Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

mitu · 26 May 2019, 13:19

@sirhenrythe5th said in New FB Alpha libretro (pre-v0.2.97.44):

Sounds great in my ears, hope we will see it on the Pi some day

It's already on the Pi, as lr-fbalpha. It will be renamed as lr-fbneo shortly, but otherwise the code is just a continuation of the fbalpha project. There are more details in the libretro.com forum post, which outlines the reasons for the name change.

sirhenrythe5th · 26 May 2019, 14:10

@mitu thanks once more mitu!!!

So it is the version we are talking here in this thread?
Then i allready use it for NeoGeo and some more games that dont work with AdvanceMame.

I will have to test some CPS2 + 3 games to get an impression of the sound improvments.

But what i also realized: with the update from. 43 to. 44 the sound quality of "Raiden DX" got worst.
I first checked if my speakers blew up 😊 but they were ok.
Sounds like crackling mono now ☺

barbudreadmon · 26 May 2019, 17:35

@sirhenrythe5th said in New FB Alpha libretro (pre-v0.2.97.44):

I will have to test some CPS2 + 3 games to get an impression of the sound improvments.

There should be no change to CPS3.

@sirhenrythe5th said in New FB Alpha libretro (pre-v0.2.97.44):

the sound quality of "Raiden DX" got worst

YM2151 is on the todo list, however i can't reproduce your issue, there might be something else causing it.

barbudreadmon · 27 May 2019, 06:21

@sirhenrythe5th said in New FB Alpha libretro (pre-v0.2.97.44):

But what i also realized: with the update from. 43 to. 44 the sound quality of "Raiden DX" got worst.
I first checked if my speakers blew up 😊 but they were ok.
Sounds like crackling mono now ☺

I asked around and i confirm there was no change in sound quality for raidendx, so there are only a few possibilities :

You were previously using raidendx (or clone) and now you are using r2dx_v33 (or clone), the later is a cheap knock-off of the first with awfully bad sound (they removed 2 sound related boards out of the 3 the game originally had, the samplerate went down to 7742hz), btw both versions are mono.
There is some issue with your setup, it might be a lot of things, maybe your setup dislike this game's refresh rate (which is 55.407801Hz) ?
Your hardware is struggling (maybe the game eats more cpu now), try setting frameskip to 1 and let me know if it solves the cracklings.

sirhenrythe5th · 27 May 2019, 07:11

@barbudreadmon thank you very much for your help!

I use raidendx.zip, so i guess the parent rom of this game.
I hope i dont have any issues with my setup, i really do anything to keep it clean and running (daily updates of OS and, as far as available, retropie-setup/all installed packages) no overclocking, no changing of sensible parameters and so on).

In the end i have this this issue only with RaidenDX and once.
I will check it again in the evening when i am home again, i had the same sound experience a couple of days ago with a game in AdvanceMame.
In this case i solved the problem: i use "auto normalize" in the audio-settings of AdvanceMame (which is a great option imo! ;) ) and in this specific case the volume was set to +18 which had the same crackling sound as result.

Now i think maybe i jumped too much between AdvanceMame and FBA so that the audio-mixer got a bit fuzzy.
I will check later as mentioned, maybe it was just a kind of loading error concerning the audio drivers.

Thx a lot again!!!

sirhenrythe5th · 28 May 2019, 06:00

OK, no more issues :D

Yesterday i updated to 4.4.13 and within this update FBAlpha has been upgraded to FBNeo.
Took quite a long time, but was worth it indeed.
No more sound-issues with RaidenDX and i am really impressed about the Performance update.
NeoGeo in special is awesome now!!!

Maybe one thing should be mentioned: after the update you have to copy everything from "/home/pi/retropie/roms/fba/fba" to "/home/pi/retropie/roms/fba/fbneo" to keep all the highscores and BIOS-Setups of NEOGEO.

Thanks a lot, great job!

BuZz · 28 May 2019, 06:18

@sirhenrythe5th you may have installed it before I had the new binaries built. Should be able to install without building now on RPI.

Regarding folders. yeah, sorry - some changed. Also core options will need to be adjusted if you customised them before as old settings are not renamed.

sirhenrythe5th · 28 May 2019, 08:20

@BuZz well, in RGUI there was 0.2.97.44. displayed indeed.
But i had no update of FBA in the near past that took so Long (about 40 min.) and what i had as result...no, that is really a difference experience with "FBANeo".
As mentioned i.e. NEOGEO is soooo awesome now!
I did not realize that it did run with a small handbrake before, love to test every single game with this enhanced engine.

Yep, i had to remap my buttons again too, you are right.
The core-overrides wird gone too.

