lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport

UDb23

@gamez-fan Getting sound in "Deep Scan" (/invinco) as previously requested, is it too complicated to implement?

Riverstorm

@gamez-fan Are all of these working to add? None of the decrypted, plus versions or 2003 have SHA1 information only CRC. "The King of Fighters 2001" and "The King of Fighters 2002" have complete info.

"The King of Fighters 2001"
"The King of Fighters 2001 (Decrypted C)"
"The King of Fighters 2001 Plus"
"The King of Fighters 2002"
"The King of Fighters 2002 (Decrypted C)"
"The King of Fighters 2002 Plus"
"The King Of Fighters 2003 (Decrypted C)"

EDIT: The same for Metal Slug 4 and 5 are the decrypted versions working to add?

Riverstorm

@udb23 said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@gamez-fan Getting sound in "Deep Scan" (/invinco) as previously requested, is it too complicated to implement?

That would be great! :)

arcadez2003

@udb23 said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@gamez-fan Getting sound in "Deep Scan" (/invinco) as previously requested, is it too complicated to implement?

You wanted the game to use the same samples as depth charge was that it again..?? i can make that change but you'll need to then test the game make sure the sound
is correct, if you can compile your own build drop this into your drivers folder replacing the original vicdual.c and then simply make a new build.

[url]http://www75.zippyshare.com/v/BCkz15DS/file.html[/url]

arcadez2003

@riverstorm said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@gamez-fan Are all of these working to add? None of the decrypted, plus versions or 2003 have SHA1 information only CRC. "The King of Fighters 2001" and "The King of Fighters 2002" have complete info.

"The King of Fighters 2001"

"The King of Fighters 2001 (Decrypted C)"

"The King of Fighters 2001 Plus"

"The King of Fighters 2002"

"The King of Fighters 2002 (Decrypted C)"

"The King of Fighters 2002 Plus"

"The King Of Fighters 2003 (Decrypted C)"

EDIT: The same for Metal Slug 4 and 5 are the decrypted versions working to add?

All i know is the parent versions of all those games will work as i've played em myself as for the decrypted versions im not sure.??

arcadez2003

@darksavior said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@gamez-fan When you fight the 1st boss “windy plane”, the audio is different. It’s been a while to know the specifics but that’s where it’s noticeable. Few minutes to get to him so it won’t take long.

After some investigation i've found out that the reason the music is different between MAME-2003 and MAME-2010, let me explain quickly sometimes in MAME
they dump a new version of a game let's for talking sake the World region of Ninja Baseball Batman and they make it the new parent eg nbbatman.zip and the
previous parent the USA version now becomes a clone eg nbbatmanu.zip

In MAME-2003 your playing the USA version and in MAME-2010 your playing the World version which does have different music on the bosses i guess the above
change on the Rom is what has made you think the music was broken in MAME-2003 when infact it's not as your playing two different versions of the game.

Regards.

arcadez2003

@udb23 said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@gamez-fan Getting sound in "Deep Scan" (/invinco) as previously requested, is it too complicated to implement?

As per my edited post that you may have missed, if you cant compile a build with the new driver then it doesn't matter i'll try the game with the new sample
handling although you'll likely need to give me a few pointers as to what to listen out for so we know the game is good soundwise.

UDb23

@gamez-fan said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

i'll try the game with the new sample handling

Ok, thanks. Will PM you on Mameworld's forum.

Riverstorm

@gamez-fan said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

All i know is the parent versions of all those games will work as i've played em myself as for the decrypted versions im not sure.??

Ok, you wouldn't happen to have access to those ROMs to test them? I can't even find the SHA1 for some of the ROMs let alone the file itself.

It is a bit time consuming. For each game I do look at several newer DAT's and if they contain some of the information I copy-n-paste. Copying from newer versions always has extraneous information that has to be removed from BIOS file entries to parent/clone relationships, redumps, etc. If not I build the entry from scratch cutting-n-pasting but I need to remove all the source driver code and reformat it for a DAT.

If pasted I have to rename/remove several files. Then you need to copy-n-paste all the CRC & SHA1 hash lines from the source driver. Then finally I check the parent/clone relationship, manually look at each file for any merge ROMs. I don't think many use split-merge but for completeness I try and add the information.

A few things that further slow it down is for example "The King of Fighters 2002 Plus". The driver only lists the CRC information no SHA1 so I will go searching on sites that contain that type of information trying to have complete and accurate entries for each game. That does take a good amount of time too.

