To confirm, Bernie’s H2H setup is currently on modified LS-32 sticks with the proper shaft height. I can support Sanwa JLF on the same control panels, but would rather not have to unless everyone is clamoring for it as the standard. From what I understand, LS-32 is the Japanese standard for ST and all other old CPS-2 games. I’d prefer to keep it that way for a number of reasons, including personal preference, but ultimately that’s up to you guys. I’m all for the PS2 adapter as well, but I can’t imagine that feeling very good when sitting in front of a cab, especially American style sticks.
I remember playing on the cigarbob cab again last year at Revelations and feeling that it wasn’t the same as the JLF of LS-32. It felt way off to me. I love that cab, but I’d prefer to never play on that joystick ever again.
btw I’m way jealous that you guys have a real scene in socal. All I have is a few people that would come over to play once in a while, all of whom have moved on to other games. I hope to visit Super at least once before Evo.
I think it’s good that you all are testing this out in a scientific manner. We over here in MD/VA actually tried using nFBA to play ST years back. To prevent spoiling your experiment, I won’t mention the details yet.
I will ask folks to consider 2 points (if they haven’t already been brought up):
On the day of, warm up your timing on the arcade cab first and then play the emulated version.
Good shit Vintage, I’m excited to test it out this Sunday. I played on MAME at Clockwork’s tournament a few Saturdays ago, and it felt pretty smooth, except for the fact that it was stuck on Turbo 1.
I’m with Ganelon on this one. I think we should all warm up on the arcade cabs, and then hop on the MAME version to do some comparisons. If there’s any speed differences, or weird input hiccups, we’ll find out pretty quick.
So are we going to be playing the tournament on laptops with MAME? Or are you somehow going to hook it up to your arcade stands?
We will definitely change the Speed (most likely Turbo 2). It will be played on the laptop via Mame. The signal will be outputted via a VGA splitter to 2 LCDs (yep, the aforementioned monitors). The stands have 360 support, so they will connect just fine.
Bad thing about laptops is the video outputs usually have display lag, so I doubt you can accurately compare MAME to a cab and be fair using this setup. Even most laptop native LCD’s have display lag.
MAME (0.145) timing is much more precise than shitty FBA’s so the speed should be fairly close to the arcade original.
too bad there isnt a version of ST for legit pc release, or is there? if we could get something legit this might be the beginning of something super e-sports like? fucking SF run on a computer with official capcom licensing etc… could the miracle happen? lets make it hype as possible people, kept the game alive this long, nothing can stop it now!!!
I think if you’re not using legit CPS-2 hardware you will always have to settle for a “less than perfect” version of the game. The game uses a Motorola 68000 processor for the game code and that combined with the sound processor and Rom speeds creates a synergistic output that can never be perfectly emulated on any home console or PC. This doesn’t mean that something very close can’t be created but at what cost? People just need to keep their cps-2 ST boards alive for as long as possible. Mame / GGPO / Supercade all feel very different to me than the real deal.
[LEFT] [/LEFT]
[LEFT] [/LEFT]
T.Hawk, Cammy, Fei, and Deejay would be DLC (already shipped with the game but unlocked later).
Akuma would be playable for those that pay to use him and usable on ranked!
Fuck I love Capcom nowadays.
Also, ST was written in 68000 assembly, there’s a reason HDR went with the dreamcast version which some other team had already ported the 68000 version to C. It’s because a lot of developers nowadays probably don’t understand a lot of the code that went into ST or why some things were done the way they were done. Capcom would take the lazy way out, use the DC version and port it to PC with fixes and we’d still be stuck with an inferior version.
The 68000 CPU can be emulated with precise timing on modern hardware (it doesn’t have a tricky instruction set, fairly few registers and is well documented) using an interpreted core, it’s just no one has done the same accuracy to the 68000 Byuu has done with the *65C816 *inside of the SNES, bsnes has already proven you can have precise timing within nanoseconds of the actual hardware as many have tested by playing the emu and actual hardware together in several SNES intros.
If you have time this is a really interesting read:
That being said, you’re right, nothing beats actual hardware.
I don’t think we’re trying to find a replacement for the CPS-2 boards, but it’s getting more difficult to maintain the longevity of ST unless we find alternative methods of playing the game, that’s acceptable by everyone. So far, MAME has had positive initial results, so hopefully it’ll be another way that new players can access offline ST, players that don’t have a way to play arcade ST, or purchase and/or build a $600+ supergun setup.
Good advice Ganelon. We’ve definitely done tests with the Final Burn Alpha emu that is used on GGPO and that one has horrid input delay. The prior version of FBA used on P2P before ggpo was actually better in terms of input delay. We’ve done several basic tests utilizing MAME with the entire setup (laptop VGA port --> splitting VGA signal to 2 separate LCDS which are much better than the Asus).
Initial tests worked extremely well with no emulation hiccups. Basically removed nearly every unwanted application that may cause a hindrance during play. With the current laptop (Acer Brand) setting (Windows 7 classic desktop setting), the feel of the game/input delay wise felt amazing in comparison to the actual board. I did a side by side comparison with the supergun via CRT for several hours…even did some juice kicks tests (lol ask Muffinman and he’ll explain the science behind that madness). We’ll be conducting some more tests with an HP Win7 PC and try to see if there is any discernible lag from the vga port from that desktop PC compared to the laptop’s vga port which felt on point.
