As an update to this previous discussion, I will be seperating the 2 versions in the near future

I was apparently never made aware of the fact that there had been activity here, so apologize for the lack of an answer.

I think the overall activity, and community, is quite low that seperation of the games for the Advanced stage is not necessary, but I do hear what you're saying.

Also gonna hijack my own thread so say that I plan on adding categories for 100-500 miles as well in the near future. For anyone interested in tackling a more enduring challenge!

I decided to add a new category to the boards.

This category only allows submissions using the Hornet played in Battle on the Edge ("BotE").

This might raise some questions as surely the Hornet is only a Power Edition vehicle? Turns out, it's not, but I didn't know about it.

Some research after the first "secret" submission was made, I found out that the community building the supermodel emulator were aware of the hidden Hornet in BotE as early as 2013 and was able to "unlock" it for a race using a hex editor to modify savestates. If you want to submit to this category, finding and using this method to "hack" the Hornet into the selection screen IS ALLOWED.

This does not make this a "hack" category, as there is a legitimate way of playing using the Hornet in BotE. This, however, as far as I know, is a secret only known by the Marubaku group, but I can confirm I HAVE seen it been done, so I can verify it is very real.

Using the hex method does not allow the car to be tuned as the legit method does, but I'm allowing both either way because this is just a misc category and it also not considered allowed for records by marubaku. So in essence this is a "meme" category.

This is something I greatly miss. It was awesome to play 8p races.

Just as games with thousands of players still discovers new tricks from time to time, this too is no different. "Neglected to figure out" is a strong choice of words because, frankly, I don't care much for the Saturn version of the game due to its flaws in comparison to the arcade version of the game. If the Saturn was the way I also played the game in my childhood, as well as others here, I'm sure it would've been a different story.

Yeah, all the Saturn runs can be improved, it's just not something that I think most of us here care for, so if you want to give that a shot, I think you'll find it easy to improve these on. Blasco and I have fun for a while battling back and forth on the Advanced track for the first place but eventually I stopped and went back to the "normal" game. If I get bored, I'll go back to the Saturn version again.

The submitted run was PS3, so apparently so.

I just verified a run for Time Trial. The game reported a final time of 2'35''64 but when I add up the times manually, I get 2'35''60.

Anyone spotted this sort of timing error before? This is the first time I see it.

The version released on PSN for PS3 and XBLA for Xbox 360 counts as "Arcade" as they are virtually the same as the Arcade version in every way (with enhanced graphics and other game modes).

Request to remove users Lolkiu64 and The_Scrivener as moderators for Daytona USA. The former is just about approaching 1 year of inactivity on the site, and the latter is already at 2 years of inactivity (with 3 coming up in january). They also have no way of contacting them as Lolkiu64 is not active on his YT channel and The_Scrivener has deleted his Twitter and YT, and is inactive on Twitch.

I wrote this post in an old thread here moments ago:

(TL;DR at the bottom)

"I am fairly confident that Saturn's "Very Hard" for AI cars is the same as PS3/X360's "Arcade" difficulty setting.

Though I don't normally play on the arcade emulator due to the fact that I prefer the X360 version; I can quickly boot the Arcade up and see what changing the difficulty actually does to the game. If that, too, is only about AI cars, it should behave similar to the ports.

As for the difficulty regarding the timer in the game, I feel like it is pointless to discuss as even when the timer is set to the hardest/lowest; your run is simply not good enough for submission if you can't beat the timer."

With that, I wanted to spark some interest of anyone who is still around and read these forums; Should a difficulty be enforce for a run to be valid? Should we add different categories for the other difficulty settings?

As I mentioned, the timer can be ignored, if you can't beat it, you didn't complete the race, and your run is not valid. Simple as that, I'm sure we all agree. (Yes, you can increase the timer, but anyone beating the race on the hardest timer setting will automatically get the better time)

But what about the CPU vehicles?
I've only ever played on "Arcade" (Very Hard) since the very beginning. It should come as no surprise that the actual arcade cabinets are most likely set to this option as well, as the whole point is to milk money out of customers (it's a business, what did you expect?)
Anyone who's played Daytona knows how frustrating it can be when AI cars are getting in the way constantly and interrupts that otherwise close-to-perfect run you had.

So I've seen a lot of submissions lately (none rejected) playing on an easier setting. Sometimes "Normal" and sometimes all the way down to "Very Easy" (or is is Easiest/Hardest? Can't remember...)
To me, personally, it does make a difference. If you play Beginner Endurance (80 laps) on the hardest difficulty, you know that a small mistake like bumping into another car, while not a big problem to you, will cause the AI cars to catch up super quickly, even if you took 1st place 20 laps ago and never made a mistake since. Then you have to deal with them all over again.

