Taito games not working anymore after update

rbaker

@robertvb83 said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

but i speak of lets say average users that just mainly want to play games. No way they look into that documentation before updating

I disagree. This is not a plug and play solution that is meant to hold your hand every step of the way. It's a learning tool and the docs are essential. If people don't want to study them and I do mean study them not read them, they have chosen the wrong hardware and software combination.

robertvb83

@barbudreadmon said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

@robertvb83 said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

"What the f*** i have to resource my roms that took me years to find a working set"

Or 2 minutes if you know how to use google search engine.

About the warning, as a developper, i'm confident about the fact people won't read it anyway, except perhaps if it's in a sign held by a cat or something.

you are probably right, i'm just saying, not everyone is a geek and learns all this stuff easily. some people just want to play.

so can anyone please input a big warning screen with a cat holding a warning sign before updating things that will make your setup unplayable for sure

KN4THX

You know, this is an unbelievably awesome project that people have donated their free time to build and have asked nothing in return. Retropie is just as much a work in progress as it is a success. It is ready to go out of the box in general, but there's tons of extras that are always being worked on, or that you need to tinker with yourself to get them working. That's the fun of it for a lot of us, you get what you put in.

More on topic, you should never update anything on any system unless you are explicitly familiar with what changes are being made to your system. I don't disagree that it would be nice to see more info about what updates are available, but keep in mind again that this is a free project and the community support is there if you do upgrade and have an issue. I treat my system as if it's always in beta...backup backup backup. Not just because of what may come down from the devs, but because I've made enough stupid mistakes that backed me into a dark, dark, corner.

rsn8887

Yes, it is a great project and a lot of work. But I support the OP's statement. Updates should always be transparent. Currently, the updates in RetroPie are completely opaque.

What I mean is that there should be a changelog and users should be able to read this log to get an idea what an update will do BEFORE performing the update. This non-existing changelog should have mentioned that updating fba will require an update of all the roms.

In my opinion, this is a basic usability feature that is currently missing, among many other basic ease-of-use features, from the RetroPie project.

There's nothing wrong with recognizing and mentioning shortcomings and possible improvements.

But yes, it is a great project. Now that I am using my RPi 3 again, I am really appreciating RetroPie and how far it has come.

However, there are many problems with RetroPie, mostly in terms of usability, and I think most of them are simply due to the underlying OS being a masterpiece of user-unfriendliness (as Linux has always been in my opinion).

mitu

@rsn8887 said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

However, there are many problems with RetroPie [..]

Just because your expectations are not met by the software does not make it a 'problem' for RetroPie.

Since the project itself mainly re-packages software from different sources, it's almost impossible to provide a complete changelog for what changes when new packages are updated - especially if you update from source. That doesn't mean updates are not documented

RetroPie specific changes are always available in the project's repository (github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup)
Point releases are detailed in the news page when they're released.

EDIT: I do agree that some updates might seem 'opaque', how do you think this should be handled ?

rbaker

@rsn8887 said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

What I mean is that there should be a changelog and users should be able to read this log to get an idea what an update will do

You mean this: https://retropie.org.uk/2018/04/retropie-4-4-is-released/ or am I missing something?

KN4THX

@rbaker It sounds like he is asking for a detailed list of updates, probably something similar that pops up when you do Windows updates stating specifically fixed issues and versions.

mitu

@thedatacereal Well, I wouldn't take Windows updates as an example for how to do updates or document them ...
I always liked the Debian's way of having a changelog.Debian.gz in the package's doc folder, or the way dpkg-listchanges shows major updates while doing a bulk update with apt-get.

cyperghost

For backup: Just upload the emulator core to your github account and write some notes to every release. Then it's documented.... who is first?

I understand the OP ... @xgauccix did you try to install lr-fbalpha2012 this might help to get older ROMSets to run again.

KN4THX

@mitu SO I got water on my screen of my phone it it went wonkey on my post and now I can't restore it.

