Raiden Fighters Emporium FAQ:

What is the emulation status of the games?

Raiden II and DX are still unemulated.

Emulation status (as of MAME v0.130): 

• Raiden: Playable.
• Raiden II: Very badly emulated, with graphics corruption and erratic gameplay.
• Raiden DX: Very badly emulated, with graphics corruption and erratic gameplay.
• Viper Phase 1: Playable. Wrong tempo and intensity for music and some sounds.
• Raiden Fighters: Playable. Wrong tempo and intensity for music and some sounds.
• Raiden Fighters 2: Playable. Wrong tempo and intensity for music and some sounds.
• Raiden Fighters Jet: Playable. Wrong tempo and intensity for music and some sounds.
• Strikers 1945: Perfect emulation as of MAME v0.62. 
• Strikers 1945 II: Emulated as of MAME v0.62, near perfect emulation. Later MAME versions have an odd sound bug that displays an error message.
• Strikers 1945 III: Emulated as of MAME v0.62, near perfect enulation. Later MAME versions have an odd sound bug that displays an error message. 
• Strikers 1945 PLUS: Emulated in MAME and NEORageX.

The word "raiden," which is Japanese, is correctly pronounced as "rye DEN," with equal stress placed on both syllables.

Seibu Kaihatsu as everyone knows them has all but ceased to exist, as it seems to have only a staff of one (Hitoshi Hamada) handling the rights, source code, and assets. A number of its programmers have formed a new company called Gulti, though.

Fabtek, a brand licensing company in Redmond, Washington, went out of business sometime in the year 2000. They were responsible for bringing the Raiden and Raiden Fighters series over here to the USA, as well as publishing other Seibu games and a variety of other arcade developers such as Raizing and TAD(Toki).

Raizing has pretty much been absorbed into its partner company Eighting. The shooting game staff have either moved to Takumi or Cave, in Shinobu Yagawa's case.

Psikyo (the rights to the games, not necessarily staff) had been absorbed into X-Nauts, whom have been dormant since 2005. As of June 2, 2009, their site is dead and replaced with a generic domain park.

All of the information about the Seibu SPI system on this site was provided by countless contributors. Here are some important things to know about the Seibu SPI system:

• The battery on the Seibu SPI mainboard was long believed to be a suicide battery. The Swiss Collectors says that the battery is NOT a suicide battery. Why? If the battery was a suicide battery, what would be there to kill? There's no program to kill on the SPI board. The game cartridges don't contain any battery, and that's the only SPI component that has any program at all. Even the English Fabtek manuals for the SPI games state that the boards come with a "battery-backed memory." This memory stores such information as bookkeeping records, high score tables, and other features like the time-release of Raiden Fighters 2. The CR-2032 battery doesn't appear to be soldered onto the board; it seems that it can be easily replaced. Also, it seems that the board will run with a dead battery. High scores and other things will not be saved.
• The RFE Seibu SPI System Hardware Page will provide all the information about the SPI that JudgeSpear has gathered to date.
• The Seibu SPI games are emulated and playable. There are some sprite priority issues and alpha-blending issues. The SPI sound emulation is incomplete.

He is currently juggling two jobs along with college classes. Because of this, he's handed this site over to a listless lazy fuckface like me. Hooray!

He is also developing his pet project, the Xeno Fighters EX Remake. It looks pretty cool, so you should check it out.

I, tiw aka Twiddle aka wit, am a person on the Internet who likes trolling fandoms I don't like and play a variety of video games on the side. I like manga and anime as well, though you won't hear me talk about that often. I consider myself a somewhat inexperienced player in regards to arcade games. My favorite shmups are Battle Garegga and Raiden Fighters Jet.

A stuntman shooting game/shumpshmup is a game where bonuses are awarded for the player as he does specific acts that put him at risk of damage/death, such as grazing or letting enemies live for longer than players would normally let them. This is a relatively unexplored subgenre of shooting game as the only examples I've known are the Raiden Fighters series. Elements from Raiden Fighters have inspired the likes of Psyvariar, Ibara, and Muchi Muchi Pork, though they aren't stuntman shmups.