Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Jurassic Park and Arabian Fight are incredibly slow even with frameskip.

Hmmm maybe you didn't set frameskip settings properly or something ? I know they are bit confusing with all the different settings. I'm not too sure how reliable are the new frameskip modes where the retroarch frontend tells the core if it should frameskip or not (Frameskip set to Auto or Manual), but the simpler mode where the core makes the decision by itself (Frameskip set to Fixed and Fixed Frameskip set to the value you want) should most likely do the job for those games on a pi4.

barbudreadmon

@darksavior said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I'm not one to really notice the Inaccurate emulation

I'm not too sure how "accurate" current emulation of segas32 is (there are still known issues on a few games), but if you look into MAME's git commit history there are visual issues that have been discovered & fixed in segas32 between 2016 and now : color, layer priority, zoom, ... and also some sound fixes. All those fixes are part of FBNeo's current driver.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I'll mess around with them a bit more. What I noticed is that mame2016 plays both of them pretty much flawlessly without frameskip required, so I may just stick with them for those two games in particular.

I don't know if it's just me, but Kingdom Grand Prix won't boot up past the start screen. I don't have that problem in any of the MAME cores.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I don't know if it's just me, but Kingdom Grand Prix won't boot up past the start screen. I don't have that problem in any of the MAME cores.

It's running fine on my side, maybe your core needs some update ? It could be related to what was fixed in https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/commit/edc472eb6952d9f71b4cd82f98653230d3b0504a

G30FF

@barbudreadmon That could be. I'm using the libretro core from RetroPie, the latest stable build which was last updated August 4. I'll try to build from source and see if that fixes the issue.

EDIT: Yep, that fixed it!

I'm also going to amend my earlier comments about some System 32 games, as going back, Segasonic lags as soon as more than one character is on screen, and Spider-Man is fairly slow. However, for all of the games I've tested, including Jurassic Park and Arabian Fight, setting frameskip to Fixed and the value to 1 frame, all of them play at full speed on my Pi 4.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

However, for all of the games I've tested, including Jurassic Park and Arabian Fight, setting frameskip to Fixed and the value to 1 frame, all of them play at full speed on my Pi 4.

How about the other modes ? Are they reliable too ?

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I tried using Auto in Segasonic, and it didn't really do anything. I wasn't sure what combination of settings would get the auto frameskip to trigger, so once I found the fixed frameskip of 1 did the job I stopped mucking with the settings. I can try running a few more experiments tonight.

I should also mention I don't have any overclock settings on my Pi 4.

EDIT: As an aside:

"F-1 Dream" was promoted to working.

I tried out F-1 Dream and once a race begins the game breaks. The cars are not visible, and the camera seems to start off of the track.

Another EDIT:
Tests completed. I tried out Spider-Man and Segasonic with different frameskip values.

Auto had no effect on any of the games.
Manual with a threshold of 42 was able to make both games play well, but the framerate felt inconsistent as the frameskip was based on the sound buffer, and as such slowed down slightly when a lot of action was happening.
Fixed with a skip of 1 frames out of every 2 frames felt the best to me personally, with a consistent framerate, and no slowdowns I could detect.

dodonpachi

@g30ff for what it's worth, Segasonic plays full speed with Mame 2010 EDIT: on Pi 4. That's what I use.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff Thanks for the feedback about the frameskip settings, i'll see if something can be done about auto-mode.

F-1 dream works properly on my desktop computer, did you maybe enable something bad in core options, like cyclone ?

G30FF

@dodonpachi Yep, it plays at full speed in Mame 2016 on the Pi 4. Pretty much all of the System32 games do. The frameskip settings are just necessary for FBNeo.

@barbudreadmon I haven't changed any of the core options besides dipswitch settings. The game works fine up until a race actually begins. I've tested only on the RetroPie libretro core, not on standalone. Interestingly, while the standard game (f1dream) has this problem, the bootleg version (f1dreamb) works just fine.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff it's indeed broken on my pi, i think i figured out the issue, rebuilding right now to confirm.

Edit : fix confirmed, thanks for the report !

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I just built from source again, and yep, it works now! Thanks!

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon I recently read somewhere that FBneo has better NeoGeo emulation than Mame2003-plus. Is this also still true for a Pi 3B+? And if so, do you know if FBneo takes advantage of the romhack to speed up Metal Slug 2 in particular? (known as Metal Slug 2 Turbo mslug2t)

The game does launch and even recognizes the Turbo part as evidenced in the service menu, but I can't be certain it actually eliminates slowdown, as the Turbo version doesn't even do that 100% on M2003+.

barbudreadmon

@weirdh Over the years, i've seen users mentioning even current mame has glitchier neogeo emulation than finalburn, so it seems very unlikely mame2003-plus would do better.

The mslug2t hack has been supported in FBNeo since 2015, however i've no idea if it actually eliminates all slowdowns, if it doesn't then it seems very likely that's just how the hack actually is.

sirhenrythe5th

@barbudreadmon i used MAME for years to emulate NEOGEO, starting with MAME32 (later MAME32FX) on a Win32-System and AdvanceMame on the Pi.
Once i changed to FBNEO it was clear that i will never change back.
Maybe it is only my impression, but IMHO the sound is much much better as is the overall NeoGeo experience using FBNEO.
Great project!!

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon @sirhenrythe5th Thank you both for your replies. It appears I have some rom replacing to do.

dodonpachi

I use FBNeo for basically everything except Sega System 32 games and CV1000 games.

G30FF

I've been testing a bunch of different games, and I found a few bugs to report:

bishi.zip (Bishi Bashi Championship): Glitchy graphics especially on the title screen and intro
formatz.zip (Formation Z): The coin button does not work (works in lr-mame2003-plus)
cflyball.zip (Flying Ball): When the startup countdown ends, the game reboots and the countdown begins again. The game never starts.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff thanks for the report !

bishi : this one is known, that's because the romset is a bad dump, we can't do anything about it as long as no one redump it, and the game isn't exactly unplayable so i guess there is no good reason to totally disable it.
formatz : p1 coin is working fine on my side, and i'm noticing this game has no p2 coin, are you sure that's not what you are trying to press ? Or maybe you are using the same key for coin and retroarch's hotkey ? This is known for causing issues sometimes, apparently there are ways to get around it by playing around with retroarch's input_hotkey_block_delay setting.
cflyball : i'll look into this

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I didn't realize that about bishi, thanks for letting me know! As for formatz, I'm using the default controller settings, where P1 coin is controller 1 select. On this controller, I'm using the Home button for hotkey instead of select, so there's no collision with the Retroarch hotkey. I'll try building from source again to see if that fixes the issue.

EDIT: formatz's coin button DOES work, but if you do anything other than just very quickly press and let go of the button, it doesn't register the button press. It's odd, but it does work. I have seen that happen in a couple of other games, but I can't remember off the top of my head which ones.