It can take from 15 to 45 minutes a game. I could expedite the process and skip a few steps or leave information incomplete but I would rather do it right the first time around if possible.

I guess if it's possible to know exactly which parent/clones have been tested it would be really helpful for an accurate DAT and a quicker build. I would rather not say here's 75 games fixed but 15 don't work and I am not sure which ones they are. It might save a few questions of why doesn't this game work too.

I think it can be tough for someone to figure out which is the parent and which is the clone let alone what does that mean. If you haven't tested them I could leave them out or if you think it's worth adding since the side effect of adding a parent might be a working clone we could go that route too.

Speaking of how about the Metal Slug games parent, clone or both? ;)

arcadez2003

I should have the parents for all the games i added support for kicking around somewhere lemmie gather em all up, i guess we need to find neutral ground
maybe a chatroom or another website to discuss this further.

arcadez2003

@udb23 said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@gamez-fan said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

i'll try the game with the new sample handling

Ok, thanks. Will PM you on Mameworld's forum.

Right well i've gathered up all the needed stuff and i see the problem here it's a two version game but only Invinco has working samples which are incorrect for Deep Scan,
i tried hooking the Depthcharge samples to a couple of INIT's the game uses at driver level in the hope it would then play the correct ones depending on which game
you choose but MAME didn't seem to like that and the game then refused to boot.

Another thing i tried was swapping the samples over and making the game use the depth charge samples and bingo Deep Scan now has sound at the expense of the
other game obviously, not perfect as i think it's playing the submarine samples when it shouldn't be, but at least i reckon it confirms the game would use the same
samples as Depthcharge..??

This will need someone with a smarter head than me to add sample code in the vicdual sound core so that this game will correctly load the samples required on a per game
basis whenever a player chooses which version they wanna play as being honest it's above my paygrade i think.

darknior

@gamez-fan Have you found time to work a little on Gals Panic ?

Gal's Panic 2 not working, GP 3 ... i think not exist on MAME 78
Gal's Panic S and S2 working fine but little slow ...
GP SS n S3 .... not exist too ?
GP 2 3 are not really important for me but i really love the S serie if you can do something please ?

arcadez2003

@darknior said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@gamez-fan Have you found time to work a little on Gals Panic ?

Gal's Panic 2 not working, GP 3 ... i think not exist on MAME 78

Gal's Panic S and S2 working fine but little slow ...

GP SS n S3 .... not exist too ?
GP 2 3 are not really important for me but i really love the S serie if you can do something please ?

Gals Panic 2 doesn't work in currant MAME a dump of the MCU would be required, as for the rest being on the slow side unfortunately it's the limitations
of the hardware your using and there's nothing i can do about that!! BTW you should try Panic Street similar game on the same hardware.

UDb23

@gamez-fan said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

add sample code in the vicdual sound core

First thanks for trying to fix this.
Vicdual boards had two games on same board but usually each game was using a different sound daughterboard. The Deep Scan game sounds are not emulated in the code as the details of that daughterboard are not known.
Recently on another vicdual rom a developer was able to make sounds work by coding a "sample player" (instead of trying to emulate the soundboard).
You can find info and code here.
I believe approach for Deep scan could be the same.

Riverstorm

@gamez-fan said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

I should have the parents for all the games i added support for kicking around somewhere lemmie gather em all up

Ok, this is perfect if you have the files. When I run the current MAME (0.192) and rollback torrents through the DAT I have a boatload of missing files. Locating the correct source code files where the changes occurred has been difficult as to obtain accurate information. If you have all the correct files (yay...they exist! ;) we can make this fairly painless.

Download DatUtil
Dump all the newly created/fixed working ROMs to a new/empty folder (leaving them zipped is fine).
From a command prompt run datutil -x -f listxml -o <output filename> <directory name> (i.e. - datutil -x -f listxml -o fixedgames.dat c:\fixedgames

This will create a file in listxml format with the CRC and SHA1 information all calculated from the actual ROMs. If you can get me that file I can add the parent/clone relationships from the source.c files. Then I can use cleanse mode to add the merge tags, header info, etc.

Then it would be just a matter of manually adding the new samples and the Neogeo BIOS information.

