Topic: dink's FBN Development & Fixes thread

[dink]

You are great!

thanks, but don't forget about iq_132 as well, we worked together on this!

best regards,
- dink

[furiadeoso]

thanks, but don't forget about iq_132 as well, we worked together on this!

best regards,
- dink

Both of you, of course

[dink]

Just incase anyone missed the video...

[dink]

Task Force Harrier by UPL (nmk16 hw) got some nice improvements:
sprite priority fixes (thanks Gab75 for reporting these!)
music slowdown fix
shakey-ship during level transitions kludgey-hack-fix.  This one is kinda weird, when you exit a level, sometimes your ship would start shaking like crazy.  It's probably a bug in the original game.  When the ship starts shaking, the game sets 0xf3310 and 0xf3410 to 0x100, so that made it easy to know when its happening, then I just created an extra sprite buffer, and chose it on the odd frame during this period.  I wanted to fix this one years ago, but didn't think of a good way to do it until today.

that's all,
best regards,
- dink

[dink]

Ancient games need love too!
Time Limit is missing the color prom for sprites, which means FBA or MAME has to fill in seemingly random values for this prom to get the sprites to show up.... And it looks horrible.  I spent a couple hours synthesizing a prom just for this game.  Enjoy some before and after piccys: (click images to zoom in/show the images properly)

[Pityesz]

Sorry, I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but may I suggest a new feature?

It would be awesome to have option for mapping more keys to the same button. For example Samurai Shodown 6 requires to press "A" and "B" at the same time to perform the heavy slash. If one could set button "A" and "B" to the same key on the keyboard it could be used more easily. Of course it would be only a secondary key so the original "A" and "B" button still could be used seperately.

[dink]

Did you try going to the inputs editor and scrolling down past the autofire buttons?   I think all Neogeo and PGM games have this feature.

best regards,
- dink

Sorry, I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but may I suggest a new feature?

It would be awesome to have option for mapping more keys to the same button. For example Samurai Shodown 6 requires to press "A" and "B" at the same time to perform the heavy slash. If one could set button "A" and "B" to the same key on the keyboard it could be used more easily. Of course it would be only a secondary key so the original "A" and "B" button still could be used seperately.

[Pityesz]

Did you try going to the inputs editor and scrolling down past the autofire buttons?   I think all Neogeo and PGM games have this feature.

best regards,
- dink

Holy cows, never tried. Thanks for the answer, that was exactly what I looking for. Since we're loves taking challenges I've not really used even the autofires thus never checked all the non-basic options. It is awesome how much this little emulator can do.

[Haze]

Task Force Harrier by UPL (nmk16 hw) got some nice improvements:
sprite priority fixes (thanks Gab75 for reporting these!)
music slowdown fix
shakey-ship during level transitions kludgey-hack-fix.  This one is kinda weird, when you exit a level, sometimes your ship would start shaking like crazy.  It's probably a bug in the original game.  When the ship starts shaking, the game sets 0xf3310 and 0xf3410 to 0x100, so that made it easy to know when its happening, then I just created an extra sprite buffer, and chose it on the odd frame during this period.  I wanted to fix this one years ago, but didn't think of a good way to do it until today.

that's all,
best regards,
- dink

There's a protection MCU on the board, could be related as it really isn't used for much otherwise.

[bigboo]

Hi
Thank you very much to all fba developers, it seems all major classic arcade games will soon be supported. I think it's a good thing because fba is much faster than recent mame version on low-end hardware like rpi. I hope that we can get rid of old mame versions on this kind of machine (like mame2003 libretro).

I checked my personal "bestof" arcade romset and found some 68000 and 68020 games/hardware currently not supported. Do they have something special/difficult to support or it's just lack of interest from developers to add them for the moment?

