Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?

spud11

@SpudsMcToole Ha! Yes, the messages are not the most helpful. I'll see whether I can get the Christmas remix to work when I'm at home later. I haven't tried that one as yet.

barbudreadmon

@SpudsMcToole Replacing a romset by another won't work, it was still tolerated a few months ago because i was lax on crc matching as long as i could find a file by the right name, but people kept reporting glitches while using wrong romsets and after years it finally broke my patience about this : now you have to use the right romset, otherwise the core won't even try to run it, period.

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

TELL ME WHICH BLOODY ONES, THEN, YOU GIT

It's explicit, the one with crc 0x12c8c95d, name doesn't matter, only crc, FWIW you could rename all files the way you want in any romset, it would still load. There is a dat file provided with the core sources, use it, and don't replace valid romsets with other romsets.

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

I noticed HBMAME calls it dkchrmx

I can also add support for this one. Btw there is a basic tutorial about this on github if you want to add FBNeo support for your favorite hbmame hacks in the future : https://github.com/libretro/FBNeo/issues/7 , for dkspkyrmx it was the most basic case : https://github.com/libretro/FBNeo/commit/ba85ed939fa12a4269ac140a8f1f8ad5ad9e1ef4 :

dupe declaration of dkongx11 romset (because this hack is based on it)
replace name, crc and size by the ones from hbmame in the dupe

SpudsMcToole

@barbudreadmon All of the above might as well just say "xnus(yfejjx ymixi&6unet fye!@qq?kimyf" to me 🙁

Some of us are just guys who like to play Donkey Kong, y'know? With luck and application and trial-and-error we can maybe make sense of a Retropie config file, but ANYTHING on GitHub might as well be in Martian.

From that "basic" tutorial, at random:

Let's explain a few things:
0: Neo68KROMActive is a byte-array, but can be word(UINT16)-accessed using a simple cast.
1: notice the first 2 ROM_FILL's are contiguous? 0x701af4, 0x701af5, that's why we are able to write both bytes at once using a UINT16 cast for ROM[]. 0x4e71 is commonly known as NOP

Me, a normal human: "WHAT is a WHAT but can be WHAT(WHAT)ted using a WHAT? The first two WHATs are WHAT? Argle bargle flargle wargle is why we are able to WHAT using a WHAT for WHAT? Gringle bingle jingle is commonly known as WHAT?"

And we'd all love to be using the right ROMsets if we had a clue what they were or knew where to get them. At least MAME ones have a number, but simply trying to figure out which ROMs FB wants is a painful trial, let alone actually find them. And in the unlikely event that we can locate the right set, invariably it's merged, which is about as much use for Retropie as a chocolate horseshoe.

People say "there's a dat", as if we have a clue what that is, where it's located or what we're meant to do to what with it. And when we try to find out any of those things, it's back to "xnus(yfejjx ymixi&6unet fye!@qq?kimyf" again, because it seems to be an iron rule of humanity that any one person can either write brilliant computer code OR helpful documentation that ordinary people can decipher and make use of, but never, ever, ever both.

Throw us a bone once in a while, man 🙁

barbudreadmon

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

People say "there's a dat", as if we have a clue what that is, where it's located or what we're meant to do to what with it.

Which means you never read retropie's arcade documentation, neither forum rules that says to search documentation before asking stuff, should i congratulate you or something ? Or should i pity you ? "poor poor guy, he doesn't have a few minutes to spend reading a documentation people spent hours writing".

Are you serious there ?

SpudsMcToole

@barbudreadmon I always search everything before I post here. I'd much rather figure stuff out and fix it myself than post a dumb question here and hang around for hours or days hoping someone will help. But searching is no use if what comes back is incomprehensible gibberish aimed at and written for people who already understand code.

barbudreadmon

@SpudsMcToole i'm talking about retropie arcade documentation, which explains what is a dat file and where to find them.

SpudsMcToole

@barbudreadmon Even that sentence is a case in point. "Retropie's arcade documentation"? What does that actually MEAN? Retropie's docs are scattered all over the place, that could mean any of a hundred files.

barbudreadmon

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

I always search everything before I post here.

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

Even that sentence is a case in point. "Retropie's arcade documentation"? What does that actually MEAN?

You are being inconsistent here...

Anyway i'll add support for dkchrmx later today, and i think that'll be the last time i try to help you if you don't even bother reading retropie's documentation, and don't bother with the sad excuse "i don't know where it is", any search engine will give it as the first result if you search "retropie arcade", you are just being ridiculous and disrespectful to the work of others here.

mitu

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

What does that actually MEAN? Retropie's docs are scattered all over the place, that could mean any of a hundred files.

There's a link at top of the Forum - Docs. This is where the RetroPie documentation resides.

SpudsMcToole

@mitu I know where they are. They're a massive multi-level multi-branching nest and just saying "it's in the docs, dummy" is not a helpful response. Particularly when the answer to the question "Does anyone know why DK Christmas Remix just stopped working?" is not going to be in there anyway.