From there it's easy to merge it to the main DAT. Using this new partial DAT we would get a few parent/clone relationship errors which are completely normal due to only the clone/bootleg version merged and the parent not present (i.e. - FixEight or Counter Run for example in your fixes). Once merged to the main DAT these errors would go away though.

arcadez2003

Yeah these old NeoGeo versions are nigh on impossible to trackdown as the Roms have been updated more times than i care to remember
meaning the older ones have been deleted, anyway good thing is i have one working version for every new game i've added support for
with the exception of SVC vs SNK Capcom Chaos and since i cant trackdown a compatable version im going to add support to MAME-2003
for the bootleg which i have a working Rom for.

Unfortunately i dont have the time at the moment to do the above as im juggling with three projects just now but i am going to leave you something
handy in a thread on another site called emuxtras look out for a post from me later today

Regards!!.

Riverstorm

@gamez-fan said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

Unfortunately i dont have the time at the moment to do the above as im juggling with three projects just now but i am going to leave you something
handy in a thread on another site called emuxtras look out for a post from me later today

Ok, that sounds good I will keep an eye out. Being able to generate a "base" listxml from the ROMs will be an excellent reference to the SHA1 list for updating the source.c files at some point. It will also leave most of the updates to just sound samples, the parent/clone entries and <BIOS SET>. It should be much quicker.

I was thinking of maintaining a change DAT of just the additions you have done for people like @maxbeanz that just want to add the new ROMs and also a complete DAT for those just starting out.

One quick question for you. I noticed they seem to load a lot of encrypted ROMs for reference then load the decypted ROM. Is that how they would do it until they were able to code it to use the encrypted ROM properly. Also do the source files contain ROM size anywhere? It's the only piece really missing to build a DAT solely from the source files. It's not a show stopper at all but does throw warnings about size mismatches.

dankcushions

in theory there should be no need to manually create dat files. original dat files are created by their respective mame core via the -gamelist command line option. if new games have been added to the drivers (or new drivers), they should appear automatically when you use the -gamelist command line option the same way the original mame 0.78 dat was created.

of course, the problem is that the libretro mame2003 core isn't some launchable .exe anymore like the original mame 0.78, so you can't run it with command line options like that anymore. however maybe it's simpler to create a bespoke lr-mame2003 build that dumps that file to ./ on launch than to manually amend the dat file. all the code to do it is there internally.

darknior

https://github.com/libretro/mame2003-libretro/pull/243
https://github.com/libretro/mame2003-libretro/pull/242

@gamez-fan NeoGeo Roms have been updated many many times over the years as a result the old ones
either get deleted or the links for them die resulting in them being unavailable, with regards
to the new ones i added to this driver i have a correct and working Rom for each of them
via old Xbox Rompacks.

Im currantly making a pack so folks can build new dats and Romsets to support them, one
game however has eluded me namely the parent and decrypted versions of SNK Vs Capcom
as all my sets just contain the bootleg Rom which im now adding support for to this core
as without it this game would be unplayable due to the correct Roms being lost over time.

Riverstorm

@dankcushions said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

of course, the problem is that the libretro mame2003 core isn't some launchable .exe anymore like the original mame 0.78

You mean -listxml and not -gamelist? I prefer using the executable for DAT creation in ClrMamePro but you can use the command line to dump it raw with pipe. In ClrMamePro you need to answer questions on a few scenarios that may force split-merge, etc. due duplicate names or hashes, different names with the same hash or different hashes with the same name.

The other thing it keep in mind is the older versions use -listinfo instead of -listxml and you do need a 32-bit OS to run them just to create the file. That is getting more challenging now that almost everything is 64-bit.

I thought of that last week and even tried running it! :) That would have been perfect to implement updates and generate a DAT from the new executable.

I was always aware of DatUtil but never really had a need to use it but this is a perfect scenario. I know it doesn't look like much of a tool but it's incredibly powerful and the real wizards of the tool can manipulate almost any DAT/folder structure for any scenario.

If you run it against the flat files you're basically forced into a non-merge scenario and everything would work fine but I don't mind doing some light editing for parent/clone relationships so split-merge works also and it operates like a true DAT.

I have no idea how the power users can create the parent/clone relationship for thousands of ROMs or add samples without some outside information because common files among archives doesn't automatically correlate to parent/clone relationship and there can be only one relationship which would require some weird branch handling for odd scenarios.

It does have a merge option that I think would be perfect for the change/main DAT. The only issue I see right now is removing say effect00.wav from dkong due to no longer in use once the new samples are merged. Basically removing no longer used samples after the merge. A few scenarios along those lines, not show stoppers but more cosmetic and clean-up.

Im currantly making a pack so folks can build new dats and Romsets to support them

This would be really nice!