GTI Club: Supermini Festa

[russ]

uncletom The first link shows it best and its even worse in bumper cam mode. Defo monitor frame rate was fine.

dieKatze88 is System16.com usually wrong? I would expect you're right as the specs they post seem quite low on the PC stuff, but they do seem to sqeeze a lot out of the PC. Unlike the home market.

Cheers guys
Russ

[uncletom]

I see. Well, the bottom line is that Konami use LCD for this game, which would infact need a good old-fashioned CRT. That's it. And watching these movies makes me *really want that game*. I can almost feel it in my hands now, the feedback of the steering wheel, the tires squeeking, the dehydration from not leaving the machine ... God, I want it. Please let me have it!

[dieKatze88]

uncletom The first link shows it best and its even worse in bumper cam mode. Defo monitor frame rate was fine.

dieKatze88 is System16.com usually wrong? I would expect you're right as the specs they post seem quite low on the PC stuff, but they do seem to sqeeze a lot out of the PC. Unlike the home market.

Cheers guys
Russ

When it comes to Konami stuff? Absolutely. There is a surprisingly small amount of reliable information on Konami's hardware. ****, without mame, that list would be totally incomplete.

[uncletom]

Hmm.. I can't see any real tearing here on my end. Are you sure it's not just your mediaplayer or graphic card settings? Or simply the fact that it's filmed with another camera?

[dieKatze88]

so bump for something

I was just headed over to Konami's website of uselessness to find out if they have as usual, posted their E3 url for this year (which is different every year) and what was the first game on their page?

as it turns out, it looks like GTI Club Supermini Fiesta is getting a release on the PSP and the Wii this fall. Looks pretty good still too (but low resolution flash is nothing to judge quality by)

I guess we'll know more in 10 days or so.

[uncletom]

Well, diekatze, thank you for that information. But it is not really great news. I have seen shots and clips of the GTI Club SMF on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tbarAjK_nI&NR=1 and I am not impressed.

Ofcourse it is nice of Konami to port the game over to the consoles for the general public to share this beautiful concept, thank you for that Konami. But please do not mix or even associate the arcade version with other verions/ports of this game. As you can see there is a distinct difference between the formats. Wii is nice, but it doesn't have the power, or necessary accessories to present the SMF propely, at least not according to my standards. (I am very spoiled) Simply the way you see how the car is controlled in the youtube-clip, jerky and in several moments to align into a turn or corner. This is not a way to play a driving game, though it may be a good way to keep small children occupied.

The PSP is even worse. I really respect the little machine and the people who play on the handhelds. But it is not a format which I am used to, infact I have chosen to never get used to it. I play my games as they are meant to be played. I don't consider myself rich nor particularly well educated, but I am happy to say that I can see and feel the difference between quality and mainstream. And I am always happy to explain to anybody who is interested, how and why.

[cRacKh0rN]

Shame that plasmas aren't used more in the new machines. A cost cutting exercise again I am sure.
My 5 Year old Pioneer Plasma still looks nicer than most modern LCD's I have seen. No blur or lag. My 24inch Dell LCD on the other hand has slight lag and blur and just annoys me on console play.

[uncletom]

I'm happy for you that your plasma is working well for games. However you will never be able to get that same smooth panning and scrolling as with a CRT, thanks to its afterglowing phosphor.

[cRacKh0rN]

I'm happy for you that your plasma is working well for games. However you will never be able to get that same smooth panning and scrolling as with a CRT, thanks to its afterglowing phosphor.

I am with you 100 percent on CRT, however given the choice of plasma or LCD I would take the former every time. You get more bang for your buck with an LCD but a top end plasma still has the edge.

[dieKatze88]

Well, diekatze, thank you for that information. But it is not really great news. I have seen shots and clips of the GTI Club SMF on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tbarAjK_nI&NR=1 and I am not impressed.

Ofcourse it is nice of Konami to port the game over to the consoles for the general public to share this beautiful concept, thank you for that Konami. But please do not mix or even associate the arcade version with other verions/ports of this game. As you can see there is a distinct difference between the formats. Wii is nice, but it doesn't have the power, or necessary accessories to present the SMF propely, at least not according to my standards. (I am very spoiled) Simply the way you see how the car is controlled in the youtube-clip, jerky and in several moments to align into a turn or corner. This is not a way to play a driving game, though it may be a good way to keep small children occupied.

