Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

roslof

@barbudreadmon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

@roslof Btw, you might consider adding trogp to your compatibility list as a different game since that prototype had significantly different gameplay from the final version.

Can't find a "trogp" ROM, but I've been using trogpa4 from the MAME ROMset. It's listed as [Proto] Trog

Is your trogp the same as MAME's trogpa4?

Funny that I actually work with one of the Trog developers and he clued me in about the gameplay differences 4 years ago, so I made sure it was on my list. As I remember him telling the story, they tested the prototype and it was too confusing for players. They opted for the new design, which internally they called "Pac-Man Trog" because of its simple collect all the things nature. I think the developers preferred the prototype, but the public had spoken. :)

After your initial post about the update, I mapped trogpa4 to fbneo, and it runs very well, as expected.

Cheers!

barbudreadmon

@roslof said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Can't find a "trogp" ROM, but I've been using trogpa4 from the MAME ROMset. It's listed as [Proto] Trog
Is your trogp the same as MAME's trogpa4?

Oops, yeah, i forgot this romset was renamed to trogpa4, trogp is the old name (from older mame). This game is a hidden gem imho, probably better than the final game.
I didn't notice it was at the beginning of your list.

barbudreadmon

The last midway tms34010 game, Revolution X, was added to FBNeo.

barbudreadmon

"Power-up baseball", a prototype that disappeared from the radars for several decades, was dumped just a few days ago and added to FBNeo. It's basically Midway's unreleased "Baseball Jam". Some background story if you are interested : https://gamehistory.org/powerupbaseball/
The game might have awkward mapping (i never know how to map those games with tons of controls...), so i'm open to any suggestion about that.

barbudreadmon

Thanks to an external contributor (eziochiu), the last 2 unplayable pgm games (and their clones) finally became playable :

Dragon World 3
Photo Y2K 2 (3-in-1)

Don't expect fancy shmup/beat'em'up/vsfighting games though ;)

barbudreadmon

Sega system32 support was added to FBNeo, including :

Air Rescue
Arabian Fight
Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder
Dark Edge
Spider-Man: The Videogame
Dragon Ball Z V.R.V.S.
Holosseum
SegaSonic The Hedgehog
Alien3: The Gun
Burning Rival
F1 Super Lap
F1 Exhaust Note
Jurassic Park
Rad Mobile
Rad Rally
Slip Stream
Super Visual Football: European Sega Cup
Soreike Kokology
Soreike Kokology Vol. 2 - Kokoro no Tanteikyoku
Hard Dunk
OutRunners
Stadium Cross
Title Fight

Tip: the multi-screen games can be ran in a single-screen, check the DIPs.
Tip2: Driving games have a dip option for steering: "Logarithmic" and "Linear" - give them a try - see what you like better.
Warning: i believe our driver is a tad slower than lr-mame2016's, so it might not be a good fit even on pi4

dodonpachi

@barbudreadmon I just compiled lr-fbneo from source and tested some games. Sega Sonic runs great in the first level; after that, the music cuts out so often that it's almost muted. Arabian Fight likewise has almost no music playing.

EDIT: For what its worth, I'm on a Pi 4 2GB overclocked to 2100 CPU and 750 GPU.

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi Thanks for the feedback, i think i know where the issue might be coming from (there is a bunch of code in soundboard emulation that doesn't seem arm-friendly), i'll try to fix this tomorrow.

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Arabian Fight likewise has almost no music playing.

Hmmm, it seems music is playing on my pi3 but maybe i'm missing something because it's so slow ? Could you please check if the following fbneo_libretro.so solve the issue you are reporting ? https://www.sendspace.com/file/him49i

Darksavior

@barbudreadmon I tried your build and I get music in Arabian Fight. I tested up to the 2nd level. The music does skip and that's because it's running at around 48-50fps on my pi4 at 2Ghz.

roslof

@barbudreadmon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Thanks to an external contributor (eziochiu), the last 2 unplayable pgm games (and their clones) finally became playable :

Dragon World 3

Photo Y2K 2 (3-in-1)

This is great! Didn't have these on my original list, but added both.
There is an issue with Dragon World 3. After completing the first set of tiles, the bonus counts down to 0, fades to black, then immediately informs "OPCODE 1111". After a few moments, presents an "Illegal Instruction" screen with a stack trace.

barbudreadmon

@darksavior said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I tried your build and I get music in Arabian Fight

but not with the standard build from the repo ?

@roslof thanks for the report, i'll let eziochiu know

Darksavior

@barbudreadmon I didn't try from the repo. That takes a while to compile. If no one tests from repo, then I will tomorrow

roslof

@barbudreadmon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

@roslof thanks for the report, i'll let eziochiu know

Confirmed the issue with Dragon World 3 is fixed with commit b8ea98b
Cheers!

roslof

@darksavior said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

@barbudreadmon I didn't try from the repo. That takes a while to compile. If no one tests from repo, then I will tomorrow

I downloaded from source (if that is what is meant by "from the repo") and Arabian Fight runs at 48FPS for me too, with same audio issue.

barbudreadmon

@roslof said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

with same audio issue

Ok, those reports are very confusing for me, which audio issue are we talking about ? @dodonpachi said it had almost no music at all without mentioning any performance issue, @Darksavior said music was skipping because of the low performance, are they talking about the same issue ? So, to confirm that the audio issue is not due to performance, could someone go in core options, enable some frameskip, and confirm audio is still missing once the game run at 60 fps ?

roslof

@barbudreadmon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

@roslof said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

with same audio issue

Ok, those reports are very confusing for me, which audio issue are we talking about ? @dodonpachi said it had almost no music at all without mentioning any performance issue, @Darksavior said music was skipping because of the low performance, are they talking about the same issue ? So, to confirm that the audio issue is not due to performance, could someone go in core options, enable some frameskip, and confirm audio is still missing once the game run at 60 fps ?

No trouble. I increased frameskip and ran at 60FPS.
No SFX issues. No music issues. All good with audio.
Compared to lr-mame2016. No difference. All good with audio.

barbudreadmon

@roslof so there is no audio issue because of some arm weirdness, thanks for confirming :)

About the performance issue, i don't think much can be done (i already spent some time looking into this), most of this comes from vdp emulation, which was ported from latest MAME and have the latest gfx fixes.
Even so, FBNeo with frameskip might still be a good alternative to no-frameskip lr-mame2016 on pi4, mainly because of 2 things i heard :

sound can also cut on pi4 with lr-mame2016, probably also a performance issue, that's not very surprising tbh because from what i benchmarked, both emulators are less than 10% apart at default settings (actually there are even scenes where FBNeo performs better). FBNeo with frameskip seems to be around 30% faster than no-frameskip lr-mame2016 (btw, there is a neat auto-frameskip setting in FBNeo if you upgrade retroarch to latest nightly)
segas32's analog controls can be a problem with MAME (including current), i heard games like Rad Mobile are barely playable because of this.

Jiryn

@barbudreadmon
Ok, really dumb question and I apologize..
Can I just use the MAME roms?
If so which one?
I have all those games for 2003. 2010 and 2016.

barbudreadmon

@jiryn said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Can I just use the MAME roms?
If so which one?

FBNeo always uses latest MAME roms, it doesn't seem there were many changes for segas32 since 2016 but i can't be sure. Clrmamepro and our dat file are your best friends to confirm if you have compatible romsets or not.