NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?)

[Used2BeRX]

Oh no! This is terrible!

The amazingly awesome hack "Super Pitfall: 30th Anniversary Edition" doesn't work in any of the 3 Pi emulators!!!!

Now I know I'm going to have to talk to somebody about getting games working. This is one of the top 10 NES hacks of all time IMO.

[Used2BeRX]

I will be unable to do any Famicom Disk System testing and will have to remove the FDS from any retropie release unless the emulator controller issues regarding disk flipping are resolved.

Partially solved. FDS testing will resume. I still need somebody to tell me how to configure controller hotkeys on a per-system basis though. The github process detailed here doesn't work.

https://retropie.github.io/RetroPie-Docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#example-per-system-control-override-retroarchcfg

[mediamogul]

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

The amazingly awesome hack "Super Pitfall: 30th Anniversary Edition" doesn't work in any of the 3 Pi emulators!

I just tested the hack with both lr-fceumm, as well as lr-nestopia and there doesn't seem to be any problems. Is there something specifically you noticed that hinders play?

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

I just tested the hack with both lr-fceumm, as well as lr-nestopia and there doesn't seem to be any problems.

Where does it put you when you start the game?

If it's working for you, you should hear an NES version of the song from Pitfall II on the Atari 2600. If it's playing different music and the background is blue then you're in the glitch. You can only go left for a while until you fall into a pit and die.

If you're not in the glitch, would you mind giving me the CRC of the rom you're using? This would be strange if you have the same one and it's working for you. The one I have works fine in both XBox emulators and is a patch of the exact CRC that the author states to use.

[mediamogul]

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

If it's working for you, you should hear an NES version of the song from Pitfall II on the Atari 2600.

Everything seems to be working. It still amazes me they were able to polish one of the worst games in the NES library into a decently enjoyable game. All in in all, I'd still always rather play 'Pitfall II: Lost Caverns' for the 2600, but this hack was very ambitious and a huge achievement none the less.

Unfortunately, I patched the game nearly two years ago and I don't have the original ROM I used on hand. However, I feel certain I just followed the instructions on romhacking.net which states that the No-Intro version 20130731-235630 ROM with a CRC32 of A4958020 should be used.

Edit:

and is a patch of the exact CRC that the author states to use.

I missed this in your post. I can't promise anything, but I'll try to dig up the ROM I used. I archive just about everything that runs through my main computer, but finding things can sometimes be a bit squirrelly.

Edit 2:

Well, that was easier than I thought. I found the file, ran crc32 and it resulted with A4958020.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul Well, we both started with the same version. I used A4958020 as well.

Could you verify that your current CRC is E55BA70D?

This is really kind of weird.

[mediamogul]

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

Could you verify that your current CRC is E55BA70D?

It is indeed.

This is really kind of weird.

It is indeed.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul I figured it out, and I learned something new. :)

I'm not super smart with this stuff, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the issue is because I tested it in lr-quicknes first, and when it didn't work there it set up a bad .srm file that jacked up the game on both other emulators when I tried it on them. (I actually thought about that last night at work for some reason, and when you confirmed for me that we had the same image I was really hopeful it would work).

Crisis averted. :)

There is actually a hack of TMNT that didn't work on any of the emulators that happened shortly after this one, but I didn't want to "double bitch" so I havent mentioned it here yet. I'm going to try this and see if that fixes that rom too. Heck... I'm going to go back and re-test any of the problem games with this and see how many we can clear up now.

Thanks for the info mediamogul.

[Used2BeRX]

Haha! Yes!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Return to the Sewersis now listed as working in retropie in the lr-fceumm emulator.

Both Nestopia and Fceumm would load the intro but it would go to a black screen and become unresponsive before the title screen. I'm assuming it had a problem in Nestopia and the bad .srm file was jacking it up in Fceumm as well.

I've got some re-testing to do now. :)

EDIT: Well, it didn't effect Devil World's strange glitch where you can't press select to choose 2 players, or fix the two VS games glitches on the list above, but it did fix two SMB3 hacks.

Mario in Some Usual Day and Mario Adventure now listed as working in RetroPie. :)

[mediamogul]

@used2berx

Nice troubleshooting. I'll have to file this away myself as a possible cause for strange ROM issues.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul Thanks.

It might have taken me longer to figure it out, or I might not have figured it out at all before bringing all 4 of those roms to anybody who might be able to fix stuff in the emulators here. So you saved me that embarrassment.

We've still got some strange glitches rendering two VS Arcade games unplayable and only allowing you to play 1 player on the European game Devil World, but other than that any of the other recorded issues on about over 1,900 games tested so far either happen on the XBox as well or are due to my using a Pi Zero instead of a Pi 3. :)

[markwkidd]

@mediamogul said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx

Nice troubleshooting. I'll have to file this away myself as a possible cause for strange ROM issues.

Yeah, especially since the troubleshooting process generally involves one emulator not working, then trying each other one in turn. Eye opener!

[Used2BeRX]

@markwkidd said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@mediamogul said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx

Nice troubleshooting. I'll have to file this away myself as a possible cause for strange ROM issues.

Yeah, especially since the troubleshooting process generally involves one emulator not working, then trying each other one in turn. Eye opener!

Yeah. Love finding things like this out by complete accident. It happens more than you would think. :)

Can anybody tell me what an SRM file does? I notice that it doesn't get created for every game that I've tested. For instance, none of the FDS games make one, and most of the VS Arcade roms don't either.