Great update! , much appreciated!!!

hermit · 28 May 2019, 16:43

sorry if I insist, but now the core is for version 0.2.97.44 or 0.2.97.43? thank you

mitu · 28 May 2019, 16:44

@hermit The current labeled version is 0.2.97.44.

EDIT: as the first post in the topic mentions, it's still not officially released, still a WIP.

sirhenrythe5th · 29 May 2019, 12:40

Anyone else has recognized issues with IGS "Demon Front" since the update to FBNeo?
I wanted to test it yesterday, but it ends in a black screen after the character selection.

It doesn not really matter, the update is great anyhow!

mitu · 29 May 2019, 13:14

@sirhenrythe5th said in New FB Alpha libretro (pre-v0.2.97.44):

Anyone else has recognized issues with IGS "Demon Front" since the update to FBNeo?

I think there was a recent an issue in the Issue tracker about it - https://github.com/libretro/FBNeo/issues/30 -, but it seems it has been solved. Try updating from source and starting again the game.

sirhenrythe5th · 31 May 2019, 08:05

Of course you were right mitu, as always :)
Gosh, also this game runs very fine now! thumbsup

Thanks again, your help is much aprecciated!

barbudreadmon · 15 Jun 2019, 08:11

I updated the first post and title

omen_peter · 15 Jun 2019, 10:47

Hi all.

Setup details in my signature. Happy to move this to the help section if it suits better.

I was just after some clarification. I currently use the .43 fba and neogeo romset (I have them as separate systems on my pi) and use lr-fbalpha as my default emulator. From reading this thread I understand that if I was to update my RetroPie setup script today my lr-fbalpha would be updated to lr-fbneo (automatically? Or do I need to then update the lr-fbaplha emulator?).

So let's assume I now have lr-fbneo. How does this emulator treat my .43 romset? As in, will the games that worked before still work? Will some now not work? Will none of them work at all??

I see from above comments that not updating lr-fbneo is an option (although not recommended), but you wouldn't believe how long it took me to get around to sorting out my current fba/neogeo setup, and just would like to know how updating will affect my setup (and maybe others in the same situation) and if I will make more work for myself by updating.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. The thread also mentions MAME. I use the .78 romset with lr-mame2003. I assume this change doesn't affect that too?

barbudreadmon · 15 Jun 2019, 11:15

@omen_peter said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

if I was to update my RetroPie setup script today my lr-fbalpha would be updated to lr-fbneo (automatically? Or do I need to then update the lr-fbaplha emulator?).

I think you need to update your retropie setup script, then install lr-fbneo, afaik this install migrates your old lr-fbalpha settings (i'm not a retropie user, so i can't confirm).

@omen_peter said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

So let's assume I now have lr-fbneo. How does this emulator treat my .43 romset?

old romsets which contains files that got renamed (sometime MAME rename files to respect some terminology) would still work, they would just output a warning at boot => clrmamepro fixes that without having to get new stuff
old romsets that got renamed would stop working => clrmamepro fixes that without having to get new stuff
new supported romsets would be missing => obviously you'll need to get them somewhere
old romsets containing new files with new crcs (new dumps) will generally stop working => obviously you'll need to get them somewhere, keep in mind we are maybe talking about 20 romsets over the course of 1 year and a half, and probably not common/popular games like neogeo's, cps's, pgm's, ... those have been properly dumped for years.

BuZz · 15 Jun 2019, 11:22

Yeah will need to update the script and emulator or do a full update. When updating the script, it will show fbneo as installed instead of fbalpha. But it won't work till you update as core name etc is changed.

(Writing this from a campsite without a pc, but should be correct).

omen_peter · 15 Jun 2019, 14:42

Thanks @barbudreadmon and @BuZz! Very useful info and good to know what may happen when I update.

I think I'll keep my .43 set for now and if I notice large scale issues with games not working I'll 'bite the bullet' and update my romset. I would like to keep everything as up-to-date as possible so chances are I'll update at some point.

Thanks again.

shavecat · 15 Jun 2019, 15:01

Hey
how do i instaal Fbneo ?
and do i need some system or bios adding ?
Is it better then the lr-mame2003-plus ?
thanks .

barbudreadmon · 15 Jun 2019, 15:24

@shavecat said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Is it better then the lr-mame2003-plus ?

That's 2 different emulators with support for different games (even if they have a lot in common), i would say they are complementary. If you are looking for accuracy, savestates support, funky features using those savestates (netplay, readahead, rewind), and maybe other funky features like RetroAchievements, FBNeo/FBAlpha is usually the recommended emulator over old mame cores when usable (i.e when the game is supported, has no known issues, and your device is able to handle it). Furthermore, reported issues are generally fixed quickly.

@shavecat said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

how do i instaal Fbneo ?

That kind of question when the answer is 2 posts above is seriously depressing.