The PSP is even worse. I really respect the little machine and the people who play on the handhelds. But it is not a format which I am used to, infact I have chosen to never get used to it. I play my games as they are meant to be played. I don't consider myself rich nor particularly well educated, but I am happy to say that I can see and feel the difference between quality and mainstream. And I am always happy to explain to anybody who is interested, how and why.

While I would normally agree with the efforts to not mix the arcade and home console discussion, the reason I gave it a mention here is because despite the extreme popularity of the earlier GTI Club games in my area, this game has STILL not seen an arcade in my area, and I'm not entirely sure its even been released in the United States. While not everyone in this discussion is in the United States, this game could be described as "hard to find" and a console release, while not entirely the same, is likely to be better than nothing.

Have you ever tried to use the Otomedius G dedicated stick in Arcade mode on the Xbox 360 port? It makes controlling the touch screen functions almost useless. Konami really should have doubled the time allowed to do touch screen functions in game because of the extreme difficulty of using the touch panel instead of an actual touch screen. But they didn't. Its the same thing. Alot of games simply will never get a 'proper' release outside of arcades, especially now that the special controller revolution has happened (a crime that Konami in particular is especially guilty of with their army of 20+ different games in the Bemani series.)

Either way, getting back to GTI Club, After seeing footage of this game a while back I did want to play it, and people that have played it have almost nothing but good things to say, so rather than let the port which I'm sure is going to get no press at E3 (Konami announced earlier this year that they would be focusing on music games this year) get swept under the rug and having the people in this thread waiting to try this game find out about it 2 years from now when looking in a bargain bin at their local electronics retailer, I decided I would mention the fact that Konami is porting it to home consoles. I didn't plan on taking the discussion of this any farther.

Also, Trust me, I'm a huge fan of the Gradius series. You don't need to convince me that Ports suck. We're 25 years and a week into the original Gradius and Konami still hasn't figured out how to put any of the games in the series onto a home console properly (you know, except Gradius 4, which I own the arcade version of >_>.) Although, that being said, don't close your mind entirely to ports, because the NES version of Life Force is vastly superior to the arcade version of Salamander and all of its children. Anyway, back to GTI Club SMF.

[uncletom]

Diekatze, I understand that. Ofcourse.

[uncletom]

By the way a little off topic again, does anybody know anything about Racing Jam? It's also a very rare Konami game, at least here in Sweden. I think it was released a couple of years after the original GTI Club, on similar hardware, and it uses 5+R gears and a clutch. Totally awesome it seems when looking at what I could find on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_UipF_tbc

Just notice the car physics, the smoke and general behaviour. This is what I want from a driving game. This is four wheel action.

My guess is that it's Konami's answer to Sega's Scud Race/Super GT, the two games came out about the same time. I am so eager to try Racing Jam. It's so unfair that Sega's games were always overpromoted everywhere, and Konami was just .. kind of overlooked.

[dieKatze88]

By the way a little off topic again, does anybody know anything about Racing Jam? It's also a very rare Konami game, at least here in Sweden. I think it was released a couple of years after the original GTI Club, on similar hardware, and it uses 5+R gears and a clutch. Totally awesome it seems when looking at what I could find on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_UipF_tbc

Just notice the car physics, the smoke and general behaviour. This is what I want from a driving game. This is four wheel action.

My guess is that it's Konami's answer to Sega's Scud Race/Super GT, the two games came out about the same time. I am so eager to try Racing Jam. It's so unfair that Sega's games were always overpromoted everywhere, and Konami was just .. kind of overlooked.

Tell that to the New Jersey boardwalks that pull more money out of their Dance Dance Revolution and beatmania machines than everything else in their arcade combined nowadays.

Of course, thats more of a recent development

[uncletom]

Oh right, those dance-games. Horrible things! Where do the people who play them come from? What kind of people are they? What did they do 10 years ago when there were no dance-games??

These dance-machines are not arcade games. I guess you can call them 'attractions' still, but I just don't see the fun in it (unless you are a little girl with pig-tails and lots of energy). Stepping on pads according to instructions on a screen, to music!? .. it seems kind of something the US military would use to train monkeys to find hidden mines. I hope I'm not offending anyone at this moment, but I am seriously in need of an explanation. I want to understand, I just cannot.

