Taito in Widescreen decades before we had it at home

awbacon

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If there is one thing Taito beat every other arcade maker at it was their willingness to just straight up experiment with what could be done with the hardware of the day. Widecreen? Sure! Ultrawide screen? Yep!
 

Heinz

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Darius on a vewlix ain't bad, just sayin'
 

smokey

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Didn’t japan already had widescreen tv’s in the early nineties for those muse laserdiscs
 

bubba966

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Didn’t japan already had widescreen tv’s in the early nineties for those muse laserdiscs

They were broadcasting HDTV signals in Japan in '89. The MUSE LD's were '93. There was also 16:9 Anamorphic LD's in '94.
 

SignOfGoob

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Yeah, the vast majority of Hivision users got it over the air. Moving to Hivision LD would double your investment, already in the thousands, and in the end wasn’t worth it since the library is small and the quality of the discs varies.
 

Burning Fight!!

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The technology probably seemed retarded at the time but thank fuck Japan used to bother to push the envelope on tech beyond profitability "just because". Now we have lots of live broadcast only events from the time period that can be enjoyed in proper image quality.

Even a stupid demo no one would watch willingly is now a cool snapshot of sometime in the 90s.

 

SignOfGoob

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Thats the same reason The Flying Clipper (1962) is one of my favorite movies. As a semi-fictionalized travelogue sort of movie it’s not that amazing on the surface but it was shot with the most flexible 70mm cameras of the day and because of that is just an amazing document of the time. Tokyo Olympiad does a similar thing. Although TO was 35mm they loved to just…let the camera run, and as a result you get a lot of the atmosphere of the occasion.
 

LoneSage

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The technology probably seemed retarded at the time but thank fuck Japan used to bother to push the envelope on tech beyond profitability "just because". Now we have lots of live broadcast only events from the time period that can be enjoyed in proper image quality.

Even a stupid demo no one would watch willingly is now a cool snapshot of sometime in the 90s.

That was a real treat.
 

StevenK

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That was a real treat.
The technology probably seemed retarded at the time but thank fuck Japan used to bother to push the envelope on tech beyond profitability "just because". Now we have lots of live broadcast only events from the time period that can be enjoyed in proper image quality.

Even a stupid demo no one would watch willingly is now a cool snapshot of sometime in the 90s.

I enjoyed watching Steve Carell being born into another mans body 16 seconds in.
 
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Takumaji

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Ninja Warriors and Darius on the actual arcade screens is quite the experience.
Played the Ninja Warriors cab back then, it was really impressive, almost intimidating. That thing must have been awesome expensive.

There's a port on Mega CD that plays quite well but of course it's no comparison.
 

Catoblepa

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The Amiga 500 version is actually pretty good, and retains the original widescreen ratio. Of course the arcade is still much better, but a good effort.
 

Arcademan

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Darius, Ninja Warriors (world record holder btw) Tecmo Bowl and the 6 player X-Men were the ones I've played. Atari's TX-1 did have three monitors and could be considered a wide view game. The movie companies did have this little thing back in the days called CinemaScope that projected a wide screen movie and some pinballs in the 80's also had wide cabinets as well.
 

awbacon

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the taito hey in akihabara has both ninja warriors and darius
so if you want to play that, now you know where you can
luckily Galloping Ghost in IL have them too. Slightly closer to Chicago than Japan is
 

prof

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I recall a racing game at the arcade in the mid 90s that had a big wraparound screen. It may have been 3 screens, front and sides, but it was seamless. Really immersive game because it was a sitdown like a cockpit. I cant remember what it was though, even though I played it quite a bit.

But yeah, wide screens or multi-screen arcades back then were pretty special.
 

Gremlin

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I recall a racing game at the arcade in the mid 90s that had a big wraparound screen. It may have been 3 screens, front and sides, but it was seamless. Really immersive game because it was a sitdown like a cockpit. I cant remember what it was though, even though I played it quite a bit.

But yeah, wide screens or multi-screen arcades back then were pretty special.

Closer to late 90s but are you thinking of Sega Ferrari F355 Challenge?

f355-1.jpg

Local theatre had one in the lobby, it was awesome.
Also got to play on a two-screen X-Men cab once in the early 2000s, was really cool to have such a panoramic view of the stage in a belt scroller
 

prof

A Great Place to Store Your Dildo Collection
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Yes, that's the one I was thinking of. I thought it was a Sega machine, but I knew it wasn't any of the Outruns or Daytona, so I figured I was off. Yeah, that was 99, so I was almost done with high school by then. Sheesh. I wasn't playing many arcade games by then, but now that I think of it, we had an intramural bowling league junior year, and the bowling alley had an arcade, so that's where I played it. Thanks, gremlin.

Looks like there's a DC and PS2 port, I'll have to check them out.


Edit (from the wiki page): Yu Suzuki is a keen Ferrari enthusiast who allegedly used data from his own Ferrari 355 at certain tracks to implement in the game during its development.

That is awesome.
 
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