Zzap!Raine issue 13 ready!

[_MADrigal]

Hi all

Just letting you know that a new issue of Zzap!Raine has been in the works for about 6 months - and it is now complete!

Just like we did for Issue 12, also this new issue (13) is 1) in Italian, 2) printed and 3) commercial (not online or free PDF).

The magazine is dedicated to Capcom CPS-1 and CPS-2 games, a sort of challenge between the two platforms. 13 games reviewed. Plus a few articles such as the "Arcade milestones of 1983", "Arkanoid", "Taito F3 System board + multicart" and "Zzap!Test" that has 12 reviews of home computer/console games.

Total 60 pages including a A3 poster specially made for us. Cover also made specifically for this magazine.

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A crowdfunding campaign will commence soon and will last 30 days. I will post the link to the campaign once available.

Main page of Zzap!Raine with all issues: https://raine.1emulation.com/zzapraine/issues.html

Issue 13 editorial and magazine info page: https://raine.1emulation.com/zzapraine/issue13/index.html

Cover of the magazine: 

[Tux]

Nice picture !

I'd say it's hard to believe cps1 and cps2 share mostly the same hardware because usually there is quite a big difference graphically, so they probably improved the way they are making games quite a lot between cps1 and cps2, and this is the main difference, also cps2 uses qsound all the time when it's used only on a very few late cps1 games. You could say cps2 is a high end cps1, with encryption and the "suicide batteries" as they were called, not such problems in emulation but still... !

Anyway cps2 is just cps1 + encryption to make sure there would be no bootleg (and it worked !), and so they could spend more in it to have higher quality games.

It's not the same for cps3 which is a completely different platform, nothing in common with cps1 or cps2 except the fact that it's from capcom !

[_MADrigal]

I have done a lot of research into the CPS system hardware and noted for the purpose of writing the magazine and it is really interesting matter!

There are a few differences between CPS1, Dash and CPS2 boards. Yes the CPS chips are the same, yes there's QSound etc but the most important changes affecting gameplay and overally quality are in the speed of the main CPU and, most importantly, the video RAM is higher in the CPS2, which allows for a much larger amount of tiles/sprites on screen. This results in much larger characters and also in more items (e.g. bullet hell shooters were not possible on CPS1 because not enough sprites on screen to create the "hell).

Also the CPS2 boards have more slots for GFX ROMs. CPS1 can accommodate max 12 MB of GFX roms whereas CPS2 can have around 40 MB. This allows including more animation frames, more graphics, and long introductions (e.g. SFZ series) that were completely absent in the CPS1 games.

All this is explained in the 4-page CPS1 vs CPS2 article on the magazine.

Tux knows for sure all the details of the hardware of the two platforms, however the max size of the GFX roms not always meets the eye - and in this case made a massive difference.

PS: the cover was made by a 14-year old girl, very very talented. She also did a poster of Darkstalkers for one past issue of Zzap!Raine. She is the daughter of a dear friend from my town, who is also my 'partner in crime' in the CreatiVision project and other projects for 2 decades now . She is really good!!

Edited 1 hour ago by _MADrigal

[Tux]

Yeah I forgot about these hardware differences because I am too used to the emulated version where all this doesn't make a big difference, and there is no real difference in the driver for what can be accessed in the gfx banks. For the cpu, cps1 qsound was at 12 MHz, cps2 is indeed at 16, it's 1/3 more, so not so much. But anyway it's still right to say that cps2 is an improved cps1, so there can't be any real competition between the 2. It's very rare to see such a high frequency for the 68000 but they even used cps2 after 2000 ! It's not an easy driver, quite a lot of crazy stuff inside between these weird ports, the sprites which have 3 layouts sharing the same memory space, and the encryption of course, but at 1st I was only interested in cps1, to be able to compare to a very old cps1 emulator which was entirely written in assembly, I forgot its name, callus I think. cps2 came quite later, but since there were not so many differences between the 2 at the hardware level it would have been a shame not to add cps2. I guess it was not so easy to extend callus, and it never emulated cps2, and callus was closed source anyway.

For the picture notice you can also get very good results using some AI these days, if they have been trained with your fictional characters you can get impressive results, and it shouldn't be hard to find some trained model for Ken and Ryu here. You just need to be very precise in the description of the picture you want... !

[_MADrigal]

Yep that was callus, real groundbreaking emulator.

But the majority of CPS1 games were at 10MHz, with the very last ones at 12MHz. the Dash was 12MHz. Most CPS2 were 16MHz, that's not a big improvement but enough to manage ip to 900 tiles as opposed to the 255 of CPS1.

Hardware very similar but games really different. A ton of fighting games on CPS2 and mostly platforms and shooters on CPS1. That's a major difference that encompasses the hw

For the cover art, I wanted a real person to design it. She's a really young graphic artist and I like the idea to give my friends the opportunity to shine. Although not a super refined or super polished drawing, I love the fact that she did it for me and other people will like it

Edited 1 minute ago by _MADrigal