling background and the game logic. In other words, when the game changes the coordinates of a sprite, the sprite doesn't move on the next video frame, but on the frame after that. Emulators need to and do correctly mimic this behavior because if they didn't, the sprites and the background would get out of sync--e.g. when you scrolled the screen to the left, enemies and pickups lying on the ground would start scrolling before the ground itself did.

Home consoles, including the Saturn, generally do not have any sprite latency, so the Saturn ports "feel" very subtly different from the original hardware.

[Neon]

Both the PCB and the Saturn have identical control precision, depending on whether you're using a pad or a stick for both.

Fuck yeah

but then

Yes, it's faithful to the real arcade hardware.

Nooooooooo!

Which one of you doesn't know what you're talking about?

Rando is correct I agree, I had forgot to mention the slowdown.

Is the original soundtrack included too?

Yes, both original and an arrange are present.

And the AST is indeed brilliant. It would be nice if you could mix and match tracks to create the perfect in-game soundtrack, but that's only because I think the OST has some better tracks than the AST and vice versa.

I can think of a way...but it couldn't be discussed at this forum I think. I'll pm a mod later...

Thanks for the tip on setting ABC to one button, I should have thought of that myself...

I know about the added red ball option in the Saturn game

Not added per se, it's present on the PCB via a dipswitch I think

[Icarus]

Which one of you doesn't know what you're talking about?

Well, I have both the Saturn version and the PCB, and they both control identically to me. It's the emulation that feels sticky.

Case in point: with Golden Bat, I can grab all the tank bullets from the opening section of stage 1 no problem, on both Sat and PCB. It takes about ten attempts on MAME.

Not added per se, it's present on the PCB via a dipswitch I think

IIRC, only the later revisions of Garegga had the Red Ball, and they were active at default, you couldn't switch them on or off.

[AWJ]

Which one of you doesn't know what you're talking about?

There might be one frame of input lag in MAME due to the timing with which MAME updates the input ports and the timing with which the game code reads them. In this case the PCB, the Saturn and MAME would all be different: the Saturn would be the fastest (no latency), MAME slowest (2 frames latency) and the PCB in between with 1 frame of latency.

If this is correct, the difference between MAME and the PCB, or the PCB and the Saturn, would be very subtle and some players would notice them while others wouldn't; the difference between MAME and the Saturn, on the other hand, would be large enough for many more players to notice. This could be the reason for the inconsistency between reports.

You also have to take into account that USB input devices have a certain amount of latency, depending on the quality of the device, your computer motherboard's USB controller, and the driver software. Cheaply-made USB devices (especially adaptors for using console controllers on a PC) may have tens of milliseconds of latency, adding one or two frames of input lag all on their own.

I know about the added red ball option in the Saturn game

Not added per se, it's present on the PCB via a dipswitch I think

Close; it's present on later revisions of the game. PCBs reading "Type 2" on the title screen have red ball bullets. But so do some PCBs that don't read "Type 2". I think what happened was Raizing initially released the game in limited markets (Japan, the US) in its original form; then, in response to player/operator feedback from these markets, they changed the bullets to red balls in the version released worldwide. Then they went back and released the red ball version in the original markets as "Type 2". Sorta like how Square rereleased the world version of FF7 in Japan as "FF7 International".

Oh, another bit of Garegga PCB weirdness concerns the extend options. Apparently, in at least one European country, it is (or was) illegal for arcade games to award extra lives for high scores; games that did so were considered "gambling machines" by law. That's why PCBs with their jumpers set for any European region have different extend options which include a "no extend" setting.

[zaphod]

Many people find emulator controals to be "floaty" and peoel who play on the real PCB tend to agree on this.

Ther are many sources of latency with emulation.

Your typical arcade game checks the controller lines once per blank.

You have your keyboard encoder changing your button presses into keyup and keydown events.

you have your emulator reading these keyup and keydown events and translating them into memory bit twiddling so the emulator sees the change in state and can react to it.

regardless of the quality of emulation there will be at LEAST one frame of lag. An arcade stick with inputs directly mapped to memory is instantaneous! TO avoid noticeable lag, you need to get the response tiem between keypress and change in emulated controller's state within 1 vblank interval. and you will still get one frame f lag some of the time.

This is also what causes all that trouble with getting those A+B moveees to come out in MAME arcade games. simultaneous keypresses aren't.

Also, even worse, you have a lack of precision in PC timerinterrupts. this causes presses and releases of keys o lag unpredictabley at times. Because of this, you haev a certain lack of precision that while doesn't mater with many game types matters a LOT with manic shooters.

That said, to those who've been weaned on modern consoles that have been multiplexing their ports and/or encoding signals instead of using one wire per control direction, this won't be that noticable.

[Neon]

Does this have redone music at all like the SF2 one? I can find replays easily enough...might be worth getting for the music

[Ord]

Yep the DVD has the soundtrack on a second disk. 16 original arcade tracks & 16 arranged Saturn tracks.

[Neon]

Thanks for the help...

One more...what does 'blast chip' in the options menu do?

[Icarus]

Turn the shrapnel on or off.

Leave it on if you want the proper arcade experience. Turn it off if the shrap makes it difficult to play