forums.marpirc.net

In the latest versions of LOHT (world) there is something different from before.
As you can see in my game on wolf 208 http://replay.marpirc.net/inp/d/4/9/krj ... olf208.zip, enemies are fast, shoot fast and at leeching points spawn in sub 3 seconds. Also the statues shoot early and fast.
This behaviour seems consinstent with Ben Shinobi's game -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnCnXE5rjcc
and monstermug there -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZcNrKbrsXI
From wolf 214/215 to the lastest, it seems like the game rank is soften for unknown reason.
In my wolf 227 you can see enemies are slower, spawn slower and the statues shoot very later when they saw you. In the first stage I am down of like 40-50 skeletons.

TLDR
I made a small comparison between wolf 208 and wolf 243 trying to point out the different in the early part of the game.
If you try to set the difficult to easy, in the latest version of mame, some skeletons do not spawn at all.

There was a lot of work around that time on the M72 driver. At a guess, it could be the MCU, which provides startup code for the game could be the culprit (which would also suggest that this is also correct behaviour). The MCU was not dumped at 0.208.

Does that make it impossible to match scores done on older versions of MAME? That's kind of a problem if so. Are there any good videos out there of the game running on PCB to show the different timings? Only found one 5-minute video on youtube and I don't know enough about this game to tell if MAME more accurately matches it now in newer versions.

If it is a case of older versions giving an unfair advantage through inaccurate emulation, we might have to DQ all old recordings... which is always unfortunate because there's a lot of history with these old scores and I hate seeing them wiped. The links to the old recordings should at least be preserved in a forum thread so that people can find them, IMO.

Not to hijack your thread too much but all Contra romsets are kind of in the same boat - all the highest scores on MARP were done on versions prior to 0.231, and make heavy use of barrel leeching on the 3D stages because the barrels always veer to the right, instead of straight forward. This was fixed in 0.231 and it's pretty much impossible to beat these old inaccurate emulation scores on newer versions of MAME with the correct emulation.

It could be possible to match but it is a quite difficult task.
I try to dig some more but if someone found an original board and make a video it is better.