If there's nothing in there that's super important, maybe it would be best if when launching the game in an emulator the file gets deleted and re-made. This would avoid issues on this consoles as well as any other that use the .SRM or other similar files. Then again, I'm assuming that it's created for a reason.

BTW.... is there any way that we can change where these files, as well a save states and in-game saves get put when they're created? I don't like that they are put in the same folder as the roms. Looks extremely messy to me.

[Used2BeRX]

@used2berx Famicom Disk System Translated games testing complete.

Out of 37 games, they all work except for "Famicom Grand Prix II". That game works, but the info at the bottom flickers the whole time. This was an issue in NestopiaX on the XBox as well, so hopefully I can work with somebody here in the RP community at some point to see about this and some other games that were fixed in NestopiaX but have the same problems in lr-nestopia. (Both FDS and NES games)

All other games work in lr-nestopia except for "19 Neunzehn", and "Lutter". For those, at least now, you need to use lr-fceumm.

[A Former User]

@used2berx SRM files are Saved RAM files. They are the battery created saved games file. You wouldn't want that deleted every time at launch or your saved games would always be deleted.

[Used2BeRX]

@livefastcyyoung Ah... thanks. Makes sense. I figured they must be important. Most NES games don't have a battery, but doing my suggestion would break the ones that did then.

[Used2BeRX]

Just recently added "Bio Hazard" to the NES Translated library, thanks to packnsacdave at romhacking! Bio Hazard was a Waixing Pirate back-port of the original PSX Resident Evil for the Famicom that was previously only in Chinese.

It worked with no issues on lr-fceumm, and I've recently gotten confirmation that it is now working in NestopiaX on the XBox! (If anybody would be interested in getting it working in lr-nestopia, I'm sure I could get the info on how to get it working in Nestopia).

Here's some info on it: http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Bio_Hazard_(Famicom)

I took the image from that page of the box, cart and manual and I made Boxart and Cart art for everyone.

[Used2BeRX]

Untranslated FDS Games: 65 out of 66 working.
FDS Hacks: 2 out of 2 working.

Druid is the only game that doesn't work. The info part of the screen flickers so bad you can't play it at all in either emulator. Hopefully this can be fixed since it is a cool little game.

Fortunately all working games play just fine in lr-nestopia. This means the only FDS games that currently need lr-fceumm are the translations of "19 Neunzehn" and "Lutter".

Adult Games tested: 28 of 28 work. All FDS games in this category work in lr-nestopia, but it's better to use lr-fceumm for BodyConQuest because it is the only 2 Disk FDS game and the disk flip function will not work on it. You need to load 1 of 4 disk sides.

Well... that's it for the FDS testing. I will have to try to get in contact with somebody who can fix the 5 or 6 games out of around 2,020 games that don't work on the RetroPie. Overall, I'm very impressed with the NES/FDS compatibility here. Nice job. :)

[Used2BeRX]

Unfortunately, because of the nature of the cart images and my inability to properly crop them without damaging the shape of the case, there will be absolutely no way for me to easily do this for that type of image.

What this means is a few things....

First, I'm going to have to make that part of the collection much larger in file size by converting them all to PNG, rather than JPG images. (From the looks of it, we can expect the 'Cart' folder to grow in file size by around 5 times). I don't yet know if this will effect how large an image I can use on both the XBox and RetroPie without impacting performance (Maybe somebody here who knows that can chime in on the issue???)

Second, is that although the final pixel sizes will be perfect ratios with transparent backgrounds filling them out, I won't be able to have perfectly sized carts relative to each other. It's just impossible without force altering the ratio of the image which will degrade quality. In actuality, this shouldn't be that big a deal because we're really only talking about the difference of a few pixels on the Right Side or the Bottom of the image that will be transparent to fill the image out. In any case, the slightly different size of some carts will be much less noticeable than grainy images by forcing ratios on them.

Third, this is a TON more work (and Math) for me to do and it will likely be a very long time before I'm finished with this. I've also decided since I will already be forced to use PNG images and I'm going to be using transparency anyhow, that I will also take the time to remove the non-cart parts of the images, such as the "holes" at the bottom right and left of a US/PAL NES cart image. This will give us full transparency of all of the cart images. I'm not sure how beneficial this will be in the Madmab/XBox emulators, but on the RetroPie it will look amazing as the images will just float over the skin background and will now look as though the cart is just floating there instead of a photograph of a cart with the background shadows behind it.

I REALLY wish I knew this was going to be the case before I had done other work, such as creating all of those FDS images from a template with the individual game labels. I'm going to end up just re-doing all of them on a single fixed template and wasting 2 full nights of work on it rather than 2 weeks trying to crop all the background noise for each individual image.

Oh well....

I don't think we're going to have any problems with the Box images still. I won't know until I get to them.

[Used2BeRX]

I don't think there's any great way of displaying what I've been doing with the cart images in a forum, but if you were to download the two of these and open them in a good image program you could see how these are now transparent.

New Image:

Original Image:

I got about 100 of these done so far.

I'm also making them centered in the image, as every single new image will be a ratio match of any single other image without actually changing the shape of the image by forcing a ratio and blurring the image. In my tests so far, it looks like this will work great with mass-resizing to the desired thresholds for performance on different systems.

EDIT: If you click on both images they will open in new tabs. You could flip back and forth between the two of them and see the difference. The new image has a transparent border around it as well as the two black spaces at the bottom are now replaced with a transparent border. In the image in your browser it may seem that this is all "white", but in actuality if you were to have this on your RetorPIe the white border would show whatever was behind the image on the skin. :)