Atari 68000
Bad Lands 1989
Cyberball   1988
Rampart   1990

Atari Dual 68000
Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters   1989

Atari G1
Hydra 1990
Pit Fighter 1990

Bally Midway MCR-68k
Arch Rivals 1989
Pigskin 621AD 1990

Banpresto 68000
Super Slams 1995

Data East MEC-M1
Stadium Hero   1988

Fuuki FG-2
Gyakuten!! Puzzle Bancho 1996

IGS 68000
Virtua Bowling   1996

Konami Dual 68000
WEC Le Mans 24   1986

Namco 68000
Thunder Ceptor   1986

Namco System 2
Assault   1988
Dragon Saber   1990
Ordyne   1988
Phelios   1988
Rolling Thunder 2   1990

Namco System NA-1
Super World Court   1992
Tinkle Pit   1993

Playmark 68000
World Beach Volley   1995

Sega System 24
Bonanza Bros   1990
Gain Ground   1988

Sega System C-2
Borench   1990
Columns   1990
Columns II: The Voyage Through Time   1990
Puyo Puyo 2   1994
ThunderForce AC   1990

SNK Alpha 68000
Time Soldiers   1987

Technosoft 68000
Hyper Duel   1993



and for 68020 hardware:

Strata/Incredible Tech 32
Blood Storm   1994

Banpresto 68EC020
Macross Plus   1996

Konami GX System
Fantastic Journey   1994
Salamander 2   1996
Sexy Parodius   1996
Winning Spike   1997

Namco System NB-1
Great Sluggers '94   1994
J-League Soccer V-Shoot   1994
Nebulas Ray   1994

Namco System NB-2
Mach Breakers - Numan Athletics 2   1995
Outfoxies   1994

[dink]

Thanks, that's a good list.  Its not a lack of interest, sure it would be nice to have every game supported, but you have to realize some simple facts:  we're just a very small group of people working on this project.  Let's put it into perspective: It took the past 2 and a half weeks of all the free/hobby time between 2 people to get Taito F3 running smoothly.  So basically things take time.  This is a really great time for this emulator, we have added countless games to the emulator lately - just look at the dev logs in this forum.  So yea, just be patient.  also, you'll be pleased to know that Macross Plus was recently added.

best regards,
- dink

[Arcadez]

Damn that might be a record here, the biggest request list ever in the history of neosource 

[dink]

Buggy Grid Seeker: Project Storm Hammer

After we got done with Taito F3, Grid Seeker quickly became one of my favorites in the driver.  The music is awesome, the game is awesome.  Then I got to the end of stage 5, and my heart sank... It looked like someone had barfed on the screen.  The game was nearly unplayable at this point...
After a full day of recon, debugging & digging I came to find out that the game itself was buggy - not the emulator.. (every emulation and video I can find about this game exhibits the problem, except in some circumstances where the bug isn't triggered aka no shooting/extra sprites on the screen when the st.5 boss blows up)  Whenever the number of sprites on the screen gets really high, it just sorta forgets about some of them and leaves them stuck to the screen. (see pictures below!)  Even after the game ends, and it goes back to the beginning of the attract sequence, they still remain (see last 2 pics)...

At this point I spent 2 solid days trying different methods of identifying these bad sprites and keep them from covering the screen.  The only thing I have to go on here is that the stuck sprites are always at the end of each spritebank, and there is always a nice gap between the bad sprites and the good sprites, but there can be little gaps between the bad sprites.  Sometime last night I finally came up with the right algo to cancel out the bad sprites, and after lots of playtesting this morning and afternoon, and several little tweaks to the algo.. we have some good results!!  This feature will be toggleable in the dip settings. 

p.s. the pictures: first one is normal, second is with the fix toggled on.

Enjoy & best regards,
- dink

[furiadeoso]

Great!

[dink]

kaneko supernova news:
1: Finally got rid of that screen garbage when starting a game in Vs Block Breaker / Saru Kani!(!!)
2: Added a dip option and a newly formulated cpu-based speedhack to supernova games. all games that studdered and had low fps on my mighty P4 computer now work at a solid 59.5971fps with this.  The dip option will default to "off", though.  Not all supernova games need speedhacks on lowly computers like mine - for example: Cyvern. - and its best to only use when necessary.
2.5: improved the tile-based speedhacks a bit, reducing cpu load a little bit.
3: Synced up the music a bit better in most games.
4: "Gals Panic S - Extra Edition" has sfx/music issues still, can't figure it out (even with all hacks disabled).  This is the only game with issues, though.  Will have to dig deeper, it's probably another issue with the sh2 timers that I havn't forseen.  Will revisit this one later.

best regards,
- dink