Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

barbudreadmon

@dankcushions Yeah, i came up with that nice speedhack the other day, it's removing some redundant calls to one of the drawing functions, it should be 100% safe and the speedup seemed quite noticeable.

G30FF

Apologies if this is a dumb question, but I was trying to switch some of my roms over from MAME 2003 Plus to FBNeo, and I noticed some of the games don't use the .nv save files, while others do. I normally wouldn't care about this, but I have the hidden characters unlocked in MK2 Plus (using a hex editor because the game is really unfair), and the nvmem file from MAME doesn't work in FBNeo, so I thought I'd at least ask. Can FBNeo use MAME nvmem files?

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Can FBNeo use MAME nvmem files?

There are 2 categories of nvram files in FBNeo :

Those which are actually emulated by an eeprom device (they got a .nv extension), they are compatible with MAME's
Those which are directly saved from memory to file (they got a .fs extension), they aren't compatible with MAME's

mk2 is in that second category

Edit: out of curiosity, could you post your MAME nvram so that i take a look ?

G30FF

@barbudreadmon That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation!

Here's my mk2p.nv file from lr-mame2003-plus for Mortal Kombat 2 Plus. It has three of the five hidden characters unlocked thanks to hex editing (Jade, Smoke, and Noob Saibot are unlocked, Kintaro and Shao Kahn are locked).

barbudreadmon

@g30ff is there something i should know about selecting those secret characters, or are they supposed to be viewable in select screen ?

G30FF

@barbudreadmon Whoops, sorry, I forgot to mention. If you go into the operator menu and select MK2+ Settings you can find an option in Visuals to change the character select to an alternate one that will show the hidden characters. Otherwise:

Smoke - Highlight Reptile and hold Start while selecting
Jade - Highlight Kitana and hold Start while selecting
Noob - Highlight Sub Zero and hold Start while selecting

For those curious, you can unlock the characters by editing your mk2p.nv file from MAME in a hex editor, jumping to decimal offset 774, and changing the value to 2D.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff Ok, then i managed to load it and convert it to our format.

For now you can download the converted nvram from here, later i'll try to come up with a good solution for MAME/FBNeo nvram cross-compatibility.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon It works for me! Thank you for doing this! And good luck with future updates!

barbudreadmon

"F-1 Dream" was promoted to working.

G30FF

I have a question regarding some Midway games, namely Revolution X and Terminator 2. To navigate the operator menu seems to require a keyboard (it says to use + / - to scroll), but those are not mapped to any game pad buttons, and a plugged in keyboard cannot be used. The operator menu can be used to set difficulty, enable free play, and increase the default volume, and as it is, the menu does not work. Am I doing something wrong?

barbudreadmon

@g30ff as far as i can tell, there is no missing keys to use Terminator 2's service menu.

Revolution X seems to require volume +/- indeed, tbh i stopped mapping volume +/- years ago since people used to complain because of them (press by mistake), but i guess i'll have to make an exception for this one. I'll come up with a fix later today or maybe tomorrow, probably gonna assign them to R3/L3.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon That makes sense. It's a very odd edge case to be sure.

After checking again I found a workaround. If you set the dipswitch for cabinet type from Rev X to Terminator 2, the service menu can be controlled using the P1/P2 start buttons, just like T2. So maybe the simplest fix is to have that dip switch enabled by default.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

So maybe the simplest fix is to have that dip switch enabled by default.

Even if the tooltip only mentions the +/- buttons, it seems "p1 start" and "p2 start" are always valid buttons to navigate service menu in revx, so i guess i'll just leave things as-is for now. In the future, when an unmapped button bank will be implemented in libretro (it's supposed to be on the roadmap), i'll re-think how i handle all those "optional" buttons.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon Good to know. Thank you for looking into this!

Loggahead

So it's been awhile since I've been on here and can see that quite a bit of improvements have been made in regards to arcade emulation using fbneo. Thanks so much @barbudreadmon and everyone else involved! You all are awesome and your volunteer work here is MUCH APPRECIATED!

I'm currently on a Pi3 and am interested in updating my rom sets and moving over to fbneo. Looking at the .dat files for fbneo, I see that Golden Axe (2): Death Adder's Revenge and Ninja Baseball Batman are now supported. I currently use mame2003 for those two games and the emulation is not great at all for them. Golden Axe 2 has bad artifacting / bad sprites for shadows and NBB has significant slowdown and choppy audio. How do those two games run under fbneo?

Also, what about the Midway games like Tapper, Timber, etc? Do they run well and keep highscores in fbneo?

Thanks in advance for the help!

-logga

G30FF

@loggahead Golden Axe 2, Ninja Baseball Batman, Timber, and Tapper all work well in FBNeo. I don't see any problems with them.

Darksavior

@loggahead Last time I checked, system32 games ran slow on my overclocked pi4. You have a pi3 so ninja baseball batman will also run slow for you on fbneo.

barbudreadmon

@loggahead said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

How do those two games run under fbneo?

You'll need a better device to play them on FBNeo, yours is already not good enough to play NBB on mame2003, and FBNeo is much more accurate for those games. Or maybe if you enable some frameskip in core options, i don't know.

@loggahead said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Also, what about the Midway games like Tapper, Timber, etc? Do they run well and keep highscores in fbneo?

They run perfectly, i don't know about hiscores though, the games don't appear in hiscore.dat so i can only guess the hiscores are saved in nvram.

@darksavior said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Last time I checked, system32 games ran slow on my overclocked pi4.

Yes, with latest segas32 video emulation, those games seem to be a bit too much for a pi4, enabling frameskip is recommended.

sirhenrythe5th

@barbudreadmon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

They run perfectly, i don't know about hiscores though, the games don't appear in hiscore.dat so i can only guess the hiscores are saved in nvram.

Confirmed! ;D

Loggahead

Thanks for the input everyone. I think I'll hold off making any changes for now. Was thinking maybe the pi4 would make them a little more playable.

Glad to see you guys are still actively developing and making improvements. Fbneo looks awesome.