Author Topic: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation  (Read 75661 times)

Offline el_rika

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #135 on: May 02, 2019, 03:18:32 PM »
what many other features ?

I can give some examples on android platform, where Retroarch allows use of many great shaders, great overlay controls, best speed on the platform and overall great variety and customisation. 

Of course, i'm probably one on the 5 people in the world that plays these games on the phone so...feel free to ignore my opinion.

grant2258

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #136 on: May 02, 2019, 03:55:10 PM »
I can give some examples on android platform, where Retroarch allows use of many great shaders, great overlay controls, best speed on the platform and overall great variety and customisation. 

Of course, i'm probably one on the 5 people in the world that plays these games on the phone so...feel free to ignore my opinion.

Again afaik there are no official android fba builds so lr is your only choice on that platform. It just re iterates what i said before lower spec platforms is where LR can so some good because there is no other choice.

That doesnt mean is good for other platforms where the standalone emulators are ripped of features when ported to lr because it doesnt fit the model.  Quiet frankly LR providing shaders and overlays might seem nice to you. Having a frontend with no gui support( ie the ablility to press a yes/no button or display a message saying a rom is missing and wait for a confirmation button press)   within core in this day and ages is quite frankly a step backwards

kev

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #137 on: May 02, 2019, 04:21:07 PM »
I created a pull request on the new repo to update the fba licence with a link to the old MAME licence. I have done this on my phone so it's messy, to say the least! If MAMEDev want us to put something more specific please let us know.

P.S. well done to whomever changed Trebble_winners forum sig lol
« Last Edit: May 02, 2019, 04:23:44 PM by kev »

Offline Stifu

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #138 on: May 04, 2019, 03:44:18 PM »
Great job with the fork and all, guys.

About libretro... It's not perfect, but I like it quite a bit, and am thankful for barbudreadmon's work. To be honest, although I like FBA very much, its GUI is a mess (it's its weakest point, in my opinion), which is why I'd rather use the libretro version to avoid it. It just works.

Offline dink

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #139 on: May 04, 2019, 06:52:06 PM »
Great job with the fork and all, guys.

About libretro... It's not perfect, but I like it quite a bit, and am thankful for barbudreadmon's work. To be honest, although I like FBA very much, its GUI is a mess (it's its weakest point, in my opinion), which is why I'd rather use the libretro version to avoid it. It just works.

Hehe that's funny, I feel exactly the opposite - I love FBA's gui.   but - different strokes for different folks.

best regards,
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Offline Stifu

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #140 on: May 05, 2019, 02:50:07 AM »
Hehe that's funny, I feel exactly the opposite - I love FBA's gui.   but - different strokes for different folks.

best regards,
- dink

Off the top of my head:
  • Defining ROM paths is slow and not flexible (max limit of 20, sub folders not supported)
  • I'm always confused whether gamepad settings will be specific to a game or shared, and keep restoring default buttons by mistake
  • ROM scanning is slow (maybe some kind of cache could be put in place to make rescanning faster?)
  • Game genres are awkward to use (they were probably fine back when we didn't have dozens of categories) and should probably be replaced by some kind of tag system

I know some of these things have been improved, but it's still a pain to use to me.

Offline barbudreadmon

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #141 on: May 05, 2019, 04:05:44 AM »
Personally i think retroarch's way to scan roms is extremely confusing, which is why i always end up using external frontends or command line to launch roms xD, the UI with its hundreds of settings is also totally overwhelming at first.

grant2258

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #142 on: May 05, 2019, 02:23:04 PM »
Off the top of my head:
  • Defining ROM paths is slow and not flexible (max limit of 20, sub folders not supported)
  • I'm always confused whether gamepad settings will be specific to a game or shared, and keep restoring default buttons by mistake
  • ROM scanning is slow (maybe some kind of cache could be put in place to make rescanning faster?)
  • Game genres are awkward to use (they were probably fine back when we didn't have dozens of categories) and should probably be replaced by some kind of tag system

I know some of these things have been improved, but it's still a pain to use to me.


and whats the Ra alternatives to this how are your sorting your genres, listing UN-avialble roms, listing only cave games ect? I dont really know why anyone would have more than 20 directories. 

The scanner is slow for a reason because it scans your roms properly.

Im really surprised you prefer an option that only scans directories with a torrent zip crc to list a roms details else youll have to just use the zip filenames. So all you have is a list of games with no way to sort the list at all. If you love not having a gui im sure you will love RA each to there own I would say the gui is a big selling point to use the stand alone.

Offline Stifu

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #143 on: May 05, 2019, 04:45:14 PM »
and whats the Ra alternatives to this how are your sorting your genres, listing UN-avialble roms, listing only cave games ect? I dont really know why anyone would have more than 20 directories.

EmulationStation can now filter by genre if I'm not mistaken, although I haven't tried recent versions because I'd rather update later.
I don't care about unavailable ROMs, because I've already fully built my game list at that point (I build my game list on Windows then play games on my Pi).
I might reach 20 directories while building my game list. I'd rather avoid having to define 20 directories, which is why I wish files were searched recursively, which would allow me to just define the root folder. 20 is a static, arbitrary limit that could just be dynamic.

