1990s Raizing/Toaplan arcade shmups, feasibility of emulatio

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dark2
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1990s Raizing/Toaplan arcade shmups, feasibility of emulatio

Post by dark2 »

Several Raizing and Toaplan (precursor to the notorious Cave of Dodonpachi fame) shmups were released in the 1990s and are well known as high quality classics in the genre by shmup fans. Some of these titles found release only on the Sega Saturn, while others stayed as arcade releases only.

At any rate, I was investigating the total (unzipped) arcade rom file size of two of the most popular mid 90s shmup releases. Each of these saw release on the Sega Saturn.

-Batsugun - 6,912kb
-Battle Garegga - 10,400kb (uses z80 processor)

It seems like they would fit into the ram restrictions of the DC, especially Batsugun. Neither of these games comes from super powerful hardware, we're talking arcade hardware that is about as powerful as a sega genesis.

Chui's port of mame seems to have support for some old Toaplan drivers as I've heard of it supporting Truxton which is similar hardware to Batsugun I think, but in the recent past, mame has been greatly upgraded and fully functional drivers including full sound support for all of these games have been developed.

I don't have the programming expertise to create any single game emulators myself. I guess the point of this thread is to call attention to these games in particular, see if anyone agrees that conceptually an optimized single game emulator for one or both of these games could be created to run well given the DC's hardware limitations, and see if there is interest by anyone outside of myself in such a thing. :wink:
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Re: 1990s Raizing/Toaplan arcade shmups, feasibility of emul

Post by Christuserloeser »

Oh, I'd love to see an update of MAME4All.

The problem is that the Dreamcast's hardware cannot emulate anything above NES and Master System without A LOT of optimizations to the code. And even the available NES and SMS emulators did require A LOT of work, with emphasis on A LOT.

So, adding a few more games to MAME4All might require a lot more work than you and me probably might imagine.
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