Regarding speed, Turbo 2 on both the US and Japanese emulated versions via MAME (0.145) seemed to be comparable to Speed 3 of the actual Japanese ST board. Speed 3 on both Emulated versions seemed slightly faster than the actual Japanese ST board Speed 3. We’ll try to do some more testing regarding this.
Papercut and El Trouble nailed the reasoning behind this quite well. Again, “IMO” playing via MAME feels infinitely better than playing than playing ST on the DC version and HDR Classic Mode, so in essence it’s already a success. Yes, I get the whole wanting "100% Arcade perfection. I think the scene has to take a realistic look at the entire situation. How many people actually have an ST board and supergun/cabinet? Isn’t it even 20 people across the entire country? I think finding a better/more robust version than the DC and Classic Mode would be more advantageous than to just rely on the arcade hardware. Case in point, what happens if one of those said individuals can not attend a tournament…no ST tourney? Since no one besides “person x” has the board, cabinet, or compatible stick? Not unless we’re mandating that everyone who wants/wishes to play ST **MUST **buy all the aforementioned hardware to play/participate in an ST tournament offline. Is that a realistic solution? I think we may/should be open to the option of actually playing on a version of ST that is as “close” to the original as possible.
The CPS-2 hardware is known, is it not? One could actually embed all of the old hardware in a single chip nowadays. The same could be done for the SNES: PCs could even have SNES and CPS-2 chips on the main board. However, I got no clue about the legal implications. I know some old games are already public domain, but I do not know if the hardware is. Patent stuff is serious business.
It is good to know other people share my feelings. The situation here is even worse: people used PS3 HDR classic mode in tournaments. Yeah. Many are in favor of using an emulator instead, but some feel a tournament that’s not on a commercial platform would not be “legit”. I fear every ST board around here is dead, by now, due to the battery suicide stuff.
BTW I totally support this effort of finding an optimal alternative.
I was also in a similar situation where my availability for providing equipment for NCR makes or breaks the tournament (it ended up not happening this year anyways because the TO won’t allow side tourney)
Seriously the best thing about HDR is that it is running in latest consoles so everyone can use their input (this is the most frustrating aspect of FGC in US where everyone has their own preference of input. In Japan I think most people can use sanwa).
The one inconvenience about mame / fba is that it is not designed to be used in a tournament - i.e. the button mapping UI works but it is assuming that you set it once and then won’t have to set it again (as if you are using it personally at home).
But at a tournament, changing button mapping with mame is quite messy (well unless some open source contributors submit a hack for quick button mapping).
DGV, why would the EVO asus monitor’s performance be different when connecting to a PC (compared to xbox 360 / ps3?)
If the asus is laggy, then surely players would complain at evo, no?
Even though I’m not a fan this new aged concept known as “logic” and “reasoning”, I find your thoughts soothing and easy to digest. I will put away my pitch fork and torch, for now…
This is something the Japanese players have mentioned at EVO (brought up in interviews under the context of making unusual in-match decisions that turned out to be compensations for lag). Not sure about the American players though (besides the obvious).
Pap: GMC Turbo 3 via emulation actually seems to run faster than GMC Turbo 3 arcade board on MAME 0.145…it feels just a tad faster. I’ll definitely mess with the speed settings to tonight for more observations. I’m sure the Super Arcade crew could probably adjust to the slightly faster speed since Grandmaster Watts secretly heightened all our reflexes by making us play Turbo 4 on the GMC board (smart move Mike!) for several weeks.
Agreed, the button configuration via MAME is slightly slower than the traditional button config on a console fighter. Basically one has to exit the emulator between different sticks. Luckily, it seems a lot of users today play mostly on TE and Hori sticks, which may reduce some of the time between switching sticks. Obviously, there will be still many who prefer their own stick and want their own specific configuration such as outer three layout via TE stick etc. In which case it’s just a small sacrifice time wise for a better experience for each user.
Glad you asked regarding the Asus monitors. The Asus monitors as a whole are really solid monitors when used for console gaming. I think the Evo specific model is 8.3 ms? (it’s mentioned on the sub-frame HDTV thread). The problem lies when sending the signal from the arcade board to the encoder which converts the signal for VGA for the Asus. The VGA encoder we bought from jammaboards.com actually has inherent input delay (30 ms) to be exact. A gentleman who writes reviews for countless encoders for game consoles/arcade machines and works closely with the Prad.de (site that does all the extensive input lag testing), confirmed this. Basically, the only way around this input delay is with a better encoder, more specifically the XRGB2 (which Ganelon owns btw). This explains why we experienced all that input delay at one of the NCRs when we utilized it in conjunction with the ASUS monitors. The monitors that will be used this weekend are considerably better (IIyama brand) and there will not be a converter to add extra input delay.
I have to ask an obvious question…xbox360 HDR classic mode? Why not?
As far as I know, it’s the most solid console version other than the graphics not being original. And emu and cps2 converted to a flat screen looks worse than the redrawn art. Everyone can use their own sticks, and its easily accessible
Also, I’d throw my vote in for Sanwa sticks as opposed to seimitsu. If only cause Sanwa is way more common thanks to the TE / Hori sticks. You’d actually have to go out of your way to have seimitsus and I’d imagine the Japanese players can play on both anyway.
