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[Agent X]

Back in the day, I traded email with Jeff Vavasour, the head of Digital Ecplise, and he clearly cared a great deal about these games and getting them right.

Yeah, like jgkspsx said, I remember when Jeff used to post in rec.games.video.classic. He was friendly, and also seemed to accept feedback and constructive criticism very well.

I know that Digital Eclipse became part of a larger group called Backbone Entertainment, which in turn merged with The Collective earlier this year to become Foundation 9 Entertainment.

By the way, I just noticed that Digital Eclipse's Web site has been updated to include a description of Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play.

 

[SomeDude]

Why don't they put UMK3 in this? MK 3 regular was just sort of bleh.

 

[mosaic]

Why don't they put UMK3 in this? MK 3 regular was just sort of bleh.

Regular MK3 is full-on "bleh."

To be fair... they didn't put UMK3 on the console versions either. Considering the quality of the emulation on PSP though, it's probably good they didn't try. Some of the backgrounds are missing, much of the background animation is laggy, and oh the load times.

 

[DaCocoBrova]

Not half bad. The MKs are very playable.

 

[Agent X]

PLEASE READ THIS IF YOU OWN THIS DISC.

In this thread from the Atari Age forums, Jess Ragan said that the widescreen stretch can be disabled. According to him, you can press the Select button while playing any game, then the Square button to change back to original aspect ratio and resolution. Of course, this feature is not mentioned in the manual (much like screen resizing in Atari Anthology that I mentioned earlier in this thread).

If you have this disc, then please give this a try, and confirm the results (and tell us your thoughts on it)!

 

[hyp]

i bought this last week for my trip to hawaii. and all i've gotta say is that the difficulty of MK2 is fucking insane. i seriously felt like throwing my PSP after playing this game. i got to kintaro and for the life of me could not beat him. there is seriously something wrong with the AI programming. i don't remember MK2 being so damn hard. *sigh*

and i consider myself a pretty good MK2 player. wtf digital eclipse? anyone experience the same issues playing this?

 

[DaCocoBrova]

^^

Wait... You act like this is news. MK AI is cheap.

You can adjust each game's difficulty prior to starting a game btw.

 

[DCharlie]

select+square : just tried - doesn't work in gauntlet at least ....

tried it on the game mentioned too (joust) - it simply doesn't work.

 

[slidewinder]

In the thread Agent X linked to, the original poster of the square+select "trick" says

This is way too weird. Now I'M having trouble getting the trick to work! Before, I swear I could just pause the game and press the square button to switch the screen size, but now I have to pause the game, then press square and down on the D-pad together. If it doesn't work the first time, try rapidly pressing both keys together until the screen size changes.

later on.

 

[DCharlie]

tried it - awesome, that works - it's select then Square + down

3 scales by the llook of it

full stretch
actual aspect ratio
and fit to vertical

nice - very nice indeed.

 

[Anyanka]

To be fair... they didn't put UMK3 on the console versions either. Considering the quality of the emulation on PSP though, it's probably good they didn't try. Some of the backgrounds are missing, much of the background animation is laggy, and oh the load times.

Wait, backgrounds are missing? Which ones?

The AI in MK II has always been bad. It's not really hard or cheap it's just stupid and set to react to the players actions the same way each time.

There's no reason to have regular MK3 in instead of UMK3. UMK3 wasn't even really a seperate game, it was just a rom upgrade for a MK3 board. There should be no problem emulating it. They don't seem to be holding it off for another collection either. As stupid as it sounds they may have just forgotten or not care about UMK3. In the credits to MAT2 MK3 they list the UMK3 actors and screenshots for previews showed UMK3 footage as if it was MK3. Almost anytime they talk about the third game now they just refer to it as MK3 as if they forgot about the updates.

I wish they'd put Wavenet UMK3 in one of these collections as a secret. Most people have never played it or even know it exists.

 

[Agent X]

I finally got around to getting my own copy of this a few days ago.

