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Battle of the Ports

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    PCE R-Type is still one of the all-time great arcade-to-home conversions.

    That said, Dimensions is now pretty much the best of the lot. A stunning example of how to remaster a retro classic.

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      Today is a short video but it is a great one. We are going to take a look at Cave's very first Arcade shooter, DonPachi.

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        The way Cave handled YOKO mode was such a train wreck. Scaling 320 lines down to 240 at runtime created an insane amount of shimmering and dot crawl, it's pretty much impossible to look at. Of course that goes away in TATE, but how many people back in the day were going to sit a heavy CRT on its side?

        Other devs did a much better job.

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          Originally posted by Yakumo View Post
          Today is a short video but it is a great one. We are going to take a look at Cave's very first Arcade shooter, DonPachi.
          There's animation missing in the PS1 version also by the looks of things. The rolling demo screen text is static in PS1 and animated in Saturn.

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            Originally posted by Kotatsu Neko View Post
            The way Cave handled YOKO mode was such a train wreck. Scaling 320 lines down to 240 at runtime created an insane amount of shimmering and dot crawl, it's pretty much impossible to look at. Of course that goes away in TATE, but how many people back in the day were going to sit a heavy CRT on its side?

            Other devs did a much better job.
            They should have flowed the example set by Batsugun.

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              Well spotted. I couldn't point that out though otherwise I'd be bitched at for being a PlayStation hater.

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                Following on from last week's BOTP comes DoDonPachi

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                  Originally posted by Yakumo View Post
                  Following on from last week's BOTP comes DoDonPachi

                  Loved this on the Saturn

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                    Originally posted by Team Andromeda View Post
                    Loved this on the Saturn
                    In TATE it's a decent port, but in YOKO..? It's another train wreck. It's really too bad as the vast majority will play it in YOKO, which is something Cave should have known and should have fixed.

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                      Originally posted by Kotatsu Neko View Post
                      In TATE it's a decent port, but in YOKO..? It's another train wreck. It's really too bad as the vast majority will play it in YOKO, which is something Cave should have known and should have fixed.
                      I didn't really care that much, back in the day, I was happy just to be able to play it in the home. Much later I found out the wonders of Tate mode for this and Layered Section; WOW !!! both games just come alive in Tate mode and look much better. The only issue was, it made one of my old portable TV screen's, go purple on the side

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                        Originally posted by Kotatsu Neko View Post
                        In TATE it's a decent port, but in YOKO..? It's another train wreck. It's really too bad as the vast majority will play it in YOKO, which is something Cave should have known and should have fixed.
                        Are you referring to scaling the graphics to 240 lines? It would be great, but how do you fix it?

                        DDP DOJ and Espgaluda on the PS2 handle this by scaling to a 480i image with anti-aliasing, but did the Saturn and PSX have the ability to do this? I never recall seeing this done until the PS2 era.

                        Another option would be to completely re-do the graphics. Later Cave games used rendered sprites which perhaps could've been just rendered at a lower resolution, but at this stage it still looks like pixel art to me which would mean a complete re-draw. That would've been great, but perhaps not something they considered fininancially viable.

                        Beyond that, there's the letterbox mode that Gunbird and Layer Section use, but whilst this looks nicer, it affects the gameplay so much that I'd just stick with squashed scaling personally.

                        I agree it would be great to have less ugly looking graphics in YOKO, but it feels like options were limited.

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                          Originally posted by ZipZap View Post
                          Are you referring to scaling the graphics to 240 lines? It would be great, but how do you fix it?

                          DDP DOJ and Espgaluda on the PS2 handle this by scaling to a 480i image with anti-aliasing, but did the Saturn and PSX have the ability to do this? I never recall seeing this done until the PS2 era.

                          Another option would be to completely re-do the graphics. Later Cave games used rendered sprites which perhaps could've been just rendered at a lower resolution, but at this stage it still looks like pixel art to me which would mean a complete re-draw. That would've been great, but perhaps not something they considered fininancially viable.

                          Beyond that, there's the letterbox mode that Gunbird and Layer Section use, but whilst this looks nicer, it affects the gameplay so much that I'd just stick with squashed scaling personally.

                          I agree it would be great to have less ugly looking graphics in YOKO, but it feels like options were limited.
                          There are few ways to do it. Battle Garegga gives you the choice between cropped, where you lose 40 lines from both the top and the bottom and the action is refocused in the centre, or you retain all 320 lines but allow the player to push the visible area up or down by moving their ship, or finally you run a realtime scale as Dopachi and Dodonpachi do.

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                            A classic from the 80's this week.

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                              One of my favourite games of all time, and I agree with everything you said there about the other ports (and well done for commenting on the 7800 jumping arc difference) except... the SMS version is never going to be better than the original I will agree, it’s very good. Oh and the DS/Wii version is a new engine but just the old graphics when you select that mode, it isn’t emulating the original game (sadly). I’ve put 500+ hours into C64 IM so I pretty much know it backwards heh.
                              Lie with passion and be forever damned...

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                                Master System version wins hands down! Pow pow! Mohohohohoh!

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