Share Your Favorite, Lesser-known Arcade Gems

edm203

Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa. It's like Sunset Rider, but with cows. Oh, and after lvl 1, you get to pick the next stage. Also 4 players.

AlexMurphy

@edm203 Ha! This is brilliant. Never "herd" of it before. Thanks!

AlexMurphy

@edm203 Great flyer too.

buddyscott

@AlexMurphy it was a good cartoon too.(from what i can vaguely remember) I remember watching it on saturday mornings when i was a wee little lad.

Omnija

@pjft Yes it runs at full speed with mame2003

AlexMurphy

@buddyscott I don't remember it. However, I am 40.

buddyscott

@AlexMurphy you would of been 16 when it was airing. may be why you didnt watch it. i was around 8 and im 32.

pjft

@Omnija For some reason I was running it on MAME2010, I believe because of the aiming controls.

That being said, I tried AdvMAME-3.x (I had 3.2 installed at the moment, haven't yet updated) but wow, it seems to have fantastic performance! Even games that I was unable to run in other emulators with any reasonable performance (System 24 games like CrackDown, Bonanza Bros or Gain Ground) run as smooth as butter!

Thank you very much for the nudge, I will research a bit more and see what other games I should be running there. I had some troubles getting the PS3 controller to work in it, especially in regards to saving the settings, but I'll do some further research.

Thanks - and you can take Bonanza Bros as a recommendation for a favorite lesser-known game!

Darksavior

@pjft I had the complete opposite experience when I tried it last night. To my surprise, it's not a libretro emulator so that already put me off. No 1080p output, no crtpi shader, no easy configurable pad. I only tried Arabian Fight (system32) and it was considerably slower than mame2003. I was looking for an emulator that might get me fullspeed in that on my pi2 but it looks like I need a pi3. That and I had a real fun time trying to get the damn rom to load because it hates my ES cfg usb rom location for some reason. Even pointing to it in the .rc file got me nowhere. It was an adventure I don't wish to try again, heh..
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Moo Mesa, Arabian Fight, and most of these obscure games I ONLY encountered at arcades on my visit to Mexico. I never saw them in an arcade here in the US.

pjft

@Darksavior Yeah, the experience wasn't in any way pleasant so far in terms of setting up, but the games I tried so far seemed to perform well. It doesn't have the crtpi shader, but there are a few scanline overlays that do the trick for me at least! I try to use only libretro emulators - the exceptions have been Daphne and DosBox for Sensible World of Soccer. That being said, if I manage to get a proper, easy setup for the controls and visuals, I will likely use it for a handful of games I had struggled to get to work at full speed (or even at all) in MAME 2003 or 2010 where needed.

I'm on a Pi3, though, so that may have had an impact on the outcome.

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft Not to take this to far off topic, but would there be a group interested in starting a google docs spreadsheet similar to what N64 and a few other systems have linked on their wiki? We could list games and have a column for each emulator and share notes on how each game runs on a given emulator. I know I have pretty much defaulted to Mame2003 because it seems to work the "best Overall" however I have seen a lot of users who suggest try fbalpha and advMame as well. If anyone is interested, lets move this conversation to a new thread. Thanks

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy I'm never a person to discourage someone from trying something out, though I've seen plenty of outdated compatibility sheets and discouraged comments from their owners, so I wonder if that effort would be somewhat short-lived. :)

I'm happy to contribute, though - as you said - the default will usually be MAME2003, sometimes FBA, and only a small handful of others (vector games, trackball games, or more recent ones) would require a different emulator, so... unsure.

I'd probably be more supportive of adding one such comment to the existing sheets (i.e. where someone says "doesn't work" or "slow", adding "works full speed on XXX"). That probably "scales" best. :)

Still, I commend the initiative and if others would find it useful, I'm more than happy to chime in with the few games I know work best in anything other than the default ones (which, for me, are like 1%-2% of the games I play, really :/ ).

Back on track, and building on the Lucky and Wild recommendation earlier, Spy Hunter and Chase H.Q. are among my favorite Driving/Action games, and work well in any emulator you through at them for the most part.

mediamogul

@pjft

If I remember correctly, 'Spy Hunter' is in someway non-functional on lr-mame2003. However it runs well on everything else in RetroPie I've tried. I have a custom mapping for it in advmame to where I have full analog control of the gas on the y-axis of my controller's thumbstick and digital steering on the x-axis. The result plays incredibly smooth like you'd find on a modern Midway compilation.

Capeman

@mediamogul Just tried to add spy hunter the other night, freezes on a volume adjustment screen after the bios and there's no way to proceed on lr-mame2003. Bummer.

mediamogul

@Capeman

Yeah, seems like it's an issue that affects several classic Midway games. It can probably be traced to one particular driver.

caver01

@pjft Chase HQ is certainly one I've never heard of, but I wouldn't call Spy Hunter a lesser-known. I think a Spy Hunter cab was in every arcade I can remember as a kid.

caver01

@Darksavior said in Share Your Favorite, Lesser-known Arcade Gems:

@pjft I had the complete opposite experience when I tried it last night. To my surprise, it's not a libretro emulator so that already put me off. No 1080p output, no crtpi shader, no easy configurable pad. I only tried Arabian Fight (system32) and it was considerably slower than mame2003.

AdvanceMAME has several "smoothing" filters, and default options may not be the best for performance--not by a longshot. display_resizeeffect may be set to options like hq or xbr which do some fancy blitting to smooth shapes etc. For most of us looking for a retro experience, this is unacceptable. It also drags performance considerably. You can edit the .rc config file and set this option to NONE by default, or use TAB in-game and set the option you like. I often set an RGB triad overlay in conjunction with a display_resizeeffect of mean or filter for a decent CRT look, but this is totally subjective. Check here for details on what each setting does.

One thing for certain, AdvanceMAME is superior when it comes to vector, running at your display's full resolution as opposed to the other emulators that take a low-res default (640x480?) resulting in jagged vectors.

pjft

@caver01 I suppose I mostly knew these games from the ZX Spectrum - never had a lot of arcades in my neighborhood as a kid - though I should have been more aware that Spy Hunter would've been quite popular. My bad. I suppose I also never saw one - I did see G-Loc (in the actual plane cockpit cabinet!) and Hang-On, though.

@mediamogul @Capeman I'll need to check. I know that at one point the Midway games did have some problems in MAME2003, but I was under the impression that I had played it on it more recently. Might be my mind playing tricks on me, certainly. Will see. :)

backstander

@pjft
Spy Hunter was one of my favorite's back on my NES and I had the TurboGrafx-16 version of Chase HQ. I couldn't tell you how many hours I'd spent playing those!

I don't know if these are lesser know but anytime I try to talk to anyone locally about these games they would either look at me crazy or have no idea what I'm talking about. Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin'! There was a gas station not far from my friend's house that had the sit down version of Race Drivin'. My friend later got the game for his Atari Lynx. I don't think the Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to emulator those 2 arcade games but if someone know how, just let us know!

Also APB ("All Points Bulletin") which was a day and the life of a rookie police officer trying not to get fired by his boss. My same friend had the Atari Lynx version of that game as well.

caver01

@backstander APB is a good-looking game, although I find it hard to play--I probably just need practice. Also, success might depend on how the controls are mapped, especially on an arcade cabinet.