For someone like myself, a person who really digs these 1980s and early 1990s games, this is worth it. There are a lot of noticeable flaws, but most of them have been described in this thread already and in several reviews on the Web. I think most people here will know what they're getting into. If you feel you can tolerate the flaws, then beneath the surface there's a lot to like.

I've tried all the games at least once now, and a few of them several times. I'll share some quick thoughts, adding onto what has already been said:

Defender and Joust emulation appear absolutely perfect, as far as I can tell. Sinistar is also perfectly emulated except for the vertical rescaling (haven't tried the screen resizing code on this one yet). Wizard of Wor might be perfectly emulated too, but it's been about 20 years since I've seen the actual machine, so my memory is somewhat hazy on that one.

Many of the Atari Games games on here have their sound mangled to some degree. Usually the music or sound effects are slower and lower-pitched. Klax isn't too bad, but the sound degradation is really noticeable with Marble Madness, Gauntlet, and Paperboy.

I've only tried the screen resizing code on a few games so far, but the results are excellent. Too bad there's no way to save the screen resizing options along with all the other high scores and preferences. You have to enter the code each time. If Midway ever released out a revised version in the future (maybe as a Greatest Hits release), then they should consider making this saveable, and even promote it to a full-fledged option rather than a hidden code. I have no clue why they implemented it as a code, because not only do the games look much better when displayed at one-to-one pixel resolution, but (as Mosaic indicated in his updated review of this disc) some games even seem to run smoother.

While the low-res games like Joust and Gauntlet look weird when stretched, most of the high-res games (which have higher resolution than the PSP) still manage to look reasonably good, even though they're technically being shrunk to a lower resolution. These include mid to late 1980s Midway games like Arch Rivals, Rampage, and Xenophobe, as well as some of the Atari Games games like 720°, Championship Sprint, Paperboy, and Toobin'.

All three of the Mortal Kombat games look beautiful on the PSP screen.

Rampart control is slightly better than on the PS2 (which suffered greatly), but still too imprecise to be really playable.

Marble Madness seems to control somewhat worse than on the PS2. I'm inclined to say 720° is a bit worse off compared to PS2, too, but the PS2 implementation of the control was somewhat tricky already.

Toobin' plays well and has responsive control, but as you're playing it vertically-oriented it's a bit tricky to use the arcade-style control scheme (using the four face buttons to move, and either the L or R button to throw cans) unless you can rest the PSP on your lap or the edge of a table. They implemented an alternative movement scheme on the joypad, but it seemed a bit flaky to me--it might be an acquired taste.

 

[kaching]

heh... thx for bumping the thread again. I missed the last one where you notified everyone about the trick to scaling these games.

What 'tards for not putting that in the manual.

 

[jgkspsx]

I finally got around to getting my own copy of this a few days ago.

...

Defender and Joust emulation appear absolutely perfect, as far as I can tell.

Excellent impressions, gracias.

Any idea whether it's possible to play this with 1.5? I'd really love to get this, but I'm afraid I'm not willing to upgrade my firmware for it.

 

[mosaic]

Any idea whether it's possible to play this with 1.5? I'd really love to get this, but I'm afraid I'm not willing to upgrade my firmware for it.

For a while, I was playing it on 1.5 with Fastloader. It works just fine, except the scaling code does not work. At least it didn't for me until I updated to 2.0 and stopped using a loader to boot the game.

 

[Ignatz Mouse]

heh... thx for bumping the thread again. I missed the last one where you notified everyone about the trick to scaling these games.

What 'tards for not putting that in the manual.

I suspect it was hidden for a reason. What that reason is, I cannot guess.

 

[Agent X]

heh... thx for bumping the thread again. I missed the last one where you notified everyone about the trick to scaling these games.

What 'tards for not putting that in the manual.

You're welcome!

Also, for the benefit of those who haven't played this yet, I want to clarify something I said earlier:

Too bad there's no way to save the screen resizing options along with all the other high scores and preferences. You have to enter the code each time.

