Sega's AM2 division is bringing back Daytona USA for the arcades.
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This is the full log of my journey with Daytona USA and my chronicles and attempts to play each version.
-Mid 2022-
1. Saturn port. Bad.
2. Original with MAME. Fine, but isn't fully compatible.
3. Xbox 360 port via Xenia. Full dump doesn't exist online.
4. PS3 port via RPCS3. Found it in the dark recesses of a personal Russian game dumper's blog. Fantastic version, the definitive, best way to play Daytona.. on controller. Gear shifting is botched through button presses, and while incremental gear shifting is allowed through shoulder buttons, the game was designed to be going from gears 4 to 2 and back, mostly. Going from gears 4 to 3 to 2 and back results in unreliable and unpredictable drifts most of the time. I craved more but was running out of options.
-Q4 2022-
5. Daytona Championship Circuit on Saturn. Worst. Do not.
-Early 2023. Got myself a steering wheel for arcade racers. I do not yet have a shifter.-
6. Reattempted MAME with wheel. Buggy but ultimately playable, but did not satiate my hunger. I missed the cleanness and definitiveness of the 7th gen ports, but neither Xenia nor RPCS3 have proper wheel support, and I was not looking to map controller input to a wheel axis. I wanted real wheel interaction.
7. Discovered SEGA Racing Classic. 2009 arcade re-release without any Daytona branding because of the license expire. The excellent 7th gen ports used this version as the base. Runs as an .exe via SEGA RingWide and took me hours of scouring and old forum surfing to find the full dump and loader. Works with my wheel, feels incredible to play. This is the one. Unfortunately, graphics are fucked due to NVIDIA GPU incompatibility (looks perfect on AMD, however). A shoddy patch exists. I get a "Cannot find Folder app.dll" error. I found one person in a YouTube comments on a gameplay showcase video with 42 views who mentioned they got this same error. There is a long thread, mostly all of it is broken non-understandable English and a general lack of tech jargon knowledge between both people to amicably find the fix. After hours of searching elsewhere, I cannot find any mention of the error elsewhere. The trail is once again cold, but for now, somehow, this lame re-release, with all of its iconic branding stripped (even the soundtrack is altered so you don't hear Mitsuyoshi's iconic "DAYTONAAAAAA" shout), is somehow the best playing version for someone in my extremely, extremely specific situation. My heart goes out to that guy who had that same error message, shouted in the void, and somehow got a response but with no resolution. I feel much like him.
-Mid 2022-
1. Saturn port. Bad.
2. Original with MAME. Fine, but isn't fully compatible.
3. Xbox 360 port via Xenia. Full dump doesn't exist online.
4. PS3 port via RPCS3. Found it in the dark recesses of a personal Russian game dumper's blog. Fantastic version, the definitive, best way to play Daytona.. on controller. Gear shifting is botched through button presses, and while incremental gear shifting is allowed through shoulder buttons, the game was designed to be going from gears 4 to 2 and back, mostly. Going from gears 4 to 3 to 2 and back results in unreliable and unpredictable drifts most of the time. I craved more but was running out of options.
-Q4 2022-
5. Daytona Championship Circuit on Saturn. Worst. Do not.
-Early 2023. Got myself a steering wheel for arcade racers. I do not yet have a shifter.-
6. Reattempted MAME with wheel. Buggy but ultimately playable, but did not satiate my hunger. I missed the cleanness and definitiveness of the 7th gen ports, but neither Xenia nor RPCS3 have proper wheel support, and I was not looking to map controller input to a wheel axis. I wanted real wheel interaction.
7. Discovered SEGA Racing Classic. 2009 arcade re-release without any Daytona branding because of the license expire. The excellent 7th gen ports used this version as the base. Runs as an .exe via SEGA RingWide and took me hours of scouring and old forum surfing to find the full dump and loader. Works with my wheel, feels incredible to play. This is the one. Unfortunately, graphics are fucked due to NVIDIA GPU incompatibility (looks perfect on AMD, however). A shoddy patch exists. I get a "Cannot find Folder app.dll" error. I found one person in a YouTube comments on a gameplay showcase video with 42 views who mentioned they got this same error. There is a long thread, mostly all of it is broken non-understandable English and a general lack of tech jargon knowledge between both people to amicably find the fix. After hours of searching elsewhere, I cannot find any mention of the error elsewhere. The trail is once again cold, but for now, somehow, this lame re-release, with all of its iconic branding stripped (even the soundtrack is altered so you don't hear Mitsuyoshi's iconic "DAYTONAAAAAA" shout), is somehow the best playing version for someone in my extremely, extremely specific situation. My heart goes out to that guy who had that same error message, shouted in the void, and somehow got a response but with no resolution. I feel much like him.