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Game compatibility report: Macross M3

dialNforNinja

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System is Win7 on a dual core 2.1 GHz Athlon II M320, gfx is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200, it's a Compaq laptop. Speed overall does not seem to be an issue in 0.5.6 aside from the opening video, but 0.5.7 runs at half-speed at best.

As noted, the opening video acts wierd - it sort of stutters along like a skipping CD, and the SPG and GPU stats in the top bar hover mid-40s compared to the 60s for everything else. This is a shame, though, as the intro animation is quite high-quality. You can watch it on Youtube though, so it's acceptable.

There is some kind of strange mungey visual artifact replacing the fade to the Chapter intros, but the sequences before and after it play fine. If anyone cares that much, I can probably take a screen shot, but it's gone too fast to get worked up over from my perspective.

Speed of the scrolling background and marquees in pilot/mecha/equipment selection screens were a bit erratic until I changed the process priority to "Above Normal" in the Task Manager, which is hardly unexpected for a game console emulator.

There are occasional black outlines and transparency glitches, but from what I can tell these were present on real DCs as well, so I can't complain about them in an emulator.

The emu froze on me once requiring killing the process in the Task Manager, out of a half dozen attempts before I learned the controls well enough to beat the first mission. Fortunately I came prepared with a save state right after the last load screen vanished.

As an aside, I use a PSX style gamepad, and set the right stick press as Save State, the left center button (Select on a real PSX controller) as Load State, and R2/L2 as next/previous state, which seems to be working quite well. I'd like to set the left stick press as "screen shot" but it seems that's fixed to F9.

The character sequences work fine, with no audio problems and no visible squares around the sprites used to animate the faces, unlike M3 under NullDC.

Even with a couple dozen enemies on screen at once firing modeled missiles with Itano Circus smoke trails, there was no lag to be noticed. Granted I've barely started the game, but M3 appears to be a solid Near Perfect under Demul so far. Since this is an emu forum rather than gaming per se, I'll refrain from posting my impressions of the game itself, only emu and performance related issues if any appear.

- dNN
 
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