Radiant Silvergun - 2 buttons / Vulcan & 3-way spread only

[pac]

Hi everybody, lurking for a while now (who's into 90s shmups and does not?), freshly registered.

Been to Manchester/UK recently, and found more or less accidentally Europe's largest Arcade in Bury (https://www.arcadeclub.co.uk/). 17 GBP entrance fee, everything set to free play, lovely. Some pictures and videos to be found here (https://imgur.com/a/UCFMpCJ), massive amount of machines from all decades - it's as awesome as it looks like.

First time ever to see an ST-V in a cab with RSG, lovely, no-brainer to sit down and do a play-through.

I remember that running RSG with a non-JP BIOS will castrate the game down to 2 buttons only (see viewtopic.php?t=724), but that does not explain what I found there - A = Vulcan as usual, B = Spread instead of homing. But already powered up from the beginning, including a backward shot (see video, A/B weapon levels, ignore the self destructing boss ).

Couldn't find much on the web regarding a hacked version, anybody seen that before? There are some mentions about that 3-way spread e.g. here (https://treasure.fandom.com/wiki/Silvergun): ´Spread: Fires two explosive warheads from the sides of the ship at a 22.5 degree angle. Shots become more powerful as the weapon levels up, and at a certain threshold, a backwards-firing warhead is added.´ Don`t remember ever seeing that before. Plenty of videos with maxed out Weapon levels on YT, e.g. check this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXhZxhPcowY around 12:25 with NASU, A/B/C on 33, but no 3-way spread.

Cheers
pac

[pja]

Hi,
as far as I know this "triple shot" is exactly how spread works on the non-JP STV version and you get it from the start, this is the screenshot I just took from MAME on the US BIOS:


the maxed out level is weird though, not sure about that.

EDIT: are you sure these aren't just the levels you got from playing normally? screenshot seems at the final level, and max level is 33, not 17 (and well, that wiki page sounds like bullshit, normally there is no backwards shot even at max level).

EDIT2: didn't read the latter part of your post too carefully and you're aware of level 33 thing - so yeah, I think you just played a regular old 2 button STV version, wiki page is just wrong and backwards shot is not something you get by upgrade, it's just how this version works. Pure speculation on my part but it probably works this way because the game expects you in a few places to have some kind of backwards shot, and they took away A+C so they just added backwards shot to regular spread.

The arcade looks cool indeed, I'd like to play RSG on an actual cab at some point, 2 button version or not

[pac]

Thanks a lot for the quick reply and testing in MAME!

I guess that de-mystifies it for me - so no wild unknown hack, but just a matter of correcting some wrong information.

The wiki https://treasure.fandom.com/wiki/Silvergun is plain wrong. Also I assume the poster here viewtopic.php?t=724 was mistaken with stating the weapons (it`s Vulcan and Spread instead of Vulcan and Homing) - and thinking about it, yes, it does make sense to have something even with 2 buttons that can fire backwards properly. Primarily playing via MiSTer, maybe one day we`ll see an ST-V implementation after the Saturn-core is completely done.

Regarding the weapon level - while I was very sure about that, my memory is fading now, something to be checked next time at the cab, will be surely visiting the arcade again.