I’m doing my annual playthrough of the PDS games using the latest build of SSF.
A lot of bugs have been fixed so far. The music tempo plays correctly, several graphical glitches have been fixed. In fact, so far PDS seems to play flawlessly.
However, I can’t seem to get past the Georgius fight with the gunship. It won’t load the subsequent fight against the Guardian Dragon. Anyone here figure out the solution to this?
EDIT:
After fiddling with some of the options, I’ve been able to overcome the problem. However, I wonder if SSF will be updated in the future.
Well, I managed to finish the game on that version. You have to save the state right before the fight, then proceed. Every time a dialogue speech is said successfully, save the state (don’t wait until the speech is finished; as soon as it begins speaking a new line, save). If it fails, just reload the state and keep trying.
I’ve also been playing Virtua Fighter 2 and it seems to play almost flawlessly (compared to other builds of SSF). Maybe most of the major hurdles have been cleared, and pounding out the minor details on a case by case basis are taking more time to complete.
Either way, huge props to Shima for achieving alone (and almost ?out of the blue?) what had somewhat stumped the staff of other Saturn emulators, which if I?m not wrong were often multi-person efforts. Now to open-source and port it!
On that note, has anyone had any success running SSF on Wine, specifically under OS X? I tried wrapping it with Wineskin, but it gave me an ?Error in blah.cpp? or similar. According to appdb.winehq.org, it’s worked for some users, but I think those reports were from Linux.
Regardless, I can dual-boot to run it (something tells me a VM wouldn’t be sufficient). I anticipate my next OS will be Windows (and maybe a Linux, for tinkering purposes!)
You’d probably be better off dual booting into Windows anyway… it’s likely more stable than running SSF using Wine on OSX or Linux. A virtual machine might be an option, but performance issues would hinder the experience.
Yeah, definitely. It?s worked great for me in the past, and I?ve yet to try Windows on Snow Leopard?s new version of Boot Camp which has some new features to try out, so I foresee some emulated PD in the near future!
I tried Nights and Sega Rally on SSF, it seems emulation is pretty much perfectly replicating the games, but wow, Nights is unplayable without analog support (unless there’s a way to enable that) and Sega Rally is totally not how I remembered it…
You’ll need an analog gamepad first. But if you have one, just configure the input to “multi controller”, and you should be fine. Analog motion has been implemented for some time now.
SSF has been recently updated to 012 beta. I decided to download it and try playing Panzer Dragoon Zwei and Saga again.
First, let me talk about Zwei: it seems the new version has improved the performance a little bit thanks to better processing power distribution between multiple CPU cores. The background music in Pandora’s Box plays fine, unless I enable “Deinterlace” in the options, in which case it slows down quite a bit due to my PC being unable to cope with the high performance requirements of that option. Other than that, no glitches or slowdowns in the game at all.
Got a much better score this time, and unlocked the Solo Wing form on the final fight. Awesome!
I have just replayed Saga from start to finish following Lance Way’s walkthrough (awesome guide, man. Kudos!). Got almost everything 100%, except for a single mistake: I smiled to the dragon once, and this got me a score of 90 on spiritual closeness. I’m feeling a bit bad about this… Next time, I’ll make sure to do it right and pet him every single time.
The new version of SSF did not fix the freeze on the Guardian Dragon fight, but enabling “CD Block Thread” seemed to fix the problem, except that the sounds didn’t play correctly. The same freeze happens during Sestren’s fight, during his speech after you defeat the anti-dragons. The rest of the game seemed to work perfectly.
This time, I could get past the credits screen and watch the ending FMV. Saved my game on the second slot. If someone is interested, I’ll upload the save file and put the link here.
The Box Game area, including all mini-games, works fine as well.
Go back to camp. Pet your dragon. Leave camp.
Repeat.
You’ll eventually get the 100 spirit points and 100% overall. Don’t stop now when the only thing you have left to accomplish is the easiest to do!
Next time, I’ll make sure to do it right and pet him every single time.
