Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

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.

Darksavior

@loggahead With a pi4, system32 games are full speed in mame2016 and they don't have the visual bugs 2003 has. I'm not one to really notice the Inaccurate emulation (which is why it's faster), but it'll do for me since I refuse to use frameskip with fbneo. Nbb is full speed on fbneo, though.

G30FF

@darksavior Several System 32 games work just fine in FBNeo on a Pi 4. Segasonic the Arcade, Spider-Man, Alien 3: the Gun, and Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder all seem to work fine from the testing I've done. Dragon Ball Z: VRVS runs a little slow but is playable, and Jurassic Park and Arabian Fight are incredibly slow even with frameskip.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Jurassic Park and Arabian Fight are incredibly slow even with frameskip.

Hmmm maybe you didn't set frameskip settings properly or something ? I know they are bit confusing with all the different settings. I'm not too sure how reliable are the new frameskip modes where the retroarch frontend tells the core if it should frameskip or not (Frameskip set to Auto or Manual), but the simpler mode where the core makes the decision by itself (Frameskip set to Fixed and Fixed Frameskip set to the value you want) should most likely do the job for those games on a pi4.

barbudreadmon

@darksavior said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I'm not one to really notice the Inaccurate emulation

I'm not too sure how "accurate" current emulation of segas32 is (there are still known issues on a few games), but if you look into MAME's git commit history there are visual issues that have been discovered & fixed in segas32 between 2016 and now : color, layer priority, zoom, ... and also some sound fixes. All those fixes are part of FBNeo's current driver.

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I'll mess around with them a bit more. What I noticed is that mame2016 plays both of them pretty much flawlessly without frameskip required, so I may just stick with them for those two games in particular.

I don't know if it's just me, but Kingdom Grand Prix won't boot up past the start screen. I don't have that problem in any of the MAME cores.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I don't know if it's just me, but Kingdom Grand Prix won't boot up past the start screen. I don't have that problem in any of the MAME cores.

It's running fine on my side, maybe your core needs some update ? It could be related to what was fixed in https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/commit/edc472eb6952d9f71b4cd82f98653230d3b0504a

G30FF

@barbudreadmon That could be. I'm using the libretro core from RetroPie, the latest stable build which was last updated August 4. I'll try to build from source and see if that fixes the issue.

EDIT: Yep, that fixed it!

I'm also going to amend my earlier comments about some System 32 games, as going back, Segasonic lags as soon as more than one character is on screen, and Spider-Man is fairly slow. However, for all of the games I've tested, including Jurassic Park and Arabian Fight, setting frameskip to Fixed and the value to 1 frame, all of them play at full speed on my Pi 4.

barbudreadmon

@g30ff said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

However, for all of the games I've tested, including Jurassic Park and Arabian Fight, setting frameskip to Fixed and the value to 1 frame, all of them play at full speed on my Pi 4.

How about the other modes ? Are they reliable too ?

G30FF

@barbudreadmon I tried using Auto in Segasonic, and it didn't really do anything. I wasn't sure what combination of settings would get the auto frameskip to trigger, so once I found the fixed frameskip of 1 did the job I stopped mucking with the settings. I can try running a few more experiments tonight.

I should also mention I don't have any overclock settings on my Pi 4.

EDIT: As an aside:

"F-1 Dream" was promoted to working.

I tried out F-1 Dream and once a race begins the game breaks. The cars are not visible, and the camera seems to start off of the track.

Another EDIT:
Tests completed. I tried out Spider-Man and Segasonic with different frameskip values.

Auto had no effect on any of the games.
Manual with a threshold of 42 was able to make both games play well, but the framerate felt inconsistent as the frameskip was based on the sound buffer, and as such slowed down slightly when a lot of action was happening.
Fixed with a skip of 1 frames out of every 2 frames felt the best to me personally, with a consistent framerate, and no slowdowns I could detect.