Native Port or Emulation?

[TyranT⨁]

Is this release emulated with some sort of MAME, or is this a native port of the arcade version to PC?

[Vapor Dosh]

Native, it's based on X360 port.

[TyranT⨁]

Awesome, thanks for the info.

[freudxxx]

What's the difference between emulation and a port?

[TyranT⨁]

Emulation mimics how the original hardware or software handled the program. It requires a seperate exe or dll to have the program run, in this case, being the emulator. This can have a varying degree of accuracy, or lack of, depending on how good the emulator is.

With a port, its runs natively, requiring no external program to run. This guarantees 100% accuracy and performance.

[shadowflash]

Originally posted by 愛 TҽмpҽsT:

This guarantees 100% accuracy and performance.

Haha... "guarantees"... with tons of broken ports it sounds like a bad joke.

But in case of Ikaruga port is good, not arcade perfect, since it's X360 version, but plays great.

[TyranT⨁]

Originally posted by shadowflash:

Haha... "guarantees"... with tons of broken ports it sounds like a bad joke.

But in case of Ikaruga port is good, not arcade perfect, since it's X360 version, but plays great.

Games built natively for an OS can be broken also, so I don't consider your statement valid to my comment. I would like you to name some broken ports of some video games, and reasons why you consider them "broken." Although some ports have some bugs, this doesn't mean that they are not 100% accurate to the native game. Just buggy. Even games made natively are buggy. So any game can be "broken" reguardless of if its native or a port.

About the Ikaruga port, I assumed that the X360 port was just a port of the arcade version like the Dreamcast port, just with added features like multiplayer and scoreboards. But, I just read how the X360 port has enemies placed in different spots and other things like that, so I will just stick with my Dreamcast port, since its arcade accurate.

Technically, the PC port from the X360 is 100% accurate, except only to the X360 version. I do want an arcade perfect port. So, I will just stick to my Dreamcast port. Thanks for the information shadowflash.

[[FaNG] Bagheera]

Actually, Naomi Hardware is relatively cheap, hooks up to a VGA monitor, and can even be netbooted with a large variety of games. If you want the authentic experience, you should just get the original arcade hardware.

[TyranT⨁]

I may consider doing that, but I'm not like a die hard Ikaruga fan. I do always go for an authentic experience with any sort of game, so I'll think about it.

[Luke Kelly]

apart from the differences in graphics, what's different between the arcade original and xbox 360?

pace of game? frames per second? difficulty? Personally I can see no differences.

[Buster Nut]

I tried the Dreamcast emulation on 2 different emus, played them thoroughly and they are far from perfect, effects and layers missing and using hacks to make bullets appear on later levels.

[TyranT⨁]

Originally posted by Luke Kelly:

apart from the differences in graphics, what's different between the arcade original and xbox 360?

pace of game? frames per second? difficulty? Personally I can see no differences.

On the PC, the graphics may look a little better since its displayed at a HD resolution, instead of the Dreamcasts SD resolution. But besides that, the textures, models, special effects, and so on are all the same. The differences are that the enemies are in different places compared to the Dreamcast and Arcade versions. You can read about it here [www.gamesradar.com]. Besides that, graphically, they are almost the same besides the higher resolution of the PC port.

Originally posted by MiTziBisHi:

I tried the Dreamcast emulation on 2 different emus, played them thoroughly and they are far from perfect, effects and layers missing and using hacks to make bullets appear on later levels.

Well thats emulation for you. I'm happy I own an actual Dreamcast. You would be better off downloading MAME and playing the arcade version. MAME emulation has come a long way compared to the Dreamcast emulation scene.

[shadowflash]

MAME emulation has come a long way compared to the Dreamcast emulation scene.

Really? Last time i checked MAME/MESS game was barely runnable and Dreamcast emulation in MESS greets you with broken BIOS screen.
And it will be about 6fps on a machine that runs the most demanding PC games at full speed with highest settings.

DC video chip (PowerVR2 version) is really hard to be fully emulated with hardware 3D, because it's different from PC video cards, and it requires a lot of resources to emulate it in software, a lot more than PS2 GS chip.
That's why there won't be any kind of virtual console DC games in the next 10 years.

There are three ways to play this game - this port, or X360 or GC - not 100% close to arcade but good anyway (don't get near 50Hz GC PAL version though), DC port on real hardware or real NAOMI hardware with good CRT monitor, if you want true arcade-like experience.