Strider- Officially the Worst port of all time

[Tatsujin]

just feel like to play that game tonight again. put it away in the box a long time ago and didn't think about playing it again, but now while reading all those comments..

[ParanoiaDragon]

Hmm, with all this extracting of data from the ACD Strider, maybe we could work on a remake of the NES Strider, that would rock!(hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean?  say no more!)

BTW, some things that always puzzle me, is why was the little cinema's music (after beating a boss), in ADPCM, rather then redbook?  The redbook is on the cd, why bother putting it in redbook, if you're just going to play an ADPCM version of it.  I also wondered why his sword never got longer in this version, have something to do with sprite handling, or were they just lazy?  And does the in game action NEED to pause, to load a new track?

I think that's all my questions I've had all these years, there might be more, but, those come to mind right away.

Oh, & some of that stuff, does remind me of pachinko for some reason.

[Tatsujin]

hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean?  say no more!)

Terry Jones?

[Bonknuts]

Did you find the supposed 2nd extra stage in there somewhere too?  

I didn't know there was supposed to be a second extra stage. I could look around some more - but most of the graphics are compressed - not sure why since it's an Arcade card game. Maybe it was originally a SCD project. The first level appears to be uncompressed though unless it's just unused graphics. Do you have any info on the 2nd extra stage?

 

I also wondered why his sword never got longer in this version, have something to do with sprite handling, or were they just lazy?

 I thought it did (in the PCE-AC version).

BTW, some things that always puzzle me, is why was the little cinema's music (after beating a boss), in ADPCM, rather then redbook? The redbook is on the cd, why bother putting it in redbook, if you're just going to play an ADPCM version of it.

 Maybe the original cinemas were limited in animation and they decided to switch to streaming data/audio instead  for more animation (similar to FMV), but left the audio tracks in the project/CD.

[ParanoiaDragon]

Did you find the supposed 2nd extra stage in there somewhere too?  

I didn't know there was supposed to be a second extra stage. I could look around some more - but most of the graphics are compressed - not sure why since it's an Arcade card game. Maybe it was originally a SCD project. The first level appears to be uncompressed though unless it's just unused graphics. Do you have any info on the 2nd extra stage?

 

I also wondered why his sword never got longer in this version, have something to do with sprite handling, or were they just lazy?

 I thought it did (in the PCE-AC version).

BTW, some things that always puzzle me, is why was the little cinema's music (after beating a boss), in ADPCM, rather then redbook? The redbook is on the cd, why bother putting it in redbook, if you're just going to play an ADPCM version of it.

 Maybe the original cinemas were limited in animation and they decided to switch to streaming data/audio instead  for more animation (similar to FMV), but left the audio tracks in the project/CD.

There was supposed to be a 2nd bonus stage, infact, I think my original Game Informer, where they rated the game, said there specifically were 2!  Maybe there's some leftovers of that hidden stage somewhere.

As for the sword, it didn't seem to get longer IMO, alteast, not as much as the Genny version.

[shubibiman]

How do they look like a pachinko game? They look like overworld map and characters + larger characters(last pic) - to me.

Pachiokun game series, that are pachinko games, have RPG aspects, so you have to speak to people to know which pachinko parlour you're supposed to go to and, of course, as in any RPG, Pachiokun, the main character, as to go across town to find the right pachinko parlour.
These pics are definitely from one of the Pachiokun game series, I'm 200% sure.

Edit : now I can even tell you that the pics are from Pachiokun Maboroshi No Densetsu

[sunteam_paul]

hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean?  say no more!)

Terry Jones?

Eric Idle.

[ParanoiaDragon]

hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean?  say no more!)

Terry Jones?

Eric Idle.

Exactly

[sunteam_paul]

How do they look like a pachinko game? They look like overworld map and characters + larger characters(last pic) - to me.

