FBA, how do I do these things?

Amishgamer

Alright, this isn't for me to say out loud because I've been living in denial for many years and have just been refusing to accept this fact. But, I'm finally starting to wrap my head around the fact that, for Retropie anyway, pound-for-pound FBA is indeed a far better Arcade emulator than any of the MAME versions. MAME2003-plus has great potential, but they still have some work to do.

Anyway, now that I'm finally starting to accept all of this, I'm making the transition to having FBA as my primary Arcade emulator. But, there's still a couple of things I can't figure out and my googling hasn't gotten me anywhere.

First, can we add a history.dat file to FBA like we can in MAME? If so, how do we do that? Having this isn't a huge deal, but if it's available I'd like to have that function.

Second, how do we cheat? I don't cheat often, but sometimes it's fun. The FBA wiki seems to make no mention of a cheat.dat file.

Thanks in advance for the help.

mediamogul

@amishgamer said in FBA, how do I do these things?:

pound-for-pound FBA is indeed a far better Arcade emulator than any of the MAME versions.

That's pretty debatable. You have to consider that MAME has had years of lead time over FBA. Almost any version of MAME is going to run many more games than FBA and the titles they share are generally emulated more accurately due to MAME's development philosophy of accuracy over speed hacks. In fact, speed is usually the area where FBA is most valued on low-end systems like the Raspberry Pi.

During the days of the RPi 1 and even currently with the RPi Zero, FBA's really the only way to run certain arcade systems well, such as CPS and Neo Geo. However, with the release the RPi 2 and 3, these systems can now be emulated at full speed with the likes of lr-mame2003 and AdvanceMAME, not only giving the user a more accurate experience, but also a much larger library. All that said however, the ability to run all these options together on RetroPie is part of what makes the project so great. Myself, I run a full 0.106 ROM set for AdvanceMAME 3.x, but I also run about half a dozen more titles between lr-fbalpha, lr-mame2003 and even lr-mame2010.

MajorDangerNine

@amishgamer First of all, hello again.

And just to get this out of the way first, I don't know about either of those things you are asking about. Sorry.

Now then, the main reason I'm currently using lr-fbalpha comes down to it being both newly written emulation and, most of the time, fast emulation. Choosing it as my main arcade emulator is mostly a time saver, though I do plan to test it more thoroughly as there were a few times I came across games obviously running too fast and switched them out to another emulator.

lr-mame2003-plus is also partly a time saver because it is fast, has bugfixes (that you can generally get eventually in a source update of lr-mame2003 as well), and new features (like the high-quality yet inaccurate Mortal Kombat samples).

lr-mame2010 is currently just a fallback emulator for me. I plan to use it more for some games I forgot to switch out from lr-mame2003-plus that weren't 100% perfect on the video or sound. As a side note, I have noticed a few instances of faster emulation in lr-mame2010 compared to the other two I'm using (Ninja Baseball Bat Man being one), though it is certainly a rare occasion.

If you want to text chat about arcade emulation in real-time sometime, then check out the Discord server in my signature. My username is the same there as it is here.

Darksavior

@amishgamer They are about even. I use Fba and mame2003plus for different reasons. Mostly due to the limitations of the pi. If I had no limitations, I'd use latest mame and call it a day.

On the pi, Fba can have more accurate emulation. It can also be slower because of it. Mame2003 supports games that Fba doesn't have. If you look into the games they both support, and NOT neogeo/cps1/2/3, sometimes a game will run considerably slower in Fba. Fba is also slower than Fba2012, depending on the system driver, like the konami 4player games. On my oc'd pi2, I have to use Fba2012. A pi3 and on can handle it.

At the moment I'm not sure how to run the system16/18 games. Fba has slowdowns, even on my pi3b+ at 1.5Ghz. Or I can settle for inaccurate audio in mame2003/plus. Advmame is not a choice since I like to use the crt-pi shader.

dankcushions

@Amishgamer

for Retropie anyway, pound-for-pound FBA is indeed a far better Arcade emulator than any of the MAME versions.

-_____-

no history.dat, and no cheats in fba.

grant2258

they both have there places and uses use what ever one you prefer it always good to have choice. Mame2003 hasnt been updated in a while apart from today and a bugfix i done before for the samples but the good news is the ssv game sound is fixed it was a bug introduce in 2013 and only found now it effected mame and mame2003+ so i just fixed mame2003 while i was at it since no one else seems to be looking after the ole port

grant2258

@Eckaji the soundtarcks for mortal kombat, outrun, final fight, moonwalker, nbajam and double dragon optional if the user wants them the option can be turned on add off in the option menu so no need to delete the samples if you want the original arcade sounds. Its just an added feature to make the games come to life a little more. Flac support has been added recenty as well to save on space