This is already a long post, so I'll round up for now. I might be the only one with this opinion, but I feel like lowering the difficulty setting of the game to anything other than the hardest is a "dishonest" act against all the arcade cabinets that we (all?) enjoyed in the past.

Please do tell me how you feel about this. Should the game always be played on hardest or should we continue to do as we please? (My vote is on making/keeping the game hard)

TL;DR:
I want to enforce a new rule that Daytona USA has to be played on the hardest difficulty setting (for AI cars, timer doesn't matter). This because I feel like the easier settings (on the same leaderboards) complete makes the harder runs irrelevant (easier = usually faster/better times due to lack of AI car interference).
I want your opinions.

Thank you for reading.

It's been over a year since my post above, and I know that most people that were active at the time, no longer are. That said, though I don't own a Saturn officially, I am fairly confident that Saturn's "Very Hard" for AI cars is the same as PS3/X360's "Arcade" difficulty setting.

Though I don't normally play on the arcade emulator due to the fact that I prefer the X360 version; I can quickly boot the Arcade up and see what changing the difficulty actually does to the game. If that, too, is only about AI cars, it should behave similar to the ports.

As for the difficulty regarding the timer in the game, I feel like it is pointless to discuss as even when the timer is set to the hardest/lowest; your run is simply not good enough for submission if you can't beat the timer.

Hello everyone!

It's been a while. Sorry for the inactivity. Real life and such. You know how it is.

I've cleaned up some minor descriptions of rules and intend on adding to them later to clear up a few points that may go "missing" due to a lack of information.

With that, I also added two new categories to the "Full-game Leaderboard"; completing All Race-tracks (single segment) for both Grand Prix and Endurance. (I know I'll be doing either one soon!)

And there has been some new activity lately from other runners, which is awesome! Keep up the good work!

This is what I noticed as well.... And well, not saying I want a split, but it sucks that the version are not all equal. As I said in my original post, the same issues happens in Daytona when comparing the Saturn version to the original Arcade

I, personally, would like to see a split, otherwise, as a player who only plays the arcade version (both emulated and on actual hardware) it makes it impossible to compete with the PC/Saturn versions due to the addition of the Stratos in those versions.

I'd like to preface this thread by saying that normally I don't like to seperate leaderboards into even further categories and subcategories. It's fun to see everyone in one, long list. I also don't have a run submitted here yet, as I only picked up this game a few days ago, but I have a few comment that you may, or may not, agree with, I just wanted to express my opinion.

- Saturn seems inaccurate.
After watching the current Championship WR, I can't help but feel that the saturn version is "too friendly" towards its player. In the video, you can see the runner making small turns with no (almost) loss of speed, while when I try to do the same playing the Arcade version on M2, I always seem to lose 5-15 kmh each time, which is a significant timeloss in comparison. I moderate the Daytona USA leaderboards and observed similar inaccuracies, again, in the saturn version of that game.

- IL's (Time Attack) seems unfair.
Please tell me if I'm wrong here, I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong.
The PC version (I don't know about the saturn) has the Stratos. This car seems to be doing ~240km/h when driving straight. Compared to the original cars only doing ~220km/h.
How is this the same leaderboards, especially since the Stratos was added later to the PC port?
Now I've read about a "faster car" code or whatever for Arcade, but it appears to do nothing (here sound in menu, no difference in-game), so if I'm doing something wrong, please let me know.

As I mentioned, I don't like seperating games unless it's necessary, but similar to OutRun 2; each version of this game seems to be different from each other.

Again, just expressing my opinions, and I'd love to hear from you what you think of this situation, or if you think that it's all good and nothing needs to change.

Thanks!

Awesome!. Always down for more stuff

Recently updated the leaderboards and reposted my time (along with an additional one I had previously missed). Everything should be more clean and "find-friendly" now and I've merged the two game versions together. After playing both of them nearly side-by-side for 3 hours each today, I'm going to conclude there is no differences between the two versions except for extra content or settings.

Good day, folks!

Just wanting to introduce myself to those still around playing this game. I've been playing OutRun 2 on and off since I first had a Demo of it on the original Xbox, but most of the time played in the Arcade.

Not saying that I'm pro or anything (I can't even remember any of my times!) but that I'm glad to say that I'll hopefully be joining the rest of you all on the leaderboards very soon. Need to get some practice in first, though 😉

Will most likely submit on Xbox, but once the local amusement park opens up again, I might prefer to make runs on their machines instead (I already do so with Daytona)

Be seeing ya'll!

8 month delayed answer, no problem!

I wasn't notified that you had even replied, but I welcome you regardless! Been on a bit of a Daytona hiatus but now back again and also with Scud Race as a newly requested game I'm setting up. Looking for a lot of fun in the near future with these games again!