The bottom image looks like pachio-kun (the ball character at the top)

[shubibiman]

How do they look like a pachinko game? They look like overworld map and characters + larger characters(last pic) - to me.

Pachiokun game series, that are pachinko games, have RPG aspects, so you have to speak to people to know which pachinko parlour you're supposed to go to and, of course, as in any RPG, Pachiokun, the main character, as to go across town to find the right pachinko parlour.
These pics are definitely from one of the Pachiokun game series, I'm 200% sure.

Edit : now I can even tell you that the pics are from Pachiokun Maboroshi No Densetsu

Have you read my post ?

[Tatsujin]

hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean?  say no more!)

Terry Jones?

Eric Idle.

Exactly

oh shame on me..of course it was eric which stressed terry in the bar and not otherwise

[akamichi]

Did you find the supposed 2nd extra stage in there somewhere too?  

I didn't know there was supposed to be a second extra stage. I could look around some more - but most of the graphics are compressed - not sure why since it's an Arcade card game. Maybe it was originally a SCD project. The first level appears to be uncompressed though unless it's just unused graphics. Do you have any info on the 2nd extra stage?

IIRC, there were only one or two pics of the 2nd extra stage.  I'll have dig thru my mags to see if I can find them.  

Strider went thru many format changes over the years.  Of course it started out as a SGX Hucard, then changed to SCD and finally ACD.  I think at one point there was talk of a SGX/PCE hybrid card version.  Actually, I think somebody posted a scan of a PCE mag article talking about the hybrid card.  I'm guessing once NEC Ave dropped SGX support, they probably were working with SCD hardware for most of the project.

 

I also wondered why his sword never got longer in this version, have something to do with sprite handling, or were they just lazy?

 I thought it did (in the PCE-AC version).

It does get longer, but it looks like crap IMO.  Basically, the full blade "slash" graphic gets bigger, but the intermediate "half slash" graphics are the normal size.  So when you get that sword power up, that one frame is bigger and doesn't match up with the other frames.

Also, I noticed that Hiryu is missing some animation frames.  Nothing major, but it might be another clue that ACD support was tacked on but not really utilized.  Not only that, the jumping frames (not somersaut) are reversed from the arcade!  I always knew there was something funny about that but didn't notice it until I played the arcade version recently.

[Bonknuts]

How do they look like a pachinko game? They look like overworld map and characters + larger characters(last pic) - to me.

Pachiokun game series, that are pachinko games, have RPG aspects, so you have to speak to people to know which pachinko parlour you're supposed to go to and, of course, as in any RPG, Pachiokun, the main character, as to go across town to find the right pachinko parlour.
These pics are definitely from one of the Pachiokun game series, I'm 200% sure.

Edit : now I can even tell you that the pics are from Pachiokun Maboroshi No Densetsu

 Awesome, you nailed it! I just checked out the off line PCE catalog and it has the same tiles.

 This is important as the date of that game is 1991. Often companies will re-use projects as a starting point and change from there, but a lot of times there are left over code and graphics in the data track. Last Alert has both Valis II and Cosmic Fantasy I tiles and sprites through out the ISO.

 So in other words, this game probably started developement from 90-91 as an old CD or SCD format. This would explain the use of compression on the tiles and enemy sprites. The weird thing is that Pachiokun is not published by NEC AVE - unless they had help from NEC or Coconuts was the developer who started the Strider CD project.

 Also; some of the graphics look more than just redrawn. The gorilla in the second stage has scaling artifacts on him  - the kind you get from doing a "nearest neighbor" down size instead of a redrawn from scratch(like the Gen version). If it did start out as a SGX game, then it probably used the 352(376)x224 res mode like GnG and they rescaled the graphics for 256(288)x224 mode res. If it were on the SGX it would have probably used the 3bit(8color) mode (for storage) for tiles and sprites like GnG appears to do instead of the native 4bit(16color) format.

 Edit: looking through the data/sprite blocks - it appears to be 7 levels - is this correct?