[dieKatze88]

Oh right, those dance-games. Horrible things! Where do the people who play them come from? What kind of people are they? What did they do 10 years ago when there were no dance-games??

These dance-machines are not arcade games. I guess you can call them 'attractions' still, but I just don't see the fun in it (unless you are a little girl with pig-tails and lots of energy). Stepping on pads according to instructions on a screen, to music!? .. it seems kind of something the US military would use to train monkeys to find hidden mines. I hope I'm not offending anyone at this moment, but I am seriously in need of an explanation. I want to understand, I just cannot.

I play those.

seriously though, they're not for everyone. They're pretty fun if you're into it. if you're not, then you're not. Same with shmups and for that matter, any other kind of game.

[uncletom]

hehe.. alright, Diekatze. Cool.

I did try it once but i didn't get any satisfaction from it, contra holding a good steering wheel in my hands. Now there's real satisfaction for me.

[Molloy]

Whenever I was in Dr. Quirkies in Dublin nobody seemed to be playing this. It doesn't seem to really draw much attention. It also broke down 3 months ago and I haven't seen it put back on the floor since. But then the slot machines have been encroaching on the arcade machine space year on year to the point there's very little left in there now.

I thought the textures on this game were a little bit low quality (which had a certain classic charm to it) but I didn't notice much blurring. It plays really well, and the multiplayer modes are interesting, which is the main thing really.

[uncletom]

Thanks for this update, Molloy. So the GTI Club SF has been removed, three months ago? It means that it's sitting somewhere in the dark now. I bet it was a fuse or some clogged fan.

Would you perhaps know if Quirkey's have good service people for their videos? If not, that would explain why the GTI hasn't come back to operation. I'd so like to take a look at it, but I live very far away.

Personally I find the single player modes more entertaining than multiplayer modes. Ofcourse the game has very innovative multiplayer games with the football and gun chasing, but to me at least it's primarily a racing/driving game. I especially like the Italy stage. I wish there was more on youtube on this game, most of it is about the Wii version of the game.

[Molloy]

As I say, I'm sure Quirkies don't care much about their videos section anymore. The slot machines are packed out pretty much 24/7 these days. I'm sure they're making an obscene amount of money off them.

[uncletom]

There will be some new info here soon. I've managed to get hold of a box with a PC-looking content and some IO-boards. Infact, GTI Club Supermini Festa runs on a Type X. The specs I've got here are sa follows:

Core 2 Duo CPU @ 2.13 GHz
Radeon HD 2600 XT PCIe video-card
2 MB DDR2 5300U RAM
80GB 7200rpm SATA HDD (standard IDE connector isn't even soldered onto the mainboard)
Onboard: audio, video, network..
There are four (4) com ports on the board which of at least two (com1 & com2) need to be active.

The custom hardware consists mainly of two smaller IO-boards. #1 - The Konami "Cosmos" handles analog inputs and also controls the motor output for the steeringwheel feedback, #2 - the Konami "Alard" which handles all switches/buttons, lamps and some kind of woofer function for the seat. Alard also holds the dongle, which is a short tube-like thing that connects to this board via a 5-pin DIN type connector.

"Cosmos" is powered with DC 24 Volts, it seems it has a 24-5 V regulator circuit onboard for the logic to communicate with Type X via com1.

"Alard" is fed only DC 12V (in two places), there is also 5V input but it's not forwarded to any circuits so you needn't bother connecting the wire. 12V goes on two connectors on this board, there are two separate 12V circuits, probably one is for the button-lamps, and the other is for something that seems like audio amplification. However there are no heatsinks on the board, only this tiny little SMD IC "M61571BFP" which infact is a 10W 8 Ohm 2 channel amplifier. (Personally I'm shocked by its small size).

Then there is also this small addon card that mounts into one of the slot openings of Type X, and connects to com2 inside the box on the mainboard. This has a reset button, a power-ON button, power & HDD LEDs, and a com port (com #2). This is how "Alard" 'talks' with Type X. ("Cosmos" uses com#1)

I'm currently waiting for my 24V PSU to arrive, the game won't start unless it clears all boards tests at the later stage of booting. I am, however, very eager to post some nice pictures of GTI Club SMF running. And also experimenting some with better performance hardware for this system. The game did have some sporadic slowdowns, (at least I think I remember correctly) when playing it in Dublin.