Author Topic: dink's FBN Development & Fixes thread  (Read 761125 times)

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1560 on: March 06, 2019, 10:01:25 PM »
Here's a fresh FBAlpha test version for download!

What's new?
--> Taito QIX hw
Qix, Zookeeper, Kram, Complex X, Slither, Space Dungeon, Electric YoYo

Enjoy!!

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1561 on: March 09, 2019, 09:22:44 AM »
Yet another test exe for download!

changes:
Fix sound in Baseball Stars and NAM-1975 when using alternate MVS bioses
new driver for Kiki KaiKai / Kick 'n Run (mexico86)

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1562 on: April 13, 2019, 09:15:21 AM »
Spent a week tweaking Spy Hunter to perfection.

Just getting spyhunter emulated wasn't enough, there were some issues that needed to be addressed:
x The game has lights to show which special items you have
x The emulated engine noise sounds like a "whine" than a rumble, as it does on the arcade machine.
x The emulated sound is chock-full of horrible clicks and pop-sounds, especially when the music starts or stops

The first one was easy, I didn't like the idea of having a line of text at the bottom of the screen - and thought, there has to be a better way.  After some conspiring with iq_132, he cooked up a nice little secondary-"hud" using icons from the game to represent the powerup items.

Regarding the engine sound:
The game designers were smart, instead of mixing the engine noise in there with every other sound, they had it output on one of the ay8910's channels.  I split this output from the others, ran it into a double resonant lowpass filter w/high q, and now it sounds almost exactly like how it does in the real sit-down Spy Hunter cabinet.

Lastly, the bane of the entire project - the Cheap Squeak Deluxe board.  This is the board that plays the "Peter Gunn" theme song.  Why was it so bad....?  It had no status of when songs started/stopped, and outputs -dc to the dac when the song isn't playing.  This simply resulted in nasty clicks/pops at bootup, whenever a song started or stopped - even though it has a status register, it's always 0 (unused).  Even worse, when the dac is left in a dc state, the value was always different, so we couldn't just filter it out.  A dc blocking filter helped a little, getting rid of the steady dc offset, but the spike to dc at the end of song still resulted in the horrible pops and clicks.  Even double-worse, there isn't even a status bit/byte in the ram of the emulated soundboard.  In order to reliably start/end "dirty" dac sounds without clicks, we need a reliable start and stop point to ramp the signal back to the 0-point.
So what now?  I wasn't going to leave my second-favorite game of all time in a headache-inducing clickfest like it has been in other emulation for the past 20-some years.  And buying a cab is out of the question...
After much poking around memory of this beast, I found a counter that only counts down when the music is playing, once per sample - which ended up being the thing I needed to actually know when the song starts/stops.  Yay!  a simple mute logic was hooked up to this counter, and, for the first time - the clicks & pops were gone.   I ended up taking it a bit further, using a technique once used for some clicky Konami games *mystwarr hw*, played the game for a few hours, and after a long week and 1/2, I'm finally happy with the results.

Oh, and now FBAlpha finally emulates all of the classics I played in the 80's.  Maybe we should celebrate or something :)

best regards,
- dink
« Last Edit: April 14, 2019, 07:03:30 PM by dink »

Offline barbudreadmon

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1563 on: April 13, 2019, 10:55:37 AM »
Congratz ! :)

Offline Bad Dude

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1564 on: April 13, 2019, 12:18:28 PM »
Yet another test exe for download!

changes:
Fix sound in Baseball Stars and NAM-1975 when using alternate MVS bioses
new driver for Kiki KaiKai / Kick 'n Run (mexico86)


tested and approved  :cool: :cool:
Wainting for the official release!
Congratulation, FBA team!

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1565 on: April 14, 2019, 12:33:12 AM »
Here's a new debug exe with the finished spyhunter/rampage driver!
enjoy guys!! :)

file link: https://www.sendspace.com/file/gawe1y

best regards,
- dink

kev

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1566 on: April 14, 2019, 08:46:44 AM »
Here's a new debug exe with the finished spyhunter/rampage driver!
enjoy guys!! :)

file link: https://www.sendspace.com/file/gawe1y

best regards,
- dink

I'm also a big fan of Spy Hunter. This build is amazing! Great works as usual!

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1567 on: April 14, 2019, 10:41:14 PM »
Thanks guys! :)

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1568 on: April 14, 2019, 11:00:23 PM »
Emulated Rampage has an even worse problem than spyhunter.  While booting up, it holds the dac at +fullDC for 2 seconds.   I feel my soundcard/headphones' pain.

Added some muting logic and a dc-blocking filter to clean things up nicely, and get a perfect audioform.  Below are before/after pictures of Rampage booting up and insert coin at the title screen.  Of course, other emulations of Rampage output the same bad waveform.

best regards,
- dink
« Last Edit: April 14, 2019, 11:03:20 PM by dink »

Offline gxb

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1569 on: April 18, 2019, 04:40:28 AM »
@dink Can you run "Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits - Bushidou Retsuden (Japan)" correctly with your lastest build? I compiled one on Apr 5. The game ran well until title screen. When I chose start game, there poped up an IO error about CD loading in game. Could that cause by fast loading codes?

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1570 on: April 18, 2019, 09:58:52 AM »
gxb, that was actually just fixed the other day, big thanks to barbudreadmon.  I'll post a new exe in sometime today :)

best regards,
- dink

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1571 on: April 18, 2019, 10:49:39 AM »
Updated fba exe, for friends and fans of FBAlpha!

what's new:
x combat school crash bug fixed
x ssrpg fix from barbudreadmon
x rampage arcade "nice" sound
PM me if you find the easter-egg in this exe :) (to let people play along, don't post about it here)

best regards,
- dink

kev

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1572 on: April 18, 2019, 11:24:42 AM »
Really like the Rampage sound :)

For some reason, Star wars crashes in this build on my PC but works in the last build I did, and the last one you did... Does it do that for you or is it my PC?

Offline Gab75

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1573 on: April 18, 2019, 01:54:17 PM »
For some reason, Star wars crashes in this build on my PC but works in the last build I did, and the last one you did... Does it do that for you or is it my PC?

I tested all three Star Wars releases (rev 1 and set 2 and 3) and all of them work without issues (my OS is Windows 10 64 bit Home Edition)

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1574 on: April 18, 2019, 06:46:26 PM »
Really like the Rampage sound :)

For some reason, Star wars crashes in this build on my PC but works in the last build I did, and the last one you did... Does it do that for you or is it my PC?

Hi Kev,
nice, I'm glad you dig it :)  Fortunately the Rampage soundfix only took a little while compared to the spy hunter fix.

Regarding Star Wars crashing - that sucks! :(
Can you please give me the crash address from the guru meditation window? (like c000000053:0000fa313)

best regards,
- dink