This is Misty's treat, right here
Judging from the video quality they no longer have the film elements to work from and it was captured from the arcade laserdisc but still - this should be great.
ICYMI, Taito already remastered Time Gal for smartphones a few years back, and it turned out pretty well—the base game adds a theatre mode & training mode for every scene, and the DLC adds a bunch of concept art/dev docs and a "show all the QTEs in advance" option:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.taito.timegal2&hl=en_US 🇯🇵
https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/%E3%82%BF%E3%82%A4%E3%83%A0%E3%82%AE%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AB/id1196100233 🇯🇵
The SE for this upcoming collection comes with a download code for "Time Gal Reverse/Rebirth", which seems to be some sort of epilogue, but I have no idea if it's brand-new or based on something from back in the day.
https://www.taito.co.jp/mob/topics/25930 🇯🇵
EDIT opening movie!
Time Gal Re:Birth is a new game starring a new time-travelling hero, Luna, that's set to fill in the blanks/behind-the-scenes on the original villain's theft of the time machine and the adventures of Reika.
It'll feature a theme song, "Meteor Traveler", sung by Ayane (Higurashi, Memories Off, Steins:gate, etc), as well as this voice cast:
Luna: Mai Sato
Reika: Ayana Taketatsu
Luda: Kenta Miyake
Erika Mori, Shiori Izawa, Mikako Komatsu, Miho Okasaki, Reina Ueda, Lynn (other roles)
Screens after the jump (horny warning):
https://www.famitsu.com/news/202307/11308435.html 🇯🇵
This interview's not super in-depth (a lot of casual chatter about the impact of early laserdisc games, the basic contents of the special edition minus Time Gal Re:birth, etc... the do confirm the games are basically uncut, if that's something you're concerned about) but it does offer some interesting info on the nature of the Space Battleship Yamato port and "Arcade Game Edition":
When it came to reissuing Yamato, the biggest hurdle wasn't licensing but the fact that Taito no longer had any of the old hardware—not the PCB, not the specific LD player required to interface with the PCB, not any of the specialised cables, etc—so they had to enlist Gotch Technology1 to analyse and recreate the hardware based on whatever schematics Taito still had, both virtually via emulation but also physically by procuring whatever component parts they could identify from Taito's documents (which also required them to source parts that still functioned correctly). The team at Gotch relishes this sort of hyper-specific work but even so, it ain't easy.
Taito produced all the HD remasters themselves but, given all the effort required by Gotch to get Yamato to the point where it could even be remastered, they figured they should make the raw Gotch version available in some form or fashion, hence the Amazon Prime Day gimmick. (Better that than the brand-new game, I suppose.)
Someone from Gotch sent in their own comments, which outlined the specifics of the hardware; I don't have time to translate the whole thing right now, but the gist is that it used three CPUs (68000/6809/Z80), a similar sound setup to Darius (two YM2203 + the PC010SA IC balancer, plus other vestigial components that Yamato doesn't use), specialised circuits for reverb and mixing LD/chip sounds, and then the LD interface itself, which required a specific model of LVD (older than the one they anticipated) plus parallel I/O hardware used by the game software to keep per-frame track of the progress of the video. The screen display offers one background layer (which wasn't much even then, but you're mostly showing LD video so it's not like you needed more; Yamato basically just uses it for the HUD), an object layer, a frame buffer and the LD layer, with the ability to do all sorts of sprite scaling and semi-transparency tricks to composite objects over the LD video and so on, most of which Yamato doesn't actually use.
-
An extremely reputable but very secretive port/emulation studio, whose lineage can be traced back to Rutubo Games and, before that, the porting team at Dempa Shimbunsha led by the prodigious programmer T.Matsushima; they handle a lot of the emulation for Hamster's Arcade Archives and have worked on several of Namco's emulated reissues over the last decade, as well as the emulation-based portion of Taito's recent Space Invaders Invincible Collection.
...so, it's safe to presume it'll be via Strictly Limited Games/ININ, and broken into multiple SKUs that will make them even more impenetrable for no clear reason.
