Adjusting levels helped a lot without adding distortion! Not sure why I didn’t check core options before 
I also watched some youtube captured footage videos of real hardware and it does sounds a little more balanced than beetle @default!
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Excellent! I’m glad you got it sorted out! It’s just weird that this bug(?) could just remain there for so long without being addressed. There are a number of other show stopping bugs in mednafen/Beetle with a few really great games that makes you wonder how much would it take for them to get accuracy up to par with let’s say BSNES.
For games that use both PSG and CDDA music I try to get the transitions between the two to sound balanced, so I guess that helps a lot.
Games like Ys Book I & II, Ys 4: The Dawn of Ys and Dracula X come to mind. Once PSG and CDDA are matched, you can tweak the ADPCM so that digitized samples can be heard clearly.
On the topic of shmups, after you get your fixes from Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder, Aero Blasters is a really wonderful treat, it just takes it slightly down a notch in the audio department in my opinion. Super Darius II is another beautiful shmup that features really beautiful enemy and boss sprites in particular.
I’ve already mentioned the Soldier series, with the exception of Final Soldier (yuck) so you can wet your feet with those and really appreciate what the turbo was capable of in its heyday!
Super Raiden on Super CD-ROM² is also a brilliant Arcade port. There’s a HuCard port but I don’t appreciate the downgrade that the music takes. It’s a bit subdued.
Other great mentions are Spriggan and Spriggan Mark II and NEXZR, which I’ve never gotten into.
Rayxanber II and Rayxanber III are also awesome in the sound, graphics and gameplay department. It’s strange that no one ever talks about those. As usual, difficulty is crazy.
I see you and Sonkun talking about Advanced BusterHawk Gleylancer! That one has a really awesome soundtrack! I need to sit down and get into that, ThunderForce/Lightening Force IV and Gaiares.
The Genesis Port of Aero Blasters/Air Buster is also really good.
One great game that probably deserves to be mentioned along with shmups is GunSmoke on NES. That’s another that I used to beat with 1 life and till this day it still gets the adrenaline pumping. It plays like a shooter but looks like an action game. Put that and NES Gyruss on your radar.
I also used to enjoy U.N. Squadron for SNES. Can’t seem to get around it in recent times though, maybe I might need to tweaky strategy or sit closer to the screen. Forgotten Worlds is also worth a play but it’s not perfect. I would say it’s good enough though. Then there’s Magical Chase on the Turbo which left me extremely impressed!
People also talk about Cotton but I’ve never gotten into that one.
Last one for the night is 1941 for SuperGrafx. From what I’ve seen on YouTube, it gets better and more beautiful every level but I’ve never really been able to get into that or any other game on the SuperGrafx.
I think it has to do with the music department. Music has to be of a certain standard for me to really get hooked on a game. I was disappointed at the SuperGrafx’s offerings when I know what the PCE soundchip could do.
Daimakaimura is awesome though. Aldynes looks really weird and it’s also really hard to get into to due to difficulty.
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Nice thread. Found a lot of games for my ToDo list. Here are 2 excellent horizontal shooters for a system that is been missing here: Commodore Amiga.
Both have fantastic sound tracks and decent graphics for that system.
Apidya
Project X SE
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I hope you don’ t mind me to chime in, but let’s not forget the Aleste and Spriggan series. In particular MUSHA, Robo Aleste and Seirei Senshi Spriggan. These are great shooters, not only for their great production values like graphics and sound but I found them very forgiving and fun if you persist enough to finish them! If you like these kind of games they are a must play! 
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Just cleared Gates of Thunder, it was easier then it felt at the beginning just need to learn just few things and especially when to use weapons (the red one does massive damage to bosses and mid boss!) I didn’t record the replay because it was just a test run but I ended up clearing it! 
Yeah a lot of good shooters in the Pc engine and Mega Drive’s libraries! probably the best platforms for the genre in that era!
Welcome! yeah, those are two great pick in the amiga library and they are very (very!) hard!
Apidya’s soundtrack is by Huelsbeck i think! I had (still do ) an Amiga 500 in the 90’s and Project X was fantastic to look at and listen to! but it was too hard for me at that time (still is )! One of my fave was Battle Squadron!
Compile is one of my favorite devs especially like their work for msx: aleste 1 & 2 and Zanac!
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Fun Fact: Project X was so hard that they released the SE Edition shortly afterwards where the difficulty level is reduced.
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I’ve always liked this one better than most PCE shmups besides maybe Soldier Blade. It’s usually the first one I boot up for a quick fix since it’s so easy for me to get into for some reason. It’s not as nice graphically than some of the others, but the music is so good.
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That Project X SE game looks amazing, going to try that today thank you for that one. I’m all about the underdog and lesser known games. I played all the classics a gazillion times already so I like trying games now that I never heard of or were overshadowed by the more popular games of the time. So please keep these titles coming lol.
Edit: Tried this one first.
I was smooth sailing until that grasshopper caught me by surprise, didn’t know it was gonna jump at me the way it did. Cool game, it’s like you’re a bee on the quest for revenge or something. I also like how it’s like Gradius with the weapon choice system.
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This is exactly what I don’t really like much about it. The tracks are highly arranged but a little bit too much for me. I don’t think they’re as hard hitting as the ones in the other 3 “Soldier” games with the exception of the boss or mid boss music.
It’s not surprising though, different composer and developers.
This is all subjective though so it’s cool that you like it.
Awesome man!
I noticed your images are all 1280 x 960 which is 4 x 240. You should be able to get away with using 5x if you set a custom resolution of 1200 in the RetroArch Scaling settings. The portion of the screen that gets cropped off of the top and bottom should fall within the safe zone. For 224p systems you can use 5 x 224 = 1,120.
It’s a little trick which @Nesguy used to do to squeeze out some more resolution which could be used for better scanline dynamics and mask detail.
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