What I meant is that you can save your high scores and most preferences (difficulty settings, custom control schemes, and such). What you can't save is the screen resizing. I already tried it with autosave on as well as off (and subsequently saving manually), but no dice.

That reminds me, I should also mention that the disc allows you to define and save not just one, but two custom control configurations per game! This is great if the PSP is frequently shared between two users, or if you want to experiment with different configurations. Also, the default configuration is always available as a separate option, without erasing your custom changes. So, during the game, you can easily switch between "Default," "Custom 1," or "Custom 2" configurations. It's a very thoughtful addition to the package.

One other neat thing they did along with high score saving is that they embedded the top scores for each game in the "information" file for the save file. This means that while you are browsing the contents of your Memory Stick from the home screen interface, you can highlight the save file for this game, press the Triangle button, select "Information," and see the top scores at a glance, without needing the game disc.

 

[shuri]

... is the ai still insane in the mk game? The ai wasnt as cheap in the arcades back in the days. IT was unplayable in midway classics 2

 

[jgkspsx]

For a while, I was playing it on 1.5 with Fastloader. It works just fine, except the scaling code does not work.

gah! Of all the luck. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[Kingpen]

Any more impressions on this? I didn't realize it had come out, and having all 3 MKs and Rampage for me seems to be worth the 30 bucks...

I realize this is months old, and I don't know if I should trust all the lackluster reviews with people saying the MKs are pretty decent (decent, not perfect, as I'm not expecting perfect). It was the last one at Best Buy and I figured if I didn't grab it, I probably would have a hard time finding it later....


This quote from a review is giving me hope for the disc...

"Furthermore, the frame-rate in a number of games is choppy because of the stretch. How do we know that? Because Digital Eclipse and Midway recently sent out a code, which wasn't documented in the manual, that allows players to select between "Full Screen," "Fit," and "Original" display ratios. When you shrink the display down to the original aspect ratio, the graphics are no longer distorted and the major share of frame drops go away. It was the discovery of this code that helped improve my opinion of the disc, because the frame drops were the most rampant and prevailing problem plaguing the major share of games in the collection."

 

[Of All Trades]

Just for you, I fired it up and tried MK, Toobin', and Paperboy. MK doesn't support the code, but doesn't run at full screen, either. Looks good.

Toobin showed pretty significant improvement with the framerate. Still a bit iffy at times, but definately better and what I would consider acceptable (as compared to before which I really didn't like, which kills me because I love Toobin).

Paperboy showed slight improvement, but it worked pretty well with full screen.

I bought it for $20 used at GS.

 

[jgkspsx]

So I finally got around to buying this. It works great and completely with the latest Devhook, so don't let that stop you.

I'd totally forgotten the complaints when I tried it out, so I want to emphasize one: the "psuedo-analog" control in Marble Madness is terrible. What's the point of including a game if you're gonna make it frustratingly uncontrollable?

That said, the load times aren't as bad as I feared, there are some great games included, and the multiplayer would be really cool if I knew someone else with a PSP

It's really disappointing if you go back and look at the compilations from Midway and Digital Eclipse on the PS1. When Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits came out on PS1, I was absolutely floored at what they were able to do, in terms of emulation (even including the arcade operator's back door screens) as well as the histories and the programmer interview videos. They were selling 5-7 games per disc for $50, but the quality was outstanding! They just had such a meticulous attention to detail.

I have to agree with this. It's great to have all these games on here, but they're thrown on with so little care or attention to detail that it cheapens things and detracts from what often were masterpieces of design. The first four Digital Eclipse collections (Williams Arcade Classics, Midway Arcade Classics, Atari Arcade Classics I & II) were fantastic, and everything since has rather disappointed me.

But hey, Joust is Joust.

(P.S. Anyone know if Capcom Classics Remixed works with Devhook? I'd love to pick that up. Wish Konami would release another anthology...)

P.P.S. I'd forgotten how fun Xybots is as a handheld game, even if the forced splitscreen wastes screen real estate. Xybots, Xenophobe, Klax... ah, it's like a brand new Lynx!