Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

YFZdude

When I try to launch choplift.zip I get a message

This romset is known but marked as not working
One of its clones might work so maybe give it a try

But when I select lr-mame as the emulator it launches and seems to play just fine. (at least for what little I've played it)

EDIT: I should clarify I am running v1.0.0.3 and I just pulled the latest rom so I'm sure it is the most recent file available.

So now I have a couple of questions since I was considering switching to fbneo as the default arcade emulator.

Is this normal behavior for fbneo to not even attempt to run roms that are marked bad?
(I assume in the DAT file is where it is marked bad)

Does anyone on the team check "bad" romsets with new releases to see if the status needs to be updated?

Is there an override setting somewhere I could change to ignore this and run anyway?

sleve_mcdichael

@yfzdude I get the same error. chopliftu ("unprotected") works.

(Edit: doesn't answer your questions, I guess, but if you just want one that works...)

barbudreadmon

@yfzdude This game is marked as not working because its protection isn't emulated in FBNeo, this is the case for most/all parents marked as not working with a working clone. This is unrelated to the status of its dump.

sleve_mcdichael

@barbudreadmon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Ok, it's weird that i can't reproduce it

Is your "hotkey enable" on Select? This wouldn't be an issue on "default" setups because the combination of hotkey Select + input_hotkey_block_delay = "5" = the select (coin) button is never activated for more than a fraction of a second (5 frames so what, 1/4 of a second @ 20fps?). But on controllers with a dedicated "home" button that's used for hotkey enable, then Select wouldn't be bound to a hotkey so the "block delay" wouldn't kick in after the 5 frames and the button would be activated for as long as the user holds it.

G30FF

Found a minor bug to report. Playing ffightae, the three player hack Final Fight 30th Anniversary Edition, the third player cannot map the "Special" button (default Y on player 1 and 2). Special is not one of the available buttons when attempting to assign controls for the third player, but it is a choice for player 1 and 2. I tried to set input 1's Mapped Port value to 3 to test, and it unassigned the Special button when I did that, then reassigned it when I changed Mapped Port to 1 or 2.

The button is mapped in the normal ffight rom by default for player 1 and 2, so the default behaviour should be to have this button mapped for player 1-3 in ffightae.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff that's not a bug, i remember that hack used another button for p3 special (probably p3 coin)

G30FF

@barbudreadmon Aah. My mistake then. I went and read the development thread on RHDN more thoroughly, and now I understand. Thank you!

barbudreadmon

@g30ff out of curiosity, i checked that game and noticed p3 coin doesn't seem to add any credit, if it's only used as p3 special then i should probably map it directly as such, or am i missing something ?

G30FF

@barbudreadmon Apparently that's by design. I went to check the RHDN thread about the game, and found this comment from the hacker:

Arcadez - Thank you for supporting ffae! P3 coin doing nothing is not a bug, it's technically p3's button 3. For various reasons we decided not to implement p3's coin button, primarily because on a real arcade cabinet you'd likely have two coin mechanisms and coins are shared in final fight. It was assumed users would just double map one of the other coin buttons to p3s select button.

So it seems that P3 Coin is actually P3's Special button, and P3 just does not have a coin button.

On an unrelated note, and I'm not sure if this is a known issue or not, I tested out bucky in lr-fbneo, and when it boots up, the screen is upside down, ROM N2 shows as BAD, and the game never moves past the RAM ROM Check. Clones seem to work, like buckyea. Again, not sure if this is a known issue, just wanted to mention it.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

So it seems that P3 Coin is actually P3's Special button, and P3 just does not have a coin button.

Ok, i'll change default mapping then, thanks for the feedback

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

On an unrelated note, and I'm not sure if this is a known issue or not, I tested out bucky in lr-fbneo, and when it boots up, the screen is upside down, ROM N2 shows as BAD, and the game never moves past the RAM ROM Check.

I can't reproduce this, the only thing that comes to mind is that your eeprom got corrupted or something, try deleting it (bucky.nv, i believe FBNeo eeproms on RetroPie are saved in a fbneo subfolder of the rom folder), i've seen similar issues happening from time to time with konami games.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I deleted bucky.nv, and the problem did indeed go away. The game works just fine now. Thanks for the info!

barbudreadmon

Support for nintendo VS was added, note that we don't plan on supporting the MAME multi-files romsets for those, instead we use the single-file romsets which are also supported by a few NES emulators.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon Very exciting news! I'm looking forward to trying them out! Sourcing the roms for this set was a challenge, but I've managed to get them together. So far I notice four VS System games (that I'm aware of) are missing from the dat, so hopefully those will get added in the future. I'll test them out when I get the chance.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff Only the support for "Vs. Unisystem" was added, support for the few games running on "Vs. Dualsystem" (2 linked nes) wasn't implemented, i doubt it will in the near future because it'll require some major rewrite of our nes driver (current driver doesn't allow to run 2 nes instances at once).

G30FF

@barbudreadmon Aah. I actually didn't realize those were separate things, but yeah, all of the games I see missing have two screens. Thanks for that!

I've tried out all of the games, and these are the only issues I noticed.

vstetris: Player 1 controls don't seem to work. If I start up a 1 player game, I have to set my input to player 2 for the game to register my inputs.
vsfreedomforce: I got a game over, and the game hung. It didn't take me back to the title screen. However this only happened once, and I couldn't get it to happen again.

Overall, excellent work!

barbudreadmon

@g30ff Thanks for the reports !

I fixed the issue for vstetris.

For vsfreedomforce, are you talking about a black screen where you can still move gun cursor ? Did it happen right after inserting coins ? I got a bug like this, but i'm not yet sure what this is about, it could even be something happening on original game.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I tested the fix for vstetris, and it works now!

For vsfreedomforce, it was the same experience you described, but after the game over screen disappeared, not right after inserting coins. Not sure if it's a bug with the actual original game or not. Sorry I can't be more helpful, I wasn't able to reproduce it after the first time it happened.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff most likely, the random issue with vsfreedomforce is fixed.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon Updated. If it happens again, I'll let you know.

WeirdH

Two Konami beat 'em ups exhibit fairly isolated performance issues on my Pi 3B+:

asterix becomes stuttery in level 2, maybe due to the background effect of air swirling in the heat

moomesa does the same when the attract mode gets to a boss fight with a floating platform

Apart from these instances, the games seem to run fine, so are these emulation issues, or is the 3B+ just too slow and obsolete by now?