Topic: What drivers have perfect and trustable emulation?

[synnchan]

Hi, guys. I'm new here.

I've been using FBA a lot lately and enjoying it. Thank you for making this emulator. But I noticed some games aren't emulated properly (such as imperfect graphics or audio emulation). I found most of the faulty ones on the Konami, DataEast and Seta drivers.

Capcom and NeoGeo seems to be universally fine, though. My question is: what FBA drivers are emulated perfectly? is it just Capcom and NeoGeo or can I trust some others (generally speaking) too?

[Arcadez]

I've been using FBA a lot lately and enjoying it. Thank you for making this emulator. But I noticed some games aren't emulated properly (such as imperfect graphics or audio emulation). I found most of the faulty ones on the Konami, DataEast and Seta drivers.

Raise a bug report for any games you've noticed have issues then with a bit of luck the FBA devs will look into it.

Capcom and NeoGeo seems to be universally fine, though. My question is: what FBA drivers are emulated perfectly? is it just Capcom and NeoGeo or can I trust some others (generally speaking) too?

There are no certainties in emulation you'll need to take FBA as you find it some games actually play better in this emulator than
they do currantly in others and vice versa best you can do is play the games you like and if your not happy with how they perform
in FBA then either raise a bug report or try em in another emulator.

[dink]

Since early 2014 I have been going through each game and fixing any graphics/sound glitches that have been reported or I have found myself.  iq_132 has done some really awesome work improving the konami drivers over the past few versions, too.  Also I did some massive reworking of the Megadrive/Genesis driver which fixes almost every graphics glitch known, except for 2 or 3 games out of hundreds.  Also we're the only emulator with perfect graphics emulation in Ninja Baseball Batman

I know there are a couple arcade games that are glitchy graphics-wise that I haven't been able to fix yet:

Konami: Sunset riders cutscene with the ladies dancing on stage, the stage "lights" are black/opaque and cover up the girls sometimes.
DataEast: The endings for Caveman Ninja and Joe and Mac strike Back - the clouds are scrolling on the wrong column, and the cutscene before the titlescreen in Mutant Fighter (same deco16 video system) doesn't scroll right.

On the bright side: nearly everything that has been reported has gotten fixed sooner or later
Other than that: we rely on you guys to report issues, a screencapture and a savestate from just before the problem happens will almost guarantee your bug will get fixed.  My personal aim is to have every game working perfectly, so I'm actually quite anxious to hear about the games w/problems you have come across.

best regards,
- dink

[synnchan]

Thank you for the replies.

About Caveman Ninja, I was playing the game yesterday (huge coincidence) and yeah, I noticed the glitch on the ending. That glitch is also present on the dinosaur riding stage (the palm trees on the background doesn't scroll correctly). But the game was even worse on earlier builds (the volcano level was completely messed up). But that got fixed now.

Not really a bug, but I'd love to see Denjin Makai 1 added to go along with Denjin Makai 2. By the way, Denjin Makai 2 is still glitched on the map screen, and the glitch happens even on MAME. I can only guess it's probably really hard to fix it since it was not fixed yet. I'm almost certain the game wasn't overlooked since it's pretty awesome. EDIT: I just raised a bug report about it.

Well, I'm happy with how the official build is currently overall. Most of the better games work perfectly. But there's one problem.

I actually don't use the official build for one single reason: there's no rerecording support. My favorite hobby is making gameplay footage about different games and most of my favorite titles are from arcade. Rerecording is really handy on emulators since it makes the process of beating games much easier and you don't have to worry about messing up since you can just load a state and backtrack before the mistake. The official FBA has no rerecording, but there are some unofficial builds with it (such as fba-rr and final burn alpha shuffle). But all those unofficial builds are based on older FBA cores. The latest fba-rr version is still on core v0.2.97.12. Plenty of things have changed since then and emulation from a lot of games have been improved (plus new games got added and whatnot).

Of course, if the official FBA had rerecording support, I'd not even want to look into those unofficial builds. The official build will always be the best no matter what, but the lack of rerecording is the only "flaw" that prevents me from using it.

I'd like to ask: are you guys planning to add rerecording support at some point? I'd be happy if that was added and I don't mind waiting even if it takes long. Since I understand nothing about coding, I don't know if this is a hard or easy task to do.

Well, that's all I have to say. I will be waiting for the answer. Again, thank you for making this awesome emulator.

EDIT: By the way, should I create a new topic focused on the rerecording matter instead?

[dink]

I like the re-recording idea, I will look into adding it as long as I can get the source code and see how they did it. 

A funny thing, my first graphical fix was the lava stage in Caveman Ninja, probably sometime in 2014. 

re: Denjin Makai 2, the map screen is kinda messed up in MAME as well, at this point we don't really know how to emulate that part, so its not an easy fix.

best regards,
- dink

[synnchan]

Oh, I can help with the source code. Here it is:
http://adelikat.tasvideos.org/emulatordownloads/fbaRR/fba-rr-v007-src.7z

Thank you for accepting the idea. Best of luck!

[dink]

I need a little help w/fba-rr:  I recorded a bit of play after loading a game of ghosts n goblins, but can't figure out how to start recording again from a certain point in the playback.  I need some help understanding this re-recording thing

[synnchan]

It's pretty easy. That's basically how it works:

load the game, then go to "Game > movie > start recording"

once you're finished, click "movie > stop movie"

to replay it, click "movie > start playback"

to resume control of the movie, make sure the box saying "Open Read-Only" is unchecked. Then save state wherever you want to regain control and load it.

rerecording emulators are mostly made with tool-assisted speedruns in mind. But in my case, I only really use rerecording (save states) to aid in completing my gameplay footage so I can post videos about them to the web.

I know the basics of how a TAS works, but I'm definitely not the best at explaining it. Maybe wikipedia would do a better job:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool-assisted_speedrun

If you have more questions, I'll be here and try to help.

[dink]

From what I gather, this can be done with the latest fba using the replay input function, perhaps?

[synnchan]

Not exactly. The difference is that a rerecording emulator throws away all of the inputs that were recorded after loading state. A regular emulator on other hand doesn't know how to get rid of the "unwanted" inputs.

I'm not good at explaining this with words, so I made a video showing the difference between a rerecording emulator and a regular emulator. I recorded the first level of Ghosts n Goblins as example. First I recorded it on fba-rr, then on the latest official fba.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlT0pKhfGE

As you can see, I saved and loaded states freely while recording the movies. On fba-rr, the movie replayed correctly, but on the official fba, it quickly desynced.

Hopefully this video will make things clear, otherwise I will still be here to answer any questions. (Sorry about the late answer btw, I had to go sleep because it was late on my timezone).

[dink]

Thanks for the vid and info - I understand what its about now: savestates during movie/input recording shouldn't desynch the movie recording at all.  I have actually been wanting to fix this for a long time, but didn't know where to start.  With the fba-rr code I can see how they did it and try to implement it.

thanks and best regards,
- dink