Question about FBA and non-merged roms

bmn001

I've got a non-merged romset for FBA. My understanding is that this means that each of my zipped roms are completely standalone, and that no additional zips or parent romsets are needed to play clones and such.

In my experience, that's not what's happening.

If I have mswordu.zip in my roms dir, (the US release of Magic Sword) it will not launch. The FBA output in the (verbose) runcommand log tells me something to the effect of "'mswordu' found, 'msword' not found."

If I then add 'msword.zip' (the World release of Magic Sword) to my roms dir, I'm able to launch each of them with no problem.

Is this some quirk of FBA that I'm not aware of? Or am I misunderstanding how non-merged roms work? (very possible :)

Ekstreme

That's not entirely correct. It means that each version of the set is separate. But sets can still have a parent child relationship otherwise the duplication of roms would be insane!

EG a game may have an initial Japanese release, but then a conversion for the US market. Only some of the code would change, so then the different rom is dumped and added to a different set. Just because the set is for the US don't assume it's the parent. That's the US runs the world thinking.

bmn001

@Ekstreme I thought that with 'non-merged' roms, there's no need to bother with parent roms anymore. Any 'parent' parts of the roms are included inside each of the children sets' zips. So you would basically need only one zip to launch a child rom.

What you're describing (and the behavior I'm seeing) sounds like split roms, where two separate zips are required to launch a rom.

Ekstreme

You said you had a split set, so that's what I was clarifying for you

dankcushions

@bmn001 your understanding is correct :) it seems like this is an outstanding bug: https://github.com/libretro/fbalpha/issues/80

Ekstreme

Well there you have it. I've never known anyone to use non-merged sets. Guess it makes sense if you want a clean games list though

suprjami

Split/merged covered here: http://choccyhobnob.com/articles/demystifying-mame-roms/

Which is also linked on the wiki: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

bmn001

It does appear to be that exact bug in FBA. It's treating non-merged sets as if they are split sets.

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks, @dankcushions.

dankcushions

this has now been fixed :) https://github.com/libretro/fbalpha/pull/89

to get this, update lr-fba-next from source, via https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/updating-retropie#updatinginstalling-individual-packages

paging @BuZz to update the binaries whenever :)

BuZz

updated.