Since it seems that every version of ST apart from playing off an actual arcade board has its problems and differences with the original that upset purists, whether we’re talking HDR, Dreamcast, GGPO/FBA, MAME, whatever - I got thinking…I wonder if it would be possible to release a perfect, hardware based remake of the game?
I was thinking that one of those plug-and-play TV game type things would be AWESOME for ST’s continued future, and with today’s technology it could be a tiny little box, wouldn’t need a big thing with a cooling fan, bulky power supply, etc.
I’m thinking basically ST on a chip, no software emulation, just CPS2 with a much more streamlined design and single usage. Give it USB controller support, and the game could be enjoyed for many, many years to come. Could this even be done? I’ve got a Sega Genesis Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition TV plug and play thingy, don’t see why someone couldn’t get the rights to do the same with arcade ST. Just plug into an old CRT and go…thoughts?
ST on a chip? Not sure what that means. CPS-2 is a combination of various processors and ROM chips that work together to create ST, anything else is coined emulation anyway you slice it. They only way to get a “perfect” version would be to find the exact chips that CPS-2 was designed for back in the early 90’s. Are these chips still available? If they are then it is possible for someone to engineer a system board to accept them and that should be pretty damn close to arcade perfect ST.
Well, I don’t know too much about the technical side of things, but wouldn’t it be possible to recreate that technology but make it a lot smaller nowadays? That’s the sort of thing I was thinking, basically. And while that technically might count as ‘emulation’ it’d be on a device specifically created to play ST, so couldn’t that be done without introducing all of the problems that consoles would generally bring to doing that? I know I’d want to buy one.
Yeah I’ve been following that, and it looks bloody amazing…major props to Undamned I was thinking something that’s not just a retrofit, though…that being said if I could get together the $ I’d love to get the UD-CPS2 someday.
I’ve often thought about this kind of thing and wish capcom would do it. but they won’t. simply put, they aren’t gonna invest money into something that only a handful of diehards are going to buy, when they can release a game such as HDremix and sell to hundreds of thousands of people with consoles.
there are enough arcade boards out there that anyone who wants the real deal can have it. the offline scene is the way to extending ST’s life. people should get together and chip in for the equipment and start organizing get togethers.
so roughly $700 total to have a good setup. yes, its a lot of money, but its also the cornerstone of the gatherings. get 5 ppl to chip in and the cost isn’t that bad. i personally like the aura a real ST setup has. reminds me of the old days where ppl would practice on the SNES, then test their might on the real thing at their local arcade. funny, how after all these years, that still hasn’t changed for street fighter.
This idea was around in SNES emulation boards. It should solve virtually all problems if done right, but it is a dangerous task. Capcom could claim patent violation over their hardware.
I think this is theoreticly possible using a FPGA. FPGA’s have been used to recreate amigas on a hardware level. To confirm, as I understand it, this isn’t emulation but physically recreating the hardware on a chip.
The minimigs are great bits of kit and have made a few upgrades/modernizations of the amiga such as adding ps2 keyboard and mouse support and VGA support. Maybe this means we could use an FPGA to make a portable ST board with usb controller support and HDMI out?
Well, couldn’t it be licenced from them? As I mentioned in the OP, I have a plug-n-play Sega Genesis HF/Special CE…that wasn’t manufactured by Capcom - but rather by Radica. I honestly believe that that there’d be far more sales of such a thing to tournament organizers and players alone than there ever was of that old Radica thing, and yet that device was totally mass-market - got mine @ Sears.
as of right now, the way capcom makes $ off of super turbo is by selling HDRemix. i don’t think they are gonna put out/license something that competes with themselves. its too bad HDR didn’t do classic mode right as it would have been the answer to all of this. PS3 version being total shit didn’t help either.
as far as someone making this…its much easier to just get a super gun setup. the consolized CPS2 is gonna cost roughly $400…then you have to get an ST board for another $250 so anyway you look at it, arcade ST isn’t cheap.
sony 20 pvm rgb monitor $100 / asus evo 23 $170
supergun $200 / xbox system $200
sticks $200 / 2 madcatz tes $300
ST $250 / 360 game $60 + $20 dlc and costumes
$750 / $750
cost are about the same as getting into any fighting game.
