Welcome!

I'm pretty incompetent and don't really know what I'm doing, so I was hoping somebody wouldn't mind explaining what's going on with the nBIOS variable in the Neo Geo driver. I'm really not a coder, so I'm only understanding the bare minimum of what's going on here: an external variable (nBIOS) is being read and different hex values are being returned based on the value of nBIOS.

For example, in d_neogeo.cpp, we have the following code snippet:

// This is actually set by a jumper on the PCB
UINT16 __fastcall KogReadWord(UINT32)
{
   extern INT32 nBIOS;
   if (nBIOS == 5 || nBIOS == 8 || nBIOS == 9 || nBIOS == 10 || nBIOS == 13 || nBIOS == 15) {
      return 0xff00;
   } else {
      return 0xff01;
   }
}

I have no idea what this is doing. My best guess: it's checking which BIOS is currently in use and returning one of two values based on ... the PCB jumper layout associated with that BIOS version? But I'm not sure where those values come from. My primary question is, what does the nBIOS value represent and where can I find that information in the code? Secondarily, how much does this affect emulation, if at all? What would go wrong if I got these numbers wrong?

Thanks so much for any help!

(as a side note) If my moderating is too extremist for anyone posting in this thread    either:

1) post your unrelated (but legal) stuff in a different thread, in the correct forum

2) ask myself or another admin to delete your account (if that's what you want)

3) just ignore it! It's nothing personal, I just want to keep this thread on topic.

Dear fellow criminals,

Weird.. it's almost like it's one rule for the emulation community and another rule for Capcom. Lets be honest here..

1. We've all been stealing from Capcom for nearly 2 decades (don't say you haven't, because I know you have). But,
2. As soon as Capcom takes (or buys?) something from the emulation community, they're an evil company? Come on,
3. We break the law (almost) every time we open FB Alpha. And,
4. By contributing to FB Alpha, we help other people break the law.
5. It's not like Capcom took the emulator and sold it as a standalone product.
6. We're actively losing Capcom business - I, and many others, won't be buying the Capcom Home Arcade System because we already have arcade sticks and FB Alpha (whoops).

Seems like everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Except for you guys.. you're all innocent.. so innocent.

Their's no way in hell Barry rewrote the code (we all know it), but it's not even out until October, so their's nothing you can do until then. He's either a dick or, as someone else said, just plain wrong. But until you can prove it, I don't think it's worth crying over. I don't think any of this is worth crying over. And it certainly isn't worth censoring people and falling out over. I've only been here a week and I'm already sick of hearing about this, but people shouldn't be deleting posts. And if people continue to do so I won't be around for much longer. I think someone owes Arcadez an apology. I'm more bothered about this than the Capcom Home Arcade System. If I can't express myself, even if I'm wrong, we have a problem.

I tried to spread a c'est la vie attitude with my last 2 posts on this thread, but I guess it didn't rub off on anyone, so I'm trying a different approach. I obviously don't believe those 6 points 100%, but there is some truth to it that people aren't grasping. The point is we should listen