Mazan: Flash of the Blade (Naomi)

pjft

@chaoseffect Sounds good. I may have a look at the Virtua Cop 2 issue, just out of curiosity at some point. I wouldn't consider myself more knowledgeable about this than flyinghead or any of the RetroArch folks, though, so... :)

To confirm:

It happens on lr-flycast with a lightgun (actual device, or even when using a mouse and selecting "Lightgun" as RetroArch input?);
it doesn't happen on vanilla flycast (can we install it on the Pi? Is it installable via RetroPie-Setup?)

Just so I can hone in on the specifics when I look into it.

Thanks!

mitu

@pjft said in Mazan: Flash of the Blade (Naomi):

it doesn't happen on vanilla flycast (can we install it on the Pi? Is it installable via RetroPie-Setup?)

It can be installed, but it's not part of RetroPie-Setup yet.

ChaosEffect

@pjft First, you will need to install lr-flycast (upstream) separately from the old lr-flycast by using this script.

On my system, I changed all references of "lr-flycast" to "lr-flycast-new" in the linked script so that the two versions can co-exist.

Here are the things I have confirmed with Virtua Cop 2 in "lr-flycast-new" on a Raspberry Pi 4B:

The game will freeze briefly on any trigger pull by a player whose control type is set to "Lightgun."
The freeze occurs regardless of whether it's a Sinden gun or a regular mouse, so it does not appear to be a hardware problem
When the control type is set to "Controller," the freeze does not occur for that player's trigger pulls. I tested with one player using a lightgun and the other using a controller. Only the lightgun player's trigger pulls cause the freeze

And here are some things that I have heard but have not confirmed myself:

The issue does NOT occur in the current version of the standalone (non-libretro) Flycast
The issue DOES occur in "lr-flycast-new" on non-pi platforms

pjft

@chaoseffect ok, so yeah. I can replicate it - as expected. It was not what my original hypothesis was going to suggest. Since the behavior reminded me of a similar stuttering caused by the vibration effects on lr-pcsx-rearmed back in the day, I kind of hoped it could be something simple as that. Alas, disabling vibration in the options, and in the core options, made no difference whatsoever.

Did you try changing some of the weirder core options to see if they're making a difference on this?

I suppose I'll have to spend more time here, but don't hold your hopes. I suppose what makes it even more painful to go through because the codebase is moderately different and, if fixed, won't make it to the lr-flycast we use.

@mitu could you share context on these changes, just for me to try to understand the difference between the two repos?

Thanks all.

mitu

@pjft said in Mazan: Flash of the Blade (Naomi):

@mitu could you share context on these changes, just for me to try to understand the difference between the two repos?

The libretro/flycast repository used to be the original libretro fork of reicast, but at some point development moved to the main contributor's repository at flyinghead/flycast. The libretro repository is not receiving any updates at the moment and any new development has been done at flyinghead/flycast.

pjft

@mitu Thank you.

But it is my understanding that we reverted that change back to libretro?

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/scriptmodules/libretrocores/lr-flycast.sh

Was the upstream one breaking something on our end, I suppose?

mitu

@pjft said in Mazan: Flash of the Blade (Naomi):

But it is my understanding that we reverted that change back to libretro?

Yes, there were a couple of issues with the upstream repo, which have been solved now, and we reverted the repository change.

pjft

@chaoseffect Ok, so as much as I'd want to help here, this clearly seems to be above my knowledge of the code and emulator.

I added some profiling elements to the emulator, and we can observe a slight increase in time for the audio handling and emu.render() calls in the main retro_run() function.

That being said, I don't know how to dig into it.

I think the only difference between playing with a controller and the gun is that the screen will flash white for a single frame (for the old CRT guns to pick up the position). I don't know if that helps in any way.

Would love to see this making some progress indeed, but I'm kind of at a loss - unsure if it's on the libretro code or on RetroArch. :|

ChaosEffect

@pjft No worries. Thanks for taking a look!

Someone else had a sort of similar issue with Ninja Assault due to the Vulkan video driver. The behavior sounds similar, but the cause of the issue seems different. In that particular issue, the game rewinds when the white flash is supposed to hit.

I tried different video drivers, but choosing anything other than "GL" just gives me "GL core," and the issue is still there. I also don't have access to Vulkan on my current setup.

I did try changing a few core options here and there, but I figured that's just taking shots in the dark and stopped. I can take another look.

pjft

@chaoseffect I was asking in case you had - you don't need to. I tried messing with it a bit more, and no core option changed things. The input drivers didn't seem to change it either.

I removed the audio code path from the game, but it still froze, so it's either something in the rendering or the actual <run> functions, both being completely out of my depth.

It's a shame, though, the game does run well other than that.

Thanks for raising it!

ChaosEffect

@pjft If it's not too much trouble, could you reply to that issue on GitHub with a brief summary of your investigation? Maybe it'll help create a "Eureka!" moment. 😃

pjft

@chaoseffect Done. It's possible it'll just lead to a "mute" moment, but it's worth a shot :D I'm happy to follow a lead, but I really just don't know where to go from there.