Jeez, it's not like I went up to this guy personally and DEMANDED he fix my problem RIGHT THIS MINUTE because I'm ENTITLED. I asked - on a general help forum designed for that exact purpose - if anyone knew why a game that worked 48 hours ago had stopped working, because I'd already spent hours trying to solve the problem without success, and I detailed some of the (entirely rational and logical) steps I'd tried, to save people time suggesting things that had already not worked.

I'm not sure that really merited such a prickly yelling-at.

SpudsMcToole

PS From those docs:

"Note: the process of verifying and rebuilding ROMs is complex and requires a substantial investment of time and effort in order to master. If your goal is to have working ROMs, it is almost always simpler to download a full ROM collection that has already been verified to match the emulator you chose."

Couldn't agree more. In the case of FB, it appears that the "correct" ROMs change on literally a daily basis, and it's already hard to figure out what they're meant to be. According to the all-knowing docs, they're "FB Neo v0.2.97.44". I've been involved in emulation, both personally and professionally, for 25 years. I know my way around. But I have not the slightest idea what ROMset that actually is or where it might be found. No file under that name exists in any of the numerous places I know of where these things usually are.

It really is asking quite a lot of people to keep on top of this stuff at the same time as being hyper-prissy about refusing to actually direct people to ROMs.

I try to contribute back as well as taking. I wrote an extensive normal-person-language guide to setting up obscure systems in MESS and posted it here. I've done a lot of graphics stuff - bezels, box art etc - because that's something I can do even though I'm hopeless at coding. I try to answer other people's questions if I can. And I know from many years of personal experience that when you make stuff for free, people can still be really dickish about it and it's easy to get pissed off and snap at them. I just don't think that was very fair in this case.

mitu

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

Couldn't agree more. In the case of FB, it appears that the "correct" ROMs change on literally a daily basis, and it's already hard to figure out what they're meant to be. According to the all-knowing docs, they're "FB Neo v0.2.97.44". I've been involved in emulation, both personally and professionally, for 25 years. I know my way around. But I have not the slightest idea what ROMset that actually is or where it might be found. No file under that name exists in any of the numerous places I know of where these things usually are.

It changes often because new things are added and that's a good thing. As for where you can find that ROMset, I can assure that I've seen it a few times. For FBNeo, you can rebuild the ROMset using a complete MAME ROMset archive and the .dat file from the project's page.

And I know from many years of personal experience that when you make stuff for free, people can still be really dickish about it and it's easy to get pissed off and snap at them. I just don't think that was very fair in this case.

You've done that exact same thing with lr-fbneo, where @barbudreadmon is the main developer.

barbudreadmon

@SpudsMcToole i spent time answering to your "capsed" questions in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/200689 :

i explained why your previous replacement of dkongx11 with an unsupported rom wouldn't work anymore, in the simplest way possible.
i explained what you need to have valid romsets, what's important in their content, in the simplest way possible.
i told you i would add this hack next
i pointed you to some guidelines on how you can port a hbmame driver to fbneo, in case you were interested (i thought you would be, considering your request for hacks support, you think you don't have what it takes, fair enough, i wasn't expecting anything about this, i'll be mentioning a fact though : until a few years ago when i started working on fbalpha, the most i could do with C/C++ was reading a documentation on how to print "hello world" in a terminal)

Your answer ? More caps and complaints about not understanding, especially not knowing anything about concepts clearly explained in the retropie documentation, while you claim you search documentation before posting anything. I think i was totally right to be pissed off by this.

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

it appears that the "correct" ROMs change on literally a daily basis

Nope, a given romset for a specific game might change every few years at most, people who say maintaining romsets is time-consuming are wrong, for a given game to stop working in fbneo, since detection of files inside a romset is crc-based instead of name-based, it would mean someone in the world opened a cabinet and desoldered stuff on the pcb to dump it and the result of his dump was different (and more correct !) than known dumps, it doesn't happen everyday.

Riverstorm

@barbudreadmon - Nice, that's great to have CRC matching in FBNeo. I have been exploiting it for a few years now using it to merge 3 different Neo-Geo BIOS file sets. Those being mame2003, mame2003-plus and FBNeo. A single file to run them all. I would leave FBNeo with native names but rename mame2003 and mame2003-plus conflicts. Now I can name FBNeo files to whatever too! ;)

SpudsMcToole

@barbudreadmon "Nope, a given romset for a specific game might change every few years at most, people who say maintaining romsets is time-consuming are wrong"

Ah, so the docs you're so angry at me for supposedly not reading are in fact a load of rubbish?

spud11

@barbudreadmon Hi. I think I understand the changes to DK's .cpp file you've made for Spooky.

Two questions I have please: Is the 0x01000 (for example) a reference to the size of the bin file? If so, how do you calculate or find this from the bin file?

grant2258

@barbudreadmon said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

People say "there's a dat", as if we have a clue what that is, where it's located or what we're meant to do to what with it.

Which means you never read retropie's arcade documentation, neither forum rules that says to search documentation before asking stuff, should i congratulate you or something ? Or should i pity you ? "poor poor guy, he doesn't have a few minutes to spend reading a documentation people spent hours writing".

Are you serious there ?

no need to be little a user acting like your better because you think your a better coder it really in bad taste imho. The user was asking for help no need for insults it doesnt reflect well on the community. Pointing to a link to read would be more helpful in this case

barbudreadmon

@spud11 said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

Two questions I have please: Is the 0x01000 (for example) a reference to the size of the bin file?

Exactly, to get the right value you just have to get the file size (4096 here) and convert it to hexadecimal (1000, which you then pad with 0x0 at the left, 0x is to tell C/C++ it's an hexadecimal, and the zeros are for driver cosmetics), but in this case you don't even need to do that, see https://github.com/Robbbert/hbmame/blob/0d44f5dfa936c820507bc1408c6c246ce513e238/src/hbmame/drivers/dkong.cpp#L306-L335 , the size are already in there (3rd argument in the ROM_LOAD calls).

Another example, for dkchrmx the fbneo driver will look like this :

// Donkey Kong Christmas Remix (Hack)

static struct BurnRomInfo dkchrmxRomDesc[] = {
	{ "c_5et_g.bin",	0x01000, 0xba70b88b, 1 }, //  0 maincpu
	{ "c_5ct_g.bin",	0x01000, 0x5ec461ec, 1 }, //  1
	{ "c_5bt_g.bin",	0x01000, 0x1c97d324, 1 }, //  2
	{ "c_5at_g.bin",	0x01000, 0xb9005ac0, 1 }, //  3

	{ "dkchrmx.bin",	0x10000, 0xe5273cee, 2 }, //  4 braze

	{ "s_3i_b.bin",		0x00800, 0x45a4ed06, 3 }, //  5 soundcpu
	{ "s_3j_b.bin",		0x00800, 0x4743fe92, 3 }, //  6

	{ "v_5h_b.ch",		0x00800, 0x0b92cc7a, 4 }, //  7 gfx1
	{ "v_3pt.ch",		0x00800, 0x6a04f93f, 4 }, //  8

	{ "l_4m_b.ch",		0x00800, 0xc6ddc85f, 5 }, //  9 gfx2
	{ "l_4n_b.ch",		0x00800, 0x2cd9cfdf, 5 }, // 10
	{ "l_4r_b.ch",		0x00800, 0xc1ea6688, 5 }, // 11
	{ "l_4s_b.ch",		0x00800, 0x9473d658, 5 }, // 12

	{ "c-2k.ch",		0x00100, 0xc6cee97e, 6 }, // 13 proms
	{ "c-2j.ch",		0x00100, 0x1f64ac3d, 6 }, // 14
	{ "v-5e.ch",		0x00100, 0x5a8ca805, 6 }, // 15

	{ "diag.bin",	0x1000, 0x00000000, 0 | BRF_OPT },
};

STD_ROM_PICK(dkchrmx)
STD_ROM_FN(dkchrmx)

struct BurnDriver BurnDrvDkchrmx = {
	"dkchrmx", "dkong", NULL, "dkong", "2017",
	"Donkey Kong Christmas Remix (Hack)\0", NULL, "Sock Master", "Miscellaneous",
	NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL,
	BDF_GAME_WORKING | BDF_CLONE | BDF_ORIENTATION_VERTICAL | BDF_ORIENTATION_FLIPPED | BDF_HISCORE_SUPPORTED, 2, HARDWARE_MISC_PRE90S, GBF_PLATFORM | GBF_ACTION, 0,
	NULL, dkchrmxRomInfo, dkchrmxRomName, NULL, NULL, DkongSampleInfo, DkongSampleName, DkongInputInfo, NULL,
	dkongxInit, DrvExit, DrvFrame, dkongDraw, DrvScan, &DrvRecalc, 0x100,
	224, 256, 3, 4
};

Just a copy/paste and replacing a few values.

@SpudsMcToole said in Donkey Kong Spooky Remix in Retropie?:

Ah, so the docs you're so angry at me for supposedly not reading are in fact a load of rubbish?

No, "Note: the process of verifying and rebuilding ROMs is complex and requires a substantial investment of time and effort in order to master. If your goal is to have working ROMs, it is almost always simpler to download a full ROM collection that has already been verified to match the emulator you chose." is certainly true (if you never did it), the only rubbish here is the fact you are using it as an excuse for not knowing anything from the arcade documentation, while you admitted above that you don't know where to get the "simpler to download full ROM collection" in the first place.

@grant2258 As i already said ignore me and i'll ignore you, i still hold you responsible for barry harris getting the easy way out after scamming the fbneo team.

spud11

@barbudreadmon Thank you so much. That's brilliant. Learnt something new today.

barbudreadmon

@spud11 No problem, and i just added dkchrmx to fbneo (sorry i was busy yesterday).