Prisoners of war (P.O.W.)

Bedza

Hello guys, 30 years ago I was playing Prisoners of War on a real arcade box. I could make it run on a PC.

Is anybody here in this forum to be able to run this game on Raspberry and Retropie ? I could not succeed to launch the game and play. My objective is to built my own Arcade box (wooden) and get my son to retro times, but I can not launch the game. Thank You so much for Your help/test/advice

Bedza

sleve_mcdichael

pow.zip works for me in lr-fbneo on RPi4.

What have you tried already? Have you read all of https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Arcade/? Please add some more info about your setup as requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

lostless

@bedza you need the right version of the rom. Arcade emulators dont just run generic rips. You need the specific version for the version of fbneo or mame you are running. You may get lucky with a random rom on a random emulator, because roms aren’t always updated between versions, but it’s always a crap shoot. You need to find a arcade emulator that you want to use and find that romset. I use fbneo and mame2003. Fbneo is a better emulator, but My fbneo set is a few versions old, so many times a game just wont work on the newer versions. but my mame2003 set wont ever be outdated and is used when I run into an issue.

Bedza

@sleve_mcdichael Thank You very much for Your interest. I am not that much skilled in running Retropie.

Raspberry Pi 3+
completely fresh installation of Retropie 4.7.1
USB stick, created retropie folder, then transfer of pow.zip file (824 511 bytes) to MAME and FDA subfolders
When I start the system I can see the game on two emulation screens, both emulations behave the same way: launch,black, back to menu.

No idea what I am doing wrong. Any suggestion?

Thank You so much for patience with me :-)
Bedza

sleve_mcdichael

@bedza said in Prisoners of war (P.O.W.):

No idea what I am doing wrong. Any suggestion?

Yes, I suggest:

1: read all of https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Arcade/

2: read it again.

3: understand that just throwing random romsets at different emulators until one sticks, is not likely to work.

4: understand why just throwing random romsets at different emulators until one sticks, is not likely to work.

5: choose what emulator you will use.

6: find or build a romset that is made specifically to work with the emulator you have chosen in step five.

You're...somewhere between steps 1-4, and you've already downloaded the rom from step 6. To understand why that is not going to work...you need to familiarize yourself with steps 1-4...

kounabi22

@bedza

have you try to put in folder the bios of neogeo/snk

sirhenrythe5th

@kounabi22 for what? P.O.W. is no MVS Game

Bedza

@sleve_mcdichael Thank You very much for Your answer. As I said I am not an expert in Retropie and I am not going to be. I am actually very happy that I can somehow launch it on Raspberry. There are guys who even don`t know what Raspberry is :-)

I would like to play POW on my Raspberry and show it to my son. Maybe once or twice...

I reformulate my help request: is there any simple tutorial how to launch POW on my Rapsberry? I red the article, but I don`t know what emulator to select and built romset. That is already a science-fiction for me.

I have now 4 different POW.zip files. If You say You are able to launch it using lr-fbneo then pretty easy might be to install Retropie in several steps doing exactly the same things You do, no?

Thank You
Bedza

sleve_mcdichael

@bedza once you have the right romset-emulator combo, it's pretty plug-and-play. lr-fbneo is already installed in RetroPie. You just need to get the pow.zip version that is made for FBNeo and it will "just work." Any other pow.zip version will not work. (824 511 bytes does not match my version. I am looking at 806 501 over here, with a crc32 of 2d70db6b.)

We can't tell you where to get the rom from.

lostless

@bedza also. This is not a retropie thing, but how arcade emulation has been from the beginning. The developers of MAME, and fbneo, decided to always use the best rip/copy of a game at the time of development. Not every rip was a perfect byte for byte copy early on. But as better rips came, they would abandon the older rip and require the newer one. Or as in capcom cps2 games, a while ago they decided for legal reasons to remove the decryption keys from MAME itself, rendering all cps2 games, from the last romset, useless on the next version and requiring a new romset where the roms have to have the decryption keys now.
So Thats what romsets are. A collection of roms for a specific version of MAME or FBneo that was built during that time. That’s why you can’t just throw a random rom from anywhere and expect to work. You need to know what emulator, what version you are using of said emulator, and find the proper romset for it. Mame 2003 romset is probably your best bet as it’s widely used for low power devices and doesn’t ever change.

Bedza

@sleve_mcdichael thank You so much for that kick. All in this discussion. I managed to find a fbneo romset pow.zip, reinstalled Retropie from scratch and it works!!! I am so happy, You made my day. Really.

Thank all of You here
Bedza