I agree on your statement about Windows updates, I also think the expectations are too high when it comes to Retropie's responsibilities. As you stated, the emulators are pre-packaged mostly and they upgraded from 4.0 to 4.4 in which the changelog states fbalpha was updated between 4.0 and now.

I understand people like to jump to the newest versions and don't like to read the fine print. This being said, I feel like the changelog is as simple as it gets and far from fine print. I like watch to watch a lot of my updates when I do them and I don't always walk away, though I'm guilty of being lazy from time to time. I also tend to watch the forums and update later rather than sooner.

On a side note, do emulator version changes wait for a Retropie version update or do they get worked in at random?

BuZz

@thedatacereal I restored your post.

KN4THX

@buzz Thank you.

rsn8887

@thedatacereal said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

On a side note, do emulator version changes wait for a Retropie version update or do they get worked in at random?

From what I read so far it seems to me that binaries are updated at random, while updating from source always downloads a certain commit, a certain branch, or sometimes, depending on the emulator, the latest master branch of the emulator’s github repo. Depending on the emulator, the source code might be patched by he RetroPie install script, which could or could not break depending on whether the emulator source code has gone through many changes or not recently.

mitu

@thedatacereal said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

I like watch to watch a lot of my updates when I do them and I don't always walk away, though I'm guilty of being lazy from time to time. I also tend to watch the forums and update later rather than sooner.

You realise you're not a typical user, right :) ?

On a side note, do emulator version changes wait for a Retropie version update or do they get worked in at random?

No, some of them could get updated in between releases to get new features or for bug fixing. There's no general rule here, it varies from package to another. For instance:

mame2003 (not the new plus core), pifba or other old emulators don't need to get any updates, since there's no new version available.
retroarch could get updated to get new features - like the new Run ahead features introduces in 1.7.3
there's a possibility the upstream totally borks the package - like the ppsspp package, so it was completely unavailable to be installed from source.

xgauccix

thanks @cyperghost lr-fbalpha2012 made those games run again.
I just wasn't aware that new emu versions could need other ROMs to get games working....

mitu

@xgauccix said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

I just wasn't aware that new emu versions could need other ROMs to get games working....

That happens only for Arcade games, since the emulators can update the ROMset used for the games.

barbudreadmon

@rsn8887 said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

This non-existing changelog should have mentioned that updating fba will require an update of all the roms.

Considering there are tens, perhaps hundreds topics mentioning it already (the fact that romsets change with every new release), and you guys manage to not see them, i don't see how a changelog would help people who are obviously blind.

DougA

@barbudreadmon it’s not quite as obvious as you suggest. I think it is obvious / well known that if you go from MAME 2003 or MAME2010, that there is a new romset needed, but when the name doesn’t change you aren’t being informed that the version of the rom set needs updating. Yes, if you come here and read everything regularly, you would see it, but if you only come to look at the forum when you have an issue yourself, it’s easier to miss it.

robertvb83

@barbudreadmon
users are updating an Emulator and in the end fix this by using a much inferior outdated Emulator. so this is worse than prior updating. this is ... sad.

i dont think that this is your fault! please dont get me wrong. perhaps you are more right than i thought. i have to say i am kind of rethinking this here. of course it would be nice to have everything for everyone but with such a project fully non-commercial you guys just dont have any motivation to make everything idiot proof. and i would not do it either.

if you can raise a topic like this you could have googled and find a solution also. and even after pointing him in the right direction he goes the lazymans way of downgrading... just to get this work somehow. retropie is not a SNES Mini plug and play system.

retropie with all its possibilities is just not for free, why would it, may be it is much more expensive than all commercially available solutions all together because you have to spend TIME. but i think this is more than reasonable considering the value.

mitu

@douga said in Taito games not working anymore after update:

I think it is obvious / well known that if you go from MAME 2003 or MAME2010, that there is a new romset needed,

The same situation applies to FBAlpha - it was upgraded from whatever version was 2 years ago to the current version. If you have properly set-up your arcade games, then you'd know that you need a new ROMset due to the version change.