Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

barbudreadmon

Some updates to galaxian hardware emulation :

harem is now supported
scorpion now has full sound support

nemo93

@barbudreadmon quick message to thank you and the whole FBNeo team for the incredible work done on that software. It's been a while since I fiddled with Arcade-era games (I was still using FBNeo 0.2.x.xx) and it's been a pleasant surprise to see Midway games are now fully supported but also Outfoxies!! Even if the latter does have sound crackling on Pi4 it is fully playable and it's amazing.

For the record, on a pi4 overall FBNeo does much better than MAME for SEGA System 16 (Altered Beast, Alien Storm, etc), Taito (Riding Fight, Elevator Action Returns, etc), Psikyo (gunbird2, Dragon Blaze), IGS (Demon Front, Kov, etc) and of course all CPS-3 boards. Worth mentioning that another of my favorite Thunder Zone (aka Desert Assault from Data East) also runs fullspeed on FBNeo - not the case on MAME. Kung Fu Master is also playing fullspeed on FBNeo.

To be fair on a Pi4 the latest MAME (.230) surprisingly works also very well. It plays fullspeed plenty of games (I tested around ~400 of them). Except 2 System 32 games (Jurassic Park and Spiderman) which both run fullspeed on MAME2016.

Thanks again and I can't wait to see what new drivers and "optimizations" will be added in the future.

DTEAM

@nemo93 said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Even if the latter does have sound crackling on Pi4 it is fully playable and it's amazing.

In retroarch-core-options.cfg Have you set :

fbneo-frameskip = "1"

This should solve your sound problem.

barbudreadmon

@dteam said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

@nemo93 said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Even if the latter does have sound crackling on Pi4 it is fully playable and it's amazing.

In retroarch-core-options.cfg Have you set :
fbneo-frameskip = "1"
This should solve your sound problem.

You should probably avoid setting it globally though, frameskip should only be required for a few systems on pi4.

dankcushions

see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Core-Options/#setting-core-options-per-rom

nemo93

@dankcushions @DTEAM @barbudreadmon thanks to all. To be honest even without skipping it's fine by me as I'm so excited to be (finally!) able to play Outfoxies.

I do have another question though. Hope you don't mind me asking about the low audio volume in Midway games. Same issue on MAME and I'd like to understand the reason behind. I've experienced various volume levels in different games but in case of Midway's (MKs, WrestleMania, etc) it's like there's almost no sound at all unless you raise the volume to the max. What causes this please?

dodonpachi

@nemo93 for the Midway games, you have to go into the service menu (where you can select difficulty or free play, etc) and raise the volume there.

barbudreadmon

@nemo93 i believe that's just how those PCBs initialize themselves by default, iirc in FBNeo we already "boost" the volume for those games

nemo93

@barbudreadmon @dodonpachi thanks again for the answers. Much helpful.

barbudreadmon

added support for the recently dumped "Mrs Dynamite", a game from 1982 which feels like a mix of pacman and bomberman

barbudreadmon

Btw, i highly recommend the new "lowpass filter" core option i added around 2 months ago, to the point i've been thinking of enabling it by default. This core option is basically trying to mimic the amp present on most arcade PCBs, so the games will sound a lot more authentic, the only downside is that it might actually cause some crackles in a few of them, but that's something we can fix if it's reported.

Darksavior

@barbudreadmon Is this related to mame's new audio driver rewrites?

barbudreadmon

@darksavior No, that lowpass filter has actually existed for a very long time in FBNeo code, but wasn't exposed in the libretro port until recently.

barbudreadmon

Added support for "Red Clash" and "Zero Hour", 2 shmups from the early 80s.
Thanks to a contributor owning this rare cabinet, "Zero Hour" is playable for the first time with sounds (samples available from https://neo-source.com/index.php?topic=2487.msg32339#msg32339)

Clyde

For anyone as curious as me, here's a five-minute review of Zero Hour and ~~a "Longplay" in under four minutes~~ of Red Clash, edit: which had no sound, so I replaced it with a video of the original PCB:

barbudreadmon

Added support for "Cycle Maabou" and "Sky Destroyer", 2 Taito games from the mid 80s.

Riverstorm

@barbudreadmon - It's been a while since I've updated my set so I might have missed it but have these games been removed, from the DAT?

kinst
kinst13
kinst14
kinst15ai
kinst2
kinst210
kinst211
kinst213
kinst214ai

They don't seem to be in the DAT but they still seem to be in the source drivers. There is definitely a mishmash of half spaces and half tabs throughout the driver(s). Blank lines with tabs, etc. I'm not criticizing at all as the games work great, just an observation if it matters at all. :)

barbudreadmon

@riverstorm as mentioned here, those games were disabled for now due to all their issues (freezes, img corruption, glitches, ...)

Riverstorm

@barbudreadmon - Ok, that makes sense. Regardless, at last count that still leaves roughly 6,700 games in the core to play. Give or take a few! :)

barbudreadmon

Added support for "Chinese Hero", "Shanghai Kid" and "Dynamic Ski"