DDR X2 (AC) (International)

I'm darn curious too. I was a sydneysider until 3 months ago, although Melbourne has 2 X2 machines anyway (one of which actually has good pads!) and last I know of, George St. Timezone swapped X for ITG2 because nobody liked X in the slightest. Was it the Galaxy World across the road? (And did they ever give X the proper unlock codes?)

But in regards to unlock codes, I don't think we'll be seeing anything until January at least. The US version has to get out and start being a little stale before the codes surface.

As of now, you'll only be able to unlock Final/Extra stage songs and the AAA remixes without E-Amuse. And as for E-Amuse in general, no arcade in Australia has it. Reeeeeally bugs me that.

Nice, and i checked some things...

1. No e-amusement capabilities, no IC card reader and no mention of USB Profiles... yet.
2. Edit mode is ready (looks like its enabled by default)
3. The new panels has a lot of better quality than wood ones. We need to see the resistance in long time.
4. The pin pad is missing too (no EX SCORE here)
5. I like the sticker in the control panel. Here the X cab got a lot of fingerprint.
6. This won't be the production build. We need to check once the game is shipped to arcade stores.
7. I emailed betson about prices and no answer.

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Someone please explain to me how a hard-drive based DDR game freezes exactly the same way a CD-ROM based DDR does when the drive motor is failing.

1. Extreme fragmentation on the HDD.
2. Integrated graphics.
3. CPU not quick enough.
4. Hardware interrupts/polling stalling the CPU.
5. Software bug.

A few possibilities.

I suspect 5 given the drift issue. Wonder if the game will still work as it does if the end user upgrades hardware in the Dell Optiplex(or is it a Dimension) those machines have. As in more RAM, better video card/a video card, imaging the game data onto an SSD.

Love Shine...Candy...Break Down o.o Lots of good stuff here, I want lol

0:26-0:30 WTF
Is all i keep in mind from the video. So drift issue + freeze problem now ?
If they didn't fix this... this cab sure will be broken.
I'm really scared with all of this. Really.

Btw, do you guys have lags sometimes on ddrx ?
I think my question stand for the EU/US build. But sometimes when i play, i can see (and my friends too) a part of the song where the screen is low in fps (like 20)... :s

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Yeah, DDR X lags on certain stages because the CPU/Graphics cannot keep up with the game... talk about them using cheap parts!

It seems that Konami's/Betson's/Raw Thrills' challenge with DDRX was to create the least functional machine possible.

The last time I saw that happen was when I was playing a 7-year old Extreme with horrible upkeep. >>

Bad, Konami!

Its not like Extreme could have even been blamed for freezing because that was usually always down to bad maintenance, im actually shocked that we are this close to a supposed release and theres still problems everywhere and the word is they are still "aware of it" but wont actually say if its been fixed or is being fixed.

Its really annoying that a year ago nearly when this was being loc tested everyone was praising it as the best thing ever, now its looking like its going to come out on cabinets that will break down even quicker than the older ones (if the troc machines anything to go by) and that the software issues makes the game unplayable!

Heres hoping DDRX3 or whatever is next they will just give us the japanese cabs that werent sold for X2 to save everyones time and money...

If Round1 Puente Hills gets X2 before winter recess, I'll be sure to let you guys know how the cab is...

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Extreme only had that freeze and speed up problem from its CD-ROM drive struggling to read the Extreme CD when the machine is poorly ventilated at the back or the CD wasn't burnt properly

X2 on the other hand I blame on the general shittily designed non-JP DDR X cabs...

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I fail to see Konami's reasoning.
How is producing a different cab for US/EU cheaper ? They won't benefit from mass production cost reducings, they have to pay for designing another cab, and they also have to deal with questionable manufacturers. Is it really worth it ? I don't know how much will a X2 cab cost but X1 cabs are not even that cheap.

It was feasible when Japan was exporting the machines to us when the yen was pretty weak.

The yen is too strong for Japan to continue doing that, which might explain the switch of production.

Unfortunately at the cost of machines not working, pads not working and overall a massively dented reputation.

I've always heard it was the disc drive's motor failing (probably also from poor ventilation and bootlegged kits). It's an off the shelf PC CD-ROM drive, if you swap it out with a new one from your favourite computer store the problem always went away.

I would still like to know what the real bottleneck is with these new machine. It's probably something stupid. If someone is willing to void warranty to do some upgrading it might also make whatever causes it go away... and I wonder if faster components would also solve the drift issue.

The most likely rumor is that the machines were designed in Japan, and came out with some pretty awesome prototypes, before handing off the design documents to US manufacturers.

The designs were given to foreign manufacturers, and although they created machines identical to the design documents, they used different components to the original designers. As a result, the TV in the US cabinets behaves differently to the monitor in the prototypes, and while the software is written for the specific monitor in the prototype, it creates weird results when you combine it with a completely different US monitor, which has a completely different response time.

Same deal with the pads. The prototypes used a certain sheet metal, and the designs probably documented the thickness and weight of the metal used, but when it came time to build the US pads, they went out and found metal sheets of the same thickness and weight, but with different properties in regards to rigidity and strength.

To be fair, they probably had no idea, because those pads are absolutely amazing the first few times a small Japanese girls plays on them, but after a few days of 14-stone kids bar-raping Pluto Relinquish, and hammering the hell out of them, it becomes obvious that the materials used don't stand upto the wear and tear of a US arcade enviroment :{

In all fairness, I don't think Konami ever intentionally developed arcade cabinets to ship to the US (don't know about Europe). The imports of all DDR machines up Supernova were never authorized by Konami (hence the warning about only being allowed in Japan). I agree with Tyrma that the failure of DDR X was never meant by Konami. They have to write software for a different set of hardware than what was being used. Had eAmuse been used, they could have continuously released patches to fix hardware issues (as they did in Japan). By the time DDR X was released in NA, they probably had limited man power and time to work on fixing DDR X due to the production of DDR X2. I say now they're playing catch up in trying to fix hardware issues.

I honestly don't believe Konami is putting forth the effort to "screw us over". It doesn't make business sense. If they selling a product that was a need, then they could, but arcade games don't work that way. They have to build a good product else arcade buyers will ignore it because they know DDR's fanbase is dwindling due to poor machine construction.

I don't think Konami meant for DDR X to happen like that either. But it's happening again, are they still surprised? I don't think they're trying to screw anyone over either. They lost a lot of money when they had to halt sales of DDR X. But on the other hand they don't seem to be in any hurry to fix the problem.

There is no excuse for all the other arcade companies getting their machines right globally, but Konami continues to mess our regions' machines up.