The scanner is slow for a reason because it scans your roms properly.

No doubt there is a reason why it's so slow, and no doubt there are alternatives to that.

Im really surprised you prefer an option that only scans directories with a torrent zip crc to list a roms details else youll have to just use the zip filenames. So all you have is a list of games with no way to sort the list at all.

You know full game titles, genres, etc can be scraped, right?

If you love not having a gui im sure you will love RA each to there own I would say the gui is a big selling point to use the stand alone.

I don't love not having a GUI, I just don't like the FBA one. It gets the job done, but the UX and performances can definitely be improved.

grant2258

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #144 on: May 05, 2019, 05:27:13 PM »
all the information to make the rom names for emulation station are in the dats that mame and fba generate. There is no need to scrape at all I personally use a script i made for the pi to create the names form the dat with the zip romnames. From what I understand you using emulation station as a launcher and not ra itself. So it makes sense you dont have any issues because your not using RA itself.

Al the information required is in the source code itself thats why gui is important for a core to have to do functions like this. Data can be added to the dat file to be parsed in emulation station though if its needed you would need to request it though. We have rom names and the year for the game as well as the rom data. So that's enough to make a game list for emulation station.

As far as validation goes you could ask the authors to add an option not to validate the rom but it really needs done with split sets and such the filename.zip isint enough if people want to know there roms are working.

Offline Stifu

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #145 on: May 05, 2019, 05:34:02 PM »
Right, I don't use RetroArch directly.

As far as validation goes you could ask the authors to add an option not to validate the rom but it really needs done with split sets and such the filename.zip isint enough if people want to know there roms are working.

But it's redundant as far as I'm concerned, as I'm already validating my ROMs with RomCenter. I believe that's the point of letting users extract game list dat files.
Also, if I just add one game to my list, I certainly don't want to rescan and revalidate all of my other ROMs just to make that new game show up as available.

Offline barbudreadmon

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #146 on: May 05, 2019, 05:58:38 PM »
Please stay on the original subject.

grant2258

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #147 on: May 06, 2019, 01:23:17 PM »
Yea well on subject let libretro deal with its own ports and license issues. FBA has strengths to remain standalone no point in loosing its identity when it clearly has strengths on stand alone imho :).

kev

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #148 on: May 07, 2019, 04:50:48 AM »
(I removed some not related posts about RA. Also this post contains swearing)

So to give a bit of an update. I emailed Capcom and Koch Media on the day of the announcement of the arcade stick. Here is a probably out of order list of what has happened so far. I am not quoting directly from any emails as I am not sure if that is even legal here in the UK, and if this does get as far as going to court I don't want to have f***ed up in any way.

Capcom

Capcom are the only people to respond so far. I don't want to say they don't care, but the reply they sent back was pretty much along the lines of "we licenced the roms to Koch, please go away", so that is what I am doing.

Koch

No reply so far. I have sent them an email linking to this thread, the threads on Reddit, the video by lantus, and even Barry's own twitter post, the FB licence, etc to give them an idea of why this is not legal. No response so far.

Barry

Interestingly I had an email from Barry. It originally went to my Spam folder, I guess because he is a traitor. To paraphrase:

  • Asked me to stop contacting Capcom
  • He said that the "stripped down version of FB Alpha" that he licenced for use in the capcom arcade stick contains no code written by me, and any code from MAME has been re-ported from the GPL3 licenced MAME, which means it's fine for commercial use. I guess they don't know that this is still not legal due to the licence of FB Alpha, which is not GPL3 compatible and also is NON f***ING COMMERCIAL LIKE THE LICENCE SAYS.
  • He also asked that I stop spreading incorrect statements online. I don't believe I have spread any incorrect statements online. If anything I was giving them the benefit of the doubt for a while. IMO, they are pricks.
  • The wording of the email makes it seem like he thinks he speaks for all the FB Alpha team. He does not speak for any of them other than himself.

That pretty much covers what has happened so far, and I am still pursuing this with Koch. I am not replying to Barry at all, as he couldn't be bothered to a) speak to the devs separately b) acknowledge any of this publicly c) attempted to kill an almost 20 year old open source project due to what I can only assume was for money.

Offline barbudreadmon

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Re: Capcom Home Arcade stick using FB Alpha Emulation
« Reply #149 on: May 07, 2019, 05:36:21 AM »
  • He said that the "stripped down version of FB Alpha" that he licenced for use in the capcom arcade stick contains no code written by me, and any code from MAME has been re-ported from the GPL3 licenced MAME, which means it's fine for commercial use. I guess they don't know that this is still not legal due to the licence of FB Alpha, which is not GPL3 compatible and also is NON f***ING COMMERCIAL LIKE THE LICENCE SAYS.

The supposedly stripped down version contains at the very least dave's work, and dave didn't give authorization for re-licensing (confirmed in youtube discussion below lantus's video).
Or, if he really did rewrite everything from scratch using code from GPL3 licenced MAME :
- that can't be called FB Alpha so they'll have to remove their statement about using FB Alpha
- code needs to be made public

(Thanks for cleaning up the topic)