This is flawed logic for sure, not many people buy a console purely to play 1 fighting game not to mention availability and usability of hardware. While the FPGA solution I’m suggesting, is initially a lot more work and way more complex to get set up, when it is up and running it solves all of that and is easy to set up once the initial research/dev has been done.
I was actually surprised to see that he was working on something very similar to what the OP suggested. It was basically a CPS2 setup in an enclosure, but with inputs/outputs to be directly plugged into a CRT and able to use any standard USB-connected controller found on many modern sticks. It was no bigger than the size of a briefcase, and had everything you needed to play ST (sans monitor and controllers obviously).
It works fairly well, but there were some odd issues with it. He admitted that it was still a work in progress, and he brought it to Evo with the intent of having the players test it and find out what was wrong. There were some odd input-drops and bugs, but I’m hoping he’ll work it out if he ever makes it available for sale. He was planning on having a button config mode where you’re just able to hold down the ‘home’ button, and then you can quickly input ‘jab strong fierce short forward roundhouse’ by pressing each respective button in that order.
The closest thing to what the OP is suggesting is running MAME or some other emulator, which is something that DGV have been working on. Of course, since it’s not exactly endorsed by TPTB, there are issues with running tourneys that way.
OP in this thread is asking for a hardware-based version of ST that will plug-and-play into a TV, and has USB controller support. That’s pretty much exactly what I played on at Evo. Technical details might be slightly different, but I’ll leave that up to smarter guys than me.
OP asking for something that ISN’T software emulation. Isn’t MAME software emulation?
Not quite, man. He means to re-create the board with similar hardware. This is possible, since we do have chips that do those same things the ones at the CPS-2 board do, but are much smaller and require less power to operate. For instance: the sound controller was a Z80 processor. We now have several processors and micro-controllers that are compatible with the Z80. They can also run at a faster clock, but that’s where the attention is most needed: the clocks must be very similar for the hardware emulation to be perfect.
MAME emulates arcade boards by approximating the original clocks with the one the system has. This could only approach 100% accuracy if the system clock is infinite, or is a perfect multiple of all clocks in the board - it never is. Also, when things happen at the same time, MAME has to guess what happens first, what happens later, and somehow get it to be similar to the original.
Yeah, this is hardware emulation: one piece of hardware pretends to be a different piece of hardware.
It’s a really awesome idea. Re-creating the CPS2 sounds like it would be a nightmare, but having convenient, accurate, mass-producible ST setups for easy home consumption would be a dream come true. The Vampire Savior players would absolutely flip over this too.
I wonder, would Capcom really bother sicking their lawyers after a small-scale production of imitation CPS2’s? I know that big companies can be pretty tight about their IP’s and stuff, but 20-year-old arcade equipment isn’t exactly their bread and butter anymore. Conceptually, legally, this isn’t much different from those bootleg consoles you can buy online. And there are already websites that sell full, pre-built, ready-to-go, 1000000-games-in-1 MAME cabinets. Heck, eBay has listings for that kind of stuff, and they tend to be very strict about the sale of illegal goods.
Things that are already being made that have already been brought up in this thread…
Undamned’s “consolized” CPS2 project is him building all of the parts of a supergun right into the A board itself: power, audio, video, kick harness, etc. Plus it uses USB arcade sticks. Really amazing.
Godlike Controls: It sounds they’re building a supergun that fits into a case along with the arcade boards? It would be super classy if it was actually a briefcase, hahaha. Carrying handle!!! Does anyone have a link?
Rather than just making one (which might be an awesome fan project for someone to tackle) I seriously wonder if it might actually have a chance at being licenced…someone said earlier in the thread that Capcom wouldn’t want to compete with themselves, but if they were getting royalties from it, I don’t really think they would be…as I said, their games have been featured in plug-and-play things before, I own one! And yeah, Vampire Savior players would flip too. As far as ST goes, Capcom have to be aware by now that a) there’s a huge demand for a readily accessible, ARCADE PERFECT version of it, and that every single attempt they’ve made at porting it thus far has introduced one problem or another that turns off the competitive community. The FGC would love them for allowing something like this to be made, even if it was a limited edition run to test the waters or something.
I don’t think Capcom would go for it personally, just because you can safely assume that they’re assholes these days. But, I also wouldn’t think a small ‘black market’ item like this would show up on their legal radar if people were relatively quiet about it, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be more than a cease and desist sort of deal.