Old Computer Appreciation Thread

Folly

I had to work, thankfully no rain.

It's good to update mame.
The binary is equal or higher than 0237.

But I think it's something else.
Do other games run ?
Does lr-mess work ? (or is it the same story ?)

Check your runcommand.log.

Btw:
Autoframeskipping doesn't work that good over here.
With F9 you have to press until it's on frameskip 10 to get almost fullspeed.

AdamBeGood

@folly Let me have a play and report back. I'll have a look at the log.

Other games do work on MAME for FM Towns. lr-mess is the same story.

Edit: is this the island postie job? Glad you didn't get rained on.

Folly

@adambegood said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@folly Let me have a play and report back. I'll have a look at the log.

Yes you should check that.

Other games do work on MAME for FM Towns. lr-mess is the same story.

Strange !
If this works than it looks like the files of Mad Stalker are wrong somehow.
I tested the version I recommended, unzipped and running the .cue should work.

Edit: is this the island postie job? Glad you didn't get rained on.

Not today, but I still do that, often, twice a week.

AdamBeGood

@folly It was the version of MAME. Updated from Source and the game works fine! Thanks so much for all the help.

I was very surprised when it loaded up!

Folly

@adambegood

Nice,

Now we have to play, after all the effort involving ;-)
Let me know how it goes.

With mame we can (we can pause first with P) :

save states with : shift-left + F7
load states with : shift-right + F7

Can you defeat this one, in stage 1 ? :

AdamBeGood

@folly I didn't have time to properly play but I'll let you know when I get a chance to play - probably tomorrow. It seems quite hard from a quick play!

Thanks for the save state help also!

AdamBeGood

@Folly - on a totally distinct issue, a bit off-topic I'll admit; I've got a Sinden Light Gun now and thought about getting it to work with Saturn tonight (I've got NES, SNES and Dreamcast working so far).

However, I need to try it on a libretro core and for some weird reason my Saturn games are all launching straight to Yabasanshiro regardless of how I have them set up in emulators.cfg. Some games are set to other cores, but it doesn't make a difference - I get no runcommand menu and Yabasanshiro just boots straight up.

Any idea where I look to resolve this? I don't remember changing anything here...

Zering

@adambegood That's because standalone yabasanshiro doesn't use runcommand. You would have changed that in your es_systems.cfg when setting up yabasanshiro.

AdamBeGood

@zering said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@adambegood That's because standalone yabasanshiro doesn't use runcommand. You would have changed that in your es_systems.cfg when setting up yabasanshiro.

Thanks, @zering. I guess I just hadn't noticed. Can I have yabasanshiro installed and still choose other emulators? Or do I have to take a line out of config every time to do that?

I didn't expect a response from you on this one!

Edit: Take that line out and put a normal runcommand line in and that seems all good now.

testudo

@folly said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@adambegood

Nice,

Now we have to play, after all the effort involving ;-)
Let me know how it goes.

With mame we can (we can pause first with P) :

save states with : shift-left + F7

load states with : shift-right + F7

Can you defeat this one, in stage 1 ? :

Concur, brilliant detective work! I can only get it to boot using the lr-mess-fmtowns config, the other fmtowns and mame runcommand selections do not work. But, changing the Joystick port 2 to <nothing> removed the in game freezing and it plays great. I'll just manually change it back to <mouse> when done playing. No luck in my first attempt to defeat the stage 1 Boss.

DTEAM

@Folly
On FM Towns Marty, some games like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge or 4D tennis require a CD ROM and a floppy disk.

Does somebody already managed that?

AdamBeGood

@dteam said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@Folly
On FM Towns Marty, some games like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge or 4D tennis require a CD ROM and a floppy disk.

Does somebody already managed that?

I'd be surprised if Folly hasn't cracked that, I think it might have been discussed at some point.

Folly

@dteam said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@Folly
On FM Towns Marty, some games like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge or 4D tennis require a CD ROM and a floppy disk.

Does somebody already managed that?

I will have a look, it should be possible.

Edit :
Tested 4d tennis adding the user floppy in the GUI but the floppy file isn't accepted.
runcommand.log gives this error :
Fatal error: Device 3.5" high density floppy drive load failed: Unable to identify the image format

I will look at it later again.

Folly

@dteam

It looks like we both use NEOKOBE files for fmtowns.
I think that the user floppy files have an image structure that cannot be read by mame somehow.
I think we need to convert the floppy files or try to find ones that work with mame.

I was able to create an empty .hdm floppy image which is accepted but it seems it's not enough for "4D Tennis".

testudo

@folly said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@dteam said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@Folly
On FM Towns Marty, some games like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge or 4D tennis require a CD ROM and a floppy disk.

Does somebody already managed that?

I will have a look, it should be possible.

Edit :
Tested 4d tennis adding the user floppy in the GUI but the floppy file isn't accepted.
runcommand.log gives this error :
Fatal error: Device 3.5" high density floppy drive load failed: Unable to identify the image format

I will look at it later again.

With FMTowns using lr-Mess, 4D Tennis will boot and be fully playable if you add a blank formatted disk in .hdm format with the GUI at the user disk prompt. The specific user disk file I had for 4D Tennis was .bin format and was not recognized.

Folly

@testudo

Is it a 1.2Mb floppy .hdm image or a 1.44Mb ?

I tried the same, as what you did, with mame with a 1.2Mb .hdm but that didn't seem to work.
So perhaps I missing something here.

I have to try it again.

testudo

@folly said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@testudo

Is it a 1.2Mb floppy .hdm image or a 1.44Mb ?

I tried the same, as what you did, with mame with a 1.2Mb .hdm but that didn't seem to work.
So perhaps I missing something here.

I have to try it again.

I'm not sure how to check the file size in the FMTowns OS, but the "ROM" file size is 1,261,568 bytes, so I would guess it is a 1.2Mb. It is MS-DOS formatted if that is a clue: I used Repacked Neo Kobe [OS] Blank disk/

Folly

@testudo @DTEAM

It's an 1.2Mb floppy image.

I used the same now for mame.
But basically I had the same problem as the last time.

Inserting the floppy image and select : read and write.
After some time it will say : check user disk !

I decided to select : read from image and save to another image.
Then it asks what kind of image format, I selected : fmtowns unformatted and changed the name so it will create a new floppy.

After that it was accepted and I could go playing.
But the game seems stuck after selecting some play options.

Did you manage to play ?

Btw.
Using the game specific load option has it's advantage.
When selecting the floppy image next time it will show up the correct directory for selecting the image.

testudo

@folly

I only played the Practice session option for a few minutes and that worked fine. I will try the proper game/tournament option and report back.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to get the MAME emulator options or MESS game specific emulator selection options to work. I have even tried making them the default in the emulator.config file and still no success.

I created a User Disk folder in the Rom directory where I store all the different user disks and lr-mess seems to default to it when I use the GUI to add a floppy image. So adding the user disk image file is a fairly quick exercise.

Folly

@testudo said in Old Computer Appreciation Thread:

@folly

I only played the Practice session option for a few minutes and that worked fine. I will try the proper game/tournament option and report back.

Curious if it will works, on your side.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to get the MAME emulator options or MESS game specific emulator selection options to work. I have even tried making them the default in the emulator.config file and still no success.

I don't know what problem you have then.

I created a User Disk folder in the Rom directory where I store all the different user disks and lr-mess seems to default to it when I use the GUI to add a floppy image. So adding the user disk image file is a fairly quick exercise.

Nice solution.