lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport

UDb23

@mediamogul Crazy! And it's not only USA...here in Italy it's still way colder than usually in this season. Not been this way since many years; yesterday it was even snowing on the Alps.

maxbeanz

It seems the 'emperor' sample may not even be needed. There is a readme inside the gorf zip that speaks about it !

Erased emperor.wav but kept it in the set for audit purposes.
After many tests I strongly believe that this sound is NOT USED during gameplay in the real machine
but may actually be "error", a sound played when a fault is detected in the speech system.
This would be the case since the original attack.wav had errors, and emperor never played for me on the real machine.
Unable to safely recreate on a real machine and documentation has not yet been found to verify if emperor is error.
The Gorf driver was written in MAME when half the samples were still missing.
With all samples now aquired, the driver still only plays certain sounds, some incorrectly/inaccurately.
Example:
In MAME you will hear "your cannot escape the gorphian robot emperor"
while the real machine plays it as "you cannot escape the gorphian robots".
And in MAME you hear, "My gorphian robot emperor are unbeatable"
while the real machine plays it as "My gorphian robots are unbeatable".
Hopefully the driver will be redone someday to correct and allow the other samples to be played like
"I have a gorphian empire". :)

mediamogul

@maxbeanz

Very interesting.

Riverstorm

@mediamogul said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

When they're done, they've rolled the yard clean and the body is still mostly mud and gravel.

That made my day. I remember doing that very thing some years. The closet recognizable city would be Minneapolis/St. Paul where they had the super bowl this year whatever we get Northern Minnesota is even worse. More cold, snow & wind.

Our average highest snowfall month is actually March but everyone is done with winter. We have another storm coming the first part of next week. There's some front that usually recedes back north but this year it's lingering further south. The issue with it is this very same "lingering front" happened 5 years ago in 2013 and we got freezing rain which was a tree killing, power downing, skating rink party.

When it's so late in the season it creates freezing rain sometimes and that drops power lines and trees like nothing. We currently have flood warnings more for safety around flowing water then worry of flooding cities or townships.

I have some great pics. It's incredible to see ice so thick on the traffic signs, trees, poles, wire fences, bike tire spokes, everything you can imagine looks neat in crystal clear ice about 1/2 inch thick. You just here the trees cracking as they sway in the wind. It looks incredible but so terribly destructive.

I tried talking the wife into a house generator. I was all about poring a concrete pad along side the house (my brother does flat work_ and get it wired but she shot that down. I told her you'll say that until the next ice storm comes along! :)

For good measure add the corrected emperor.wav to the sample zip?

Nowun

As a new user who is still absolutely drooling over retropie I want to thank you for all of this hard work!

Riverstorm

@nowun said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

As a new user who is still absolutely drooling over retropie I want to thank you for all of this hard work!

If you're using mame2003-plus you need to direct that praise @markwkidd, @grant2258 & @arcadez who are doing 99% of the work. We are just testing and giving feedback! :)

Riverstorm

@maxbeanz - Here's a new DAT. I added the pre 0.125u2 Gorf set & corrected emperor.wav. I also verified the sets are current where applicable as some are from the older section on Twisty's. Lastly I updated the set to use the unofficial enhanced versions of the samples described below with a brief description. If you prefer the current set or older just let me know.

Arcade Accurate Unofficial Samples

Berzerk - enhanced version by Gyrovision, who states that it sounds more accurate in comparison to a real machine. Try it out!

Carnival - enhanced version by Gyrovision, who states, "Just a couple tweaks, upped the quality a little and gave the bear a new attitude. Grrr! :)"

Donkey Kong - lower pitch adjustment by Gyrovision.

Space Invaders - Gyrovision assembled this set by merging some edited Retrocade samples with the Mame ones, and the result is magnificant 8D. There is a significant quality increase that is very noticeable. I now use these instead.

Qbert - enhanced by Gyrovision.

Rallyx - enhanced by Gyrovision.

Star Castle - this was submitted by Gyrovision - he modified the pitch on the 'drone' sample and increased by 50% the volume on the 'star' sample within the set to make it sound much more accurate in relation to the real arcade machine - recommended.

Vanguard - enhanced by Gyrovision.

maxbeanz

@riverstorm I think this is a good set of samples and should be the default DAT for mame2003plus samples. One minor point, as stated in the readme, the 'emperor' sample in Gorf isn't even needed and people may struggle to find it anyway at a later date. Maybe just leave it as it is in the Twisty's archive ?

Riverstorm

@maxbeanz said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

One minor point, as stated in the readme, the 'emperor' sample in Gorf isn't even needed and people may struggle to find it anyway at a later date. Maybe just leave it as it is in the Twisty's archive ?

Yeah that makes sense then all the samples may be obtained from one location at Twisty's. Even the 188 byte samples has no audible audio when played back. I put corrected emperor.wav in a separate zip with a note so when I go back to it a few years later or whenever I'll have an idea what it is.

markwkidd

If there is going to be a 'null sample' in the DAT, I suggest it should be the 188 byte CRC. I'm making an educated guess that the 188 byte file is a valid WAV file (meaning it has a header) with no audio.

On the other hand a 0-byte file can't be a valid WAV file. Based on my reading while looking for emperor.wav, older versions of MAME might crash when trying to load a 0-byte WAV. In other words, if there is going to be a 'fake' WAV it seems best to make it a valid fake WAV. :)

Riverstorm

@markwkidd said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

In other words, if there is going to be a 'fake' WAV it seems best to make it a valid fake WAV. :)

Thanks Mark, that makes sense why I didn't hear anything with the 188 byte sample. That's the one we were going to use (the older 188 byte) samples from the 0.125u1 and older set. Current samples (0.125u2 and newer) are the ones using the zero-byte files.

maxbeanz

I read in the 'whatsnew.txt' on Github (2003plus) that 'Explosive Breaker' was added but I don't see it in the datfile. Are there more missing ? (I used the DAT posted on Github, does anyone detect this game with the manually generated DAT ?)

EDIT: Also, I just noticed this post . Apparently there are no unofficial roms used.

markwkidd

@maxbeanz said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

I read in the 'whatsnew.txt' on Github (2003plus) that 'Explosive Breaker' was added but I don't see it in the datfile. Are there more missing ? (I used the DAT posted on Github, does anyone detect this game with the manually generated DAT ?)

EDIT: Also, I just noticed this post . Apparently there are no unofficial roms used.

From arcadez: "Explosive Breaker didn't make the cut so i've removed it from the newly supported games list, however the japan version of this game Bakuretsu Breaker is now playable in this core via my Kaneko16 updated from a while back."

Riverstorm

@maxbeanz said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

I used the DAT posted on Github, does anyone detect this game with the manually generated DAT ?)

I just generated one this morning after updating from source and the samples are not in the DAT under Bakuretsu Breaker yet.

Another quick question Shark Attack has 2 sample sets. One is 'full size' and the other is 'reduced size'. I added the full size is that the one you would prefer. I don't think I've played Shark Attack so not quite sure the difference. It's 35MB vs. about 1.5MB.

maxbeanz

@riverstorm I was talking about the actual game (Explosive Breaker), not samples :)

Regarding Shark Attack, I think the larger version has the same sample played over and over for 3 and a half minutes ! whereas the reduced one only plays the sample once and lets MAME repeat it as needed (i think). Maybe use the reduced one as there's quite a size difference.

Riverstorm

@maxbeanz said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

@riverstorm I was talking about the actual game (Explosive Breaker), not samples :)

Regarding Shark Attack, I think the larger version has the same sample played over and over for 3 and a half minutes ! whereas the reduced one only plays the sample once and lets MAME repeat it as needed (i think). Maybe use the reduced one as there's quite a size difference.

Ah, that's interesting. I'll change it to reduced.

Yes the newest generated DAT does have Bakuretsu Breaker. I was looking for samples with it as they are on the mind lately. ;)

maxbeanz

Built from source (2003plus) using the latest manually generated DAT (from the MAME menu) new 'svc.zip' has corrupted graphics, 'svcboot.zip' works fine.

Samples don't work on any game ? (BIOS/mame2003-plus/samples)

Riverstorm

@maxbeanz - Here's the new DAT. All sets are pulled from the 'Current Section' on Twisty's site. If a sample didn't exist that's current then I pulled it from the 'Older Section'. Things to note on the sets used.

Alternate sets from the 'Current Section'

Gorf set Pre-0.125u1
Shark Attack reduced version

Enhanced versions for the 'Unofficial Section' enhanced by Gyrovision

Berzerk
Carnival
Donkey Kong
Space Invaders
Qbert
Rallyx
Star Castle
Vanguard

Riverstorm

@markwkidd - I spent some time last night taking a look at the missing ROMs. I am using MAME 0.196 and Rollback 0.196 that came out a few days ago. I verified my sets are accurate.

With the newest DAT (from yesterday). It looks like King of Fighters was removed which corrected the hacked ROMs, SVC was overhauled and now uses official ROMs but Hyper Street Fighter still looks like it's using hacked ROMs. I Rebuilt with all sets, even the BIOS device sets just to be sure and they don't seems to exist in the official set.

I don't mind if they are hacked ROMs but any chance you could use your kung-fu research skills to verify one way or the other? I think Arcadez said they are official so I am not 100% sure. I do have them from the old reference set we made before the fork but it's a bit tough to search every zip in every ROM from the official set which is like 80,000 ROMs to match them but ClrMamePro is not picking these ones up.

It helps so I can make a subfolder and use and Adds-Path in ClrMamePro for one-off and miscellaneous ROMs that aren't official.

Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition (Asia 040202) [folder: hsf2a - size: 45mb]
missing rom: hs2ax.03 [size: 524288] [CRC32: 5f3d7397] [SHA1: 96f327dd998105ad5dc46bc9d3b741805a840d68]
missing rom: hs2ax.04 [size: 524288] [CRC32: 59acf108] [SHA1: e68fe233681175b29a35badab249c2b892b23af3]

maxbeanz

@riverstorm Do any samples work on yours ? They don't seem to play on mine. I have them in 'BIOS/mame2003-plus/samples' which is the folder that's automatically created.

As I posted above, the new 'svc.zip' seems to have corrupted graphics, 'svcboot.zip' works fine though. Arcadez posted the 2 missing roms for hsf2a on Github (not sure if they are official).