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What is the difference between the romsets called Star Wars Rev1 and Star Wars Rev2?
Finally have SW setup in MAME with a real flight controller, the gameplay seems slightly different than the real SW uprights I have played the past year or two. Is the difference in the romsets, like the aggression of the enemy shots at the player, speed up on towers, etc.
What a great game, with even better sounds and background music. ahhhhh.
thanks for the input.
I am not sure what the exact differences are, but over the years I have only experienced the following two (2) quantifiable differences in gameplay...possibly attributed to varying ROMsets.
-> The behaviour of tie fighters (waves 5 and beyond) differs at the beginning of each wave.
-> Some performances force you (no pun intended) to deal with two circling tie fighters at the same time frequently throughout the game, while in other performances the tie fighter waves were fairly easy without having to deal with that particular headache
I never really gave notice to the tower scenes being more difficult, same for the trenches, however a long time ago (also no pun intended) Darren Harris shared with me a post on an entirely different forum in which some game stated as a matter of fact (or so he believed) that the precise tower patter and trench pattern is predictable for the entire game. I never really bothered to pay attention to it past wave 19, to be honest, and unlike "Tron" which is easy to keep track of, I can't realistically see keeping track of it for "Star Wars" to waves 100, 500, 1000, etc...I just deal with the patterns as they come up.
I stated many years back on the forum that during my marathon performance something bizarre happened after the approx. 120M mark, likely more based on duration than score. The game sped up dramatically for an hour and then subsided for the next five, and then as far as I could tell using my gauge of 6M per hour, this pattern repeated until the game was intentionally ended. No idea if that was due to the ROMset or not, but one of the programmers many years back in a response to my post suggested that MAYBE one of the other programmers did something that could have caused this to happen deep into the game. I'll never know. Could have also happened due to the duration of gameplay causing wear and tear on the game...who knows.
Interesting stuff. thank you.
For the mame differences between a real machine, I'm just going to chalk that up to emulation issues that no one probably ever fine tuned out in the mame code. and the fact that a monitor doesn't quite do justice compared to a full size vector monitor in a real machine.
It still astounds me that mame can capture the original sensation of flying an X-Wing fighter, the same as the real arcade machine. gotta love technology
PS- played an immaculate real Star Wars machine yesterday.
Proves that emulation is WAY off the mark on speed/performance.
MAME cursor movement is sluggish and sloppy compared to quick-precise controls on real.
The game plays far slower on real than mame, the towers come along at a nice pace on real.
the large vector monitor makes the trench a more precise affair on real, mame on LCD is a lot of guesswork on timing.
Checked with a MAME Developer, not the original SW developer, and he guessed the key differences might be resultant of the vector>raster conversion process.
Meaning, we should just be happy someone figured out how to create a reasonable facsimile for home use. cheers!
Would be nice to have a yoke to play the MAME version...the extra speed sounds like fun !!
It's a beast! Rob, back in the early 80s a Star Wars champion came to TG in Ottumwa to play a marathon.
Taught a bunch of us the patterns and strategies so quite a few of us learned to play "long" games.
Was that you?
But yes, having this harder version means there won't be any mindless marathon games going on by me anyway. finding a 19inch LCD over a 17 might be a slight advantage in managing the game.
Who knows. I'm rather excited to get the kids interested in it, such a fun gaming experience even on wave 1!
Wasn't me...I was never in Iowa or anywhere outside of the Tri-State area until 1992.