Topic: What I have been working on (Kev's work in progress)

[Kev]

As I have been working on the SNES driver a bit after a many year gap, I got to the position where I needed more test roms. For years, I have wanted a way of loading roms for the non arcade systems that didn't require the rom being added to the main game selection dialog.

After a bit of thought I figured one way of doing it was to create a new driver structure (BurnSlot) that has a link back to a normal BurnDrv driver. After some messing around, I have started to get it working in the way I thought it should be. Basically, there is a new load option, which when selected, pops up a window to select the system to load (currently only Sega Master System, Spectrum and snes), and then allows you to select a rom.

It looks a bit like the attached screenshot.

TODO:
* Make it work with zip roms (should be pretty easy)
* Add support for other platforms. As the console/computer drivers tend to be a bit more free-form than the arcade drivers this does require a few code changes/additions to the drivers but none that are hopefully too horrible!
* Currently, it requires a BurnSlot for each configuration of a specific system, so e.g. for snes, there will be 3 systems to choose from to start with (USA/NTSC, EURO/PAL, JAP/PAL). This might get a bit complicated with SMS for example as you have all the different region SMS systems and also Game Gear. The cool thing with this though is that you can e.g. load a game on a different region console. The downside is that there might end up with a lot of systems to choose from
* The UI needs work. I can't figure out how to edit the resource files without causing issues, so I have re-purposed the language download dialog for now.
* Translations need adding for the UI
* I am still not sure this is the greatest idea ever as bug reports might happen for bad roms.

Hopefully I can get this to the stage where it can be merged into the main git without my shitty code upsetting any of the other devs 

[dink]

Hi Kev,
Nice work   I long for the day to play super gng in fba!

Back with the sms driver I started working on a loader for non-romset loads, but came to the conclusion that getting fba-features: "most recent games", states, input settings, replay, etc. working right with it would not be feasible without adding a mountain of kludges, so abandoned the idea and wrote a proggy to convert mame hash .xml's to fba style rom entries.  problem solved

best regards,
- dink

[Kev]

Yes, some of those features might be better disabled when using this loader. That's probably the easy short term solution anyway. Things like controller config are saved per system, so it's only save states/replays/most recent games that are going to be the issue unless it saves the whole rom area as well, which I could argue is never going to happen.

Either way, this is only ever going to be used as a "bonus" to the full on game select dialog, and the way I have done it means once it's all cleaned up, we should only need a few extra driver structs and one or two new init routines per driver. Hopefully this means it won't create a massive maintenance overhead.  I could also see it being disabled in release builds and just have it there for running test roms on the systems, but that can be decided later

Super GNG is getting a bit further than it was, but all the capcom games seem to crash after the Capcom logo. It is next on my list to look once this is done though

[Bad Dude]

Good to see SNES on FBNEO. I'll follow the progress, for sure! 

[barbudreadmon]

Long time i didn't play some snes rpg, looking forward to doing it on FBNeo .

[Bad Dude]

I go with Contra: The alien wars 

[Arcadez]

Super Adventure Island is where it's at @kev some good progress here nice to see it.

[Fulg0re]

Well it would be awesome if this will work cause there are some games which do not run perfect  than on a real snes.
I am running a lot of emus on my pc. FBNEO up the most modern high end emus for racing and shmups games of the latest generation. They all work nearly perfect. But no snes Emu does. Especially if you wanna play these games which do have all the high end graphic chips involved. 3DFX, Mode 7. I have never seen Axelay running great. I do know what I am talking about cause I have many original hardware and games. If this works.... This would be awesome!!!!!

[Kev]

Without starting from scratch and spending a few years on it (which is possible I guess) the driver probably won't ever support all the games. It's better than it was now I have fixed some bugs but countless remain and probably will for a while. I can certainly concentrate on getting the suggested ones working though. 

[Kev]

Needed a break from the snes driver as there are too many CPU bugs to get my head around, so did some work on another old driver.

[dink]

OMG, this is my favorite Tetris version ever!
please tell me it has sound

best regards,
- dink

Needed a break from the snes driver as there are too many CPU bugs to get my head around, so did some work on another old driver.

[Kev]

OMG, this is my favorite Tetris version ever!
please tell me it has sound

best regards,
- dink

I've been working on sound today. It's making noise at least but not anything that sounds like Tetris lol

[Kev]

made a hacky attempt at adding CHD support for NeoCD via libchdr. Seem to have an annoying error where the data seems to be -16 bytes off where it should be. Probably won't look at it for a long while but if anyone wants to take a stab at fixing whatever I've done wrong, the branch is on https://github.com/tmaul/FBNeo/tree/chdsupport

Only has VS2019 build support, I have not updated the makefiles for any of the other compilers.

[dink]

so not interested, sorry
all the bloat crap added to support chd, :/

[dink]

Things that will need to be updated if/when chd works:
burner/win32/neocdlist.cpp
burner/win32/neocdsel.cpp