Topic: INFO: How to play Power Drift in FBAlpha

[dink]

Just fyi, fixed a little bug where the arrow keys would move the slider while mapping them.  d'oh!

[dink]

Hi phozz,
tonight I did a bit of debugging, comparing the old vs. current emulation again and made some adjustments, please grab the latest exe's from the repo:
https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/releases/tag/latest

The previous setting might be OK:
input  "Steering"         slider 0xcb 0xcd speed 0x800 center 10
If that doesn't feel quite right, try this one:
input  "Steering"         slider 0xcb 0xcd speed 0x700 center 10

best regards,
- dink

[phozz]

Thanks for the quick responses and the effort. Unfortunately I can't see an improvement in nightly 1f46da0, the steering is still nowhere as responsive as it was in FBA.
Here's a little experiment you can do to see just how sluggish the steering has become. The specific ROM I'm testing is Power Drift (World, Rev A).
Insert a coin and see how many times you can move the course selection cursor with the arrow keys from one side to the other (A to E, then back to A again) before the time runs out.
With FBA I can do this 13 times, with the current nightly it's down to 9 or 8 depending on the speed setting of 0x700 or 0x800 respectively. I see no improvement with other values.

You mentioned that bugs occurred in the game because of the steering; I play this game often and intensively and the only bugs I've seen are:
(A) rarely I'm listed as second place even though I'm clearly ahead of everyone else (and the car behind me finishes after me and gets #1), and
(B) in the Extra Stage with the fighter jet, sometimes the first three AI cars run at full speed and it's impossible to pass them so I finish at #4.
Are these bugs related to steering? To be honest they hardly bother me.

[dink]

I'll get to the bottom of this, hopefully today

Curiosly, are you using 0x800 for the speed on .43?  I can't seem to get above 10 A-E's on .43 with 0x800, but with 0xe00, no problem.  Maybe its just me

The 2 things you've mentioned seem like how Sega programmed the game, usually we can't influence game logic like that, unless there is some sort of difficulty setting to be changed.

best regards,
- dink

[phozz]

Yes, speed is set to 0x800 on FBA 0.2.97.43. Can easily switch 12 to 13 times with the arrow keys. So if you can do 10 on FBA, how many can you do on Neo? Do you notice the difference like I did?
Good luck in your investigation

[dink]

phozz,
Thanks for helping me better understand the issue!  Please give the latest exe a try

best regards,
- dink

[phozz]

It's much better, but control is still not quite as sharp as in FBA 43. The car is still a little slow to change direction in response to an arrow key and will still skid sideways for too long after I've released the arrow key. In the game's built-in diagnostic however it looks like the exact opposite is happening - according to the displayed hex values the wheel is both responding faster and centering faster!

So really I don't know what to say. I wish we could just restore the behavior from FBA, it really was perfection and it seems to me that there was no need to change anything. In your comments in the source code I see you wrote "Power Drift gets confused if there is a large change between steering values - making the car very difficult to control" - I've never seen such a problem when playing with the keyboard. You mentioned earlier that this occurred with joysticks and other forms of input, I assume this is because an analog joystick's input value can vary much quicker than a physical steering wheel - that's understood, but perhaps you can make the fix apply only in that case and not for digital (=keyboard) inputs?

[dink]

phozz, that's a good idea - I've added a dip to enable/disable the steering fix to hopefully solve the problem, let me know how it goes
best regards,
- dink

[phozz]

It goes really really well. It's perfect. Thank you.
My only comment is that there needs to be some documentation somewhere that states that this new setting is not technically a DIP switch (it's not something that existed in the original arcade machine) and what exactly it's intended to fix. I suppose a good place to do that would be in the Notes that appear when choosing the game in the Select Game dialog, but I leave the decision up to you.
I think this is the first time since the original Final Burn (which was released in what, 2002?) that Power Drift is fully playable on an emulator on keyboard without tweaking some obscure setting. Congrats

[dink]

That's good news   Thanks for helping me get it right!

I would like to make an attempt at improving the fix so that it won't cause any side effects at all, would you be willing to test it again if I do come up with something?

best regards,
- dink

[phozz]

Sure. But please don't break it 

[dink]

After a bit of thinking on this one: it's not going to work when using a keyslider - since it basically does the same thing (at the driver level).  Oh well   Carry on!

best regards,
- dink

[Pipeline79]

Hi, this is a question for Phozz:

How are the controls supposed to work in Power Drift?  I've been trying with MAME (0.247) and an xbox 360 controller on Windows this afternoon.

By controls I mean the steering.  And MAME classifies it as a paddle.  If I set the Left Stick X-axis to the paddle (not Paddle Inc/Dec), the way it seems to work is that it turns the wheel relatively left and right - which seems wrong.  If I'm coming out of a corner I have to push the stick past centre in the opposite direction to get the car going straight again - which is way difficult.  If I set it to just Increase/Decrease the paddle and the auto-centering comes into effect it's much more playable.

I think I saw a post from 2006 or something where someone was complaining about this and I think a MAME dev said that's just how the game was - although I didn't really understand his explanation.

I haven't tried the FB Neo implementation yet that you've been discussing, but the way it's working in MAME really threw me - it's almost like it's working the opposite way I would expect.  I don't know if say, using an actual spinner-like device with a wheel would be more playable with things like this.

Just wondered if someone could explain this to me.

[phozz]

Sorry, I've never had any luck with this game under MAME, and I've only ever tried playing with the keyboard or a steering wheel. I'm not really an expert, sorry if the high quality of my complaints made it seem like I am