I'm sure I've read some articles on this very site that claim the NGCD versions have superior soundtracks to the AES versions. I'd be interested enough to see how much better.
Art of Fighting 3's music is AWESOME there. Ninja Master's too (good luck finging it if you wanna own it physically though). Last Resort is another example.
Loading times differ on different games. Stay away from Last Blade, for example. Also, ain't CD-z model better?
One of Fatal Fury CD releases had PRETTY INTERESTING cutscene in form of song. And, of course, those two exclusives are worth checking - i mean Crossed Swords 2 and Ironclad. Or that RPG.
>>Would that really be worth<<
Depends on what's important for you, sure.
Last Edit: Sept 18, 2015 5:19:33 GMT -5 by qishmish
Considering the switch to disc is one of my least favorite aspects of where gaming went, I honestly don't know the answer to this, but are the load times the same with emulation?
Post by starscream on Sept 18, 2015 9:32:07 GMT -5
You can speed things up under emulation of course, though it may depend on the program that's used. Other emulators with CD-support that haven't been mentioned yet are Nebula and XE, though I think both are dead and the latter not easy to use for NeoGeo.
Last Edit: Sept 18, 2015 9:36:05 GMT -5 by starscream
I think it's definitely worth checking out as the CD versions often have really good CD soundtracks along with extra features. In Last Blade 1 as example, most of the sprite is a palette swap but you can actually play as the brother that Sanada Kojiro is avenging and secretly disguised as in Last Blade 2. Metal Slug as the combat school game mode, etc.
Also check out Neo Geo CD Special. It's a collection of horribly early and bad demos of upcoming Neo CD games and the interface is built around an early 90s CG talking Athena Asamiya.
If you've played SNK ports on the PSX and Saturn, those are actually ported from the Neo CD releases of the games if you want an example of the inferior voice sample quality (done to cut down on load times). Also to save on loading, on some of the Neo CD versions of the fighting games the character sprites will be SLIGHTLY smaller (like 95%) and some voice samples will be missing completely.
As far as the soundtracks go, it can't be said definitely which is better or not. To me some like King of Fighters '99 and Pulstar lose the impact and what is clearly an intended rawness of the original chiptunes. Others like KoF '94/'95/'96, Fatal Fury 3, and Art of Fighting 3 have legit excellent music in them. It's worth listening to them all to decide.
Last Edit: Sept 18, 2015 15:25:03 GMT -5 by Neo Rasa
Would that really be worth 30 second load times? One has to wonder.
I can live with some load times if the emulator is easy to work.
Anyway fyi I'm a bit busy at the moment and haven't had the chance to test any of the recommendations yet, but please keep the discussion going, I'll get around to it eventually
So I'm using Raine and so far so good, but there's one big problem, I can't get scanlines to work, I see there's a config file with an option "scanlines = 0" but when I set it to 1 nothing happens.
The games look pretty pixelated without scanlines and it honestly stumps me as to why that's not just a default option in the emulator's menus, who makes an emulator without that option?