Gradius III SNES patch released to eliminate slowdown (emulators and SA-1 Carts)
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I just gave this a try on my SD2SNES last night and wow. I hope to see this kind of thing done with lots of other SNES games that suffer from similar slowdown.
Gradius II arcade has several cruel checkpoints if you happen to die. The NES version though is much more lenient and if you're good then dying isn't that big of a deal.
Gradius III Arcade is easily the cheapest, most unfair and frustrating game of the entire series. The plant stage in particular is near impossible to beat if you die mid-stage. Actually killing the giant plant boss is impossible, you just have to wait for him to time out and self-destruct, if you don't have at least two speed-ups then you're going to get sucked into him and die. There's several other checkpoints that might as well be game overs if you die mid-stage, the game is totally unfair, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Luckily for Gradius III in the PS2 Gradius III & IV collection you can use the konami code to get fully powered up.
Gradius III SNES is one of the easier games in the series. Konami changed a ton of things in the SNES version to make it much more forgivable (and playable) than the ultra cheap and unfair arcade version. For one thing, the fireballs in the fire stage are now fully destructible. The spider dancers on the final stage are killable, there's a bunch of other changes (i haven't played it in a long time) that just make the game much less cheap and unfair, and this is coming from someone who loves challenging shmups.
Gradius IV isn't too bad if you die mid-stage, i mean yes it can be challenging to live long enough to get enough powerups for your ship to be formidable but the bosses are pretty easy and it's certainly doable. The boss rush sucks though.
Gradius V's instant re-spawn/recapture floating options makes dying not that bad, it uses the same system as Lifeforce NES.
Lifeforce NES and Gradius Gaiden are the two easiest games in the series. In Gradius Gaiden you can customize your powerup bar in any order, so you can have the shield powerup first or even have options first, and the Jade Knight is OP. The game is also my favorite game in the series just because the music, stages, graphics, ships and bosses are all freakin' awesome and fun.
I wish Konami did a widescreen HD remaster of Gradius III SNES, it's a great game but the field of view is a bit too tight and the slowdown is ridiculous, but this mod is wonderful in reducing the insane slowdown of the SNES version since the SNES had a weak cpu.
Correct:
SA-1 was like a SNES Turbo, too bad the chip came so late (1995 and forward) that it was mostly underutilized/never pushed to the max.
Here a couple of demow for SA-1:
This is neat. Does the SFC version offer anything unique that the arcade version doesn't? It's a rebalancing overall, I assume, and they're more in-line now with this update, but I never played through the SFC version to the end and don't know if it has unique stages or anything.
I forget, but I think some stages are new.. The music is different (snes vs arcade fm) and some people, myself included, prefer it. Honestly though, unless you really want to play gradius 3 with 0 slowdown I recommend this hack instead. I adapts the game to use fastrom, and just optimized from there.
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=27609.0
Each subsequent patch you'll find in the thread has less slowdown than before, but the first one has a nice reduction already.
I should check out shmuplations and see if they have an interview about Gradius III. I'd love to find out how the devs ended up making such a cruel game.
EDIT: Oh hey there is one.
This exchange is pretty telling.
1. Nobody on the development team could 1CC Gradius III. Normally that isn't a red flag but...
2. The devs really should've tried to have everyone on the team see if they can clear each stage instead of relying on "specialists".
Having the person who designed the stage be responsible for play-testing it doesn't accomplish all that much IMO. Yeah they can beat it, but what if they're literally the only person they can? What if there's this extremely specific strategy that only they know, and it's nearly impossible for players to figure it out?
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Can I just patch this using Flips or is it more involved? I tried it yesterday and when it didn't run in ZSNES I just assumed I screwed up by not doing something, but maybe it just doesn't work in zsnes?
I love this era of emulation we're in right now. We've gone from pushing towards incredibly high accuracy to improving how these games run and function (beyond resolutions bumps and shaders). Really incredible the work that's being done these days.
Just tested on my Super NT + SD2SNES (what a combo!) and made it to the third stage, It's really difficult. This Gradius SA-1 patch is fucking incredible! Zero slowdown gives fresh air to this classic! I hope we'll see more of this in the near future. It's awesome to get this kind of new SNES experience in 2019!
There is a fastrom patch for Gradius 3, which supposedly fixes most of the slowdown.
For playability it might actually be better than the SA-1 rom, as some sections of the game are very hard.
SA-1 is cooler though.
SA-1 is cool, but if you ask me it's cooler to modify the game so it actually uses what's there properly instead of just brute forcing the whole thing lol.
R-Type Dimensions EX on Switch and PC is a solid remaster of the first 2 games with a ton of QoL features + co-op.
I haven't tested any of the patches, but ZSNES is pretty archaic these days. The latest SNES9x and BSNES versions are great, you can't go wrong with either.
Oh nice! I like playing these kind of games on Switch so I'll check that out too.
Doesn't Parodius 3 also use the SA-1 chip? I don't think that helped eliminate any slowdown in that game. I haven't played it in a while though.