Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

barbudreadmon

@Ashpool said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Does it mean that previous 800x600/600x800 / 640x480/480x640 information should be treated as 1440x1080 for 4:3(H) and 810x1080 for 3:4(V) in Applications which are utilizing/queriieng that info (usable then with an option of true/false dipswitch set: aka -> use dat size, or 1080p one)?

Indeed, but i wouldn't recommend using the hires dips on pi4 with FBNeo, you'll likely run into performance issues.

Advmame is the recommended emulator for vector games on retropie, it does a far better job at performance and has features we don't for customizing visuals.

Machtroid

@Folly @barbudreadmon @Riverstorm Awesome this is great information to have, much appreciated! I'm definitely going to update fbneo and my romset, but it's great to know which new game additions to look for and play around with. I have never played some of these CAVE shooters and look forward to trying them out. Thanks for helping out with this!

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon Don't know if this should go here or in its own thread/report, but I discovered something weird: in snowbro2, when I change the dipswitches for the coinage settings (through RGUI), then save, exit and relaunch the game, the left direction on my joystick stops working. Changing the dips back and relaunching solves the issue. Is it a bug?

barbudreadmon

@WeirdH Thanks for the report, i have one good news and one bad news. The good news is that the issue should be fixed. The bad news is that this game is one of the few using conditional dipswitches (in this case, "Territory" is supposed to control which pair of "Coin A" / "Coin B" is available), and i never found a way to make those work properly due to how the libretro api works.

WeirdH

@barbudreadmon Well, as long as things still work without having to endure the god awful US/EU character selection screen, you won't hear me complaining.

Coinage options also aren't really that important to me, but I just stumbled upon this little quirk while fiddling around, so I thought I'd mention it.

EDIT: Confirmed fixed and working for me. Region was set to SE-Asia (gives English text and original character select), changed player 1 coinage setting, smooth sailing.

barbudreadmon

@WeirdH I was thinking about those conditional dips for the past few days and finally managed to get them working. It's still kinda awkward though with that libretro core option list working somehow asynchronously, and the conditional dips sometimes requiring a restart to work properly. But that's the best i can achieve with the tools i have at my disposal.

dodonpachi

So I updated to the latest binary for the libretro version, and I notice none of my CV1K games save their diagnostic settings. IE, lowered difficulty, 9 credits instead of 1, etc.

I know that a month or so back, the driver was updated to add speed hacks. Did something break in the meantime, or do I need to delete save files somewhere?

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi due to multiple requests about this, i recently migrated FBNeo nvrams from the older headered/compressed format to a raw format closer to MAME's, it turns out my migration process didn't handle several cv1k games properly due to some unusual nvram behavior.
The fix is on git, thanks for the report.

dodonpachi

@barbudreadmon just downloaded the latest binary from retropie setup, and can confirm the in-game options are saving again! Thank you for the swift fix!

janderclander14

Regarding CV1000 games, I'm experiencing a strange behavior.

The first time I run a CV1000 game, it works as expected: near full speed with default 100% cpu in the core options, and almost perfect full speed if I change the core cpu % by the suggested value.

However, the second time I run the same game, fps are halved (around 33 fps) and audio drops are extreme. Also, core cpu settings do not seem to have any visible effect. I have tried saving per game core settings or not, but the problem remains. The only thing that remedies the problem is removing the .fs file for that game in the fbneo directory. Then, the game runs well again, until I run it a second time (after fbneo creates again the .fs file).

I'm using the latest fbneo binary, but I have experienced this problem in previous versions too, since when CV1000 support was added. I'm also running the latest Retropie version on a Pi 4, 4Gb.

Does anyone encountered a similar problem?

barbudreadmon

@janderclander14 said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Does anyone encountered a similar problem?

I never heard of it. Does it maybe happen on specific games ?

@janderclander14 said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I'm using the latest fbneo binary,

You mean latest from sources, right ? I've no idea how old is the version if you are installing from binary

janderclander14

@barbudreadmon Yes, it happens on all CV1000 games and the behavior is deterministic for all of them. And yes, the binary was compiled on Jul 23, 2022 sources.

barbudreadmon

@janderclander14 sorry, i have no idea what's going on with your setup

dodonpachi

@janderclander14 it seems like there was a similar problem talked about here. Try out the steps el rika did, maybe there's a glitch in the way the .fs file is saving threaded blitter options.

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi this issue wasn't about performance and was fixed back in may

sleve_mcdichael

@janderclander14 I don't have any answers, just chiming in to say I can't replicate this either.

d712362159f1c7410fc862638e3cc3b2  ddpdoj.zip
fdb4f4321a418b167a440abbb36c8ffb  deathsml.zip

Both of these are running 59-60 fps on RPi4 (2 gb) in lr-fbneo latest binary (843db9f, compiled 2022-07-25), both on initial and subsequent launches.

I don't have my sound up so I can't comment on the audio.

I haven't touched the core options.

Maybe comparing verbose logs of before and after might give some insight. Are your global and system retroarch.cfg files default?

janderclander14

Thank you all for your answers.

Verbose logging for the first and second runs are identical and do not show anything strange. My only settings different from default are threated video = off and one lightweight crt shader. I tried enabling the former and disabling the later but the result is the same: only deleting the .fs file corrects the issue.

This is certainly a strange problem that I haven't encountered with neither other cores nor other games with fbneo.

barbudreadmon

@janderclander14 we did a bit of profiling, emulation is not supposed to be more demanding on subsequent launches

Do you still observe the same behavior (subsequient launch being slower) if you disable the dips "thread blitter" in core options ?
note: i don't expect the games to run at full speed even on 1st launch with this dips disabled, but what i want to know is if it could be some kind of threading issue.

janderclander14

@barbudreadmon Thanks for looking at it.

I did some tests with the dip options. These are the results with Deathsmiles BL:

1st run (no .fs file) default core and dip settings: 57-59 fps
1st run disabling thread blitter: 51-54 fps
2nd run (with .fs file) with thread blitter disabled (saved from the first run): 27-29 fps
2nd run enabling again thread blitter: 30-33 fps

Enabling/disabling the speed hacks option has a similar influence in both runs (3-4 more/less fps respectively).

By the way, is there any option to prevent FBNeo from creating the .fs file?

barbudreadmon

@janderclander14 said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

57-59 fps

57 seems low though ? It seemed pi4 users were reporting full speed using the right settings. Are you properly overclocking your pi4 and downclocking the emulated cpu ? Are you using some kind of ressource-intensive feature ?

If disabling threading didsn't change that behavior either, then it's clearly something wrong with your hardware/setup and not a core issue. Threading was the only possible cause of randomness on core's side.