GameStone - Gradius Home World

Games

Playing

Raiden IV
雷電IV
(Xbox 360)

Otomedius X (Excellent!)
オトメディウスＸ（エクセレント！）
(Xbox 360)

Harmful Park
ハームフル・パーク
(PS)

Raiden DX
雷電DX
(PS)

Otomedius G (Gorgeous!)
オトメディウスＧ（ゴージャス！）
(Xbox 360)
Finally got the last Achievement!!!

Waiting

None

G r a d i u s
H o m e W o r l d

(Even More Countdowns)

3rd February 2012

It looks like Gradius HD Collection and Otomedius Excellent for the PSVita was all a hoax.

I cannot find evidence of the games existence anywhere so I've edited the Wiki article to remove the games.

I would like it to be true but unless some concrete evidence is found, so as far as I'm concerned the games do not exist on the PSVita.

30th January 2012

Gradius HD Collection and Otomedius Excellent could be a lie for the PSVita.

The edits on Wikipedia were by an anonymous source whose IP address shows them in the Philippines, there is speculation that the edits are fake and hundreds of sites have jumped on this news as fact.

I'll keep you posted if any other news or evidence shows it's self.

29th January 2012

Gradius HD Collection and Otomedius Excellent are listed as games coming out for the PSVita, who knows if the wiki list is correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_Vita_games

No other information at the moment.

25th January 2012

I've been sent some interesting guides for Salamander 2 (AC) and Nemesis 3 (MSX), take a look, they are in the Guides section.

27th December 2011

Konami has released their third DLC stage.

ＥＸ３どんぶり島ステージ（２０１１／１２／２７配信、４８０ＭＳＰ）
EX3 Donburi Island Stage (Released 27/12/2011, 480MSP)

Note:Donburi translates as Bowl.

22nd December 2011

The Mameworld site is now back after some site hacking took it offline for almost a week.

http://mameworld.info/

Mr Do's Arcade section has lot of artwork scans for various games in MAME including most of the Gradius related games scanned by me.

I haven't had a reply yet about my new Gradius II GOFER no Yabou but I guess after a major hack that takes the site offline, it may be a bit of time until the new artwork is on his site.

http://mrdo.mameworld.info/

21st December 2011

MAME supports background artwork like bezels, backgrounds etc... the original versions I scanned a few years back (shown below), Mr. Do done the lay file for it (Mr. Do's MAME artwork page is currently offline), the dark colour around the logo's on the instruction cards is due to a foil section which doesn't scan too well, last time I coloured it a dark blue but this time I've decided to add a metallic type background to simulate the foil effect.

MAME Gradius II GOFER no Yabou OLD

After looking at KEI-KO Fujisaki's machines http://www.konaken.com/ (of which I'm so jealous), I noticed the large side banners on her Gradius II GOFER no Yabou machine, I thought wouldn't that be great to recreate that in MAME.

Konaken's Machine

I managed to win a pair of large side artwork in an auction, pretty rare items apparently and not cheap, I paid £160 for a pair in pretty much mint condition, I already have the top & bottom banners and the two side instruction cards.

MAME Gradius II GOFER no Yabou

I decided to not simulate the monitor bezel more than 5px on the left and right as it made the game image smaller, the top and bottom I cannot do anything about.

As the art is pretty large I've done two versions, 25% and 50%, the 50% can slow down the game some what as the art is so big.

They are the same name as that's how MAME needs it, just put one or the other vulcan.zip file in the MAME Artwork folder and run the game.

vulcan.zip - 25% version - 13.2MB

vulcan.zip - 50% version - 65MB

The long version of the artwork, the Seven and a new computer.

Over the last few months I have been cleaning up some scans I done of the complete set of Gradius II GOFER no Yabou artwork for use in MAME.

I scanned them at 300dpi 600dpi and 1200dpi, the 1200dpi version is just too large to edit even on the new system listed below (almost 10000x26000px - 500MB PNG for the large side artworks).

The goldilocks approach was the best choice, the 300dpi didn't show enough detail making edited difficult and the 1200dpi images made the computer unusable so I decided to edit the 600dpi version which is 4650x12748px - 148MB PNG.

Even this brought my poor AMD Athlon X2 XP system with 2GB of RAM to its knees, so an upgrade was required.

I don't upgrade that often these days as computers have levelled off over the last five years or so (unless you play games that is, which I don't much), my XP system is five and half years old with some tweaks a few years back, like an 160GB Intel X25-M SSD which made it feel like new again, i just needed more RAM.

I decided to splash some cash on a new homebuilt system (I always build my own workstations).

I bought two copies of Windows 7 Home Premium retail at launch ( I installed one on my laptop) but never got around to using the other version on my desktop as it just ran slower than XP on that hardware.

Anyway, I had no choice but to finally go with Windows 7 x64 as I wanted more RAM, another story is Windows 7 Home Premium only supports 16GB of RAM, so I had to buy an anytime upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate, £100 just for a code, what a rip off.

So here's the list for those interested in what I bought, I already had a case, PSU, graphics card, fans, hard drives, monitors, Keyboard and mouse.

Items I already had from my old XP system

Antec 4U22ATX400UK Rackmount Chassis (I had to modify the lid as the Noctua heatsink was too large for the case by about 20mm).

Noctua NF-R8 80mm Quiet Case Fan x2

Noctua NF-P12 Vortex-Control 120mm Quiet Case Fan x2

Enermax 650W Infiniti EIN650AWT Modular Quad CPU & SLi/CFire PSU 85% Eff' DXX EPS12V/ATX12V.

Supermicro CSE-M35T1 Five Drive SATA Rack Mount (Ivory) x2 (with help from the late Mred and myself, we modified them to fit 120mm Noctua fans as the original 80mm fans were very noisy).

PNY NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 PCI-E Graphics Card - 1GB (old but good enough for real work).

Various large hard drives.

DELL - UltraSharp U2711 27" Widescreen LCD Monitor.

HP L2335 23" Flat Panel TFT Monitor.

Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard (five year old, which I modified to an orange LED backlight as the standard blue looked pretty crap).

Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer with Intellieye USB (my trusty eight year old optical mouse).

Items bought for the new workstation

Asus P9X79 PRO S2011 Intel X79 DDR3 ATX

Intel Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz S2011 12MB

Kingston 16GB (4 x 4GB) HyperX DDR3 1600MHz 240-pin DIMM CL9 XMP (two lots of to make 32GB)

Intel 300GB 320 Series MLC 2.5" 25nm SATA-300 9.5mm SSD

Noctua NH-D14-2011 Dual Radiator Cooler with PWM fans, LGA2011 only.

The Build

System is built and running great, some software is still needed here and there as Windows 7 can be a bit annoying sometimes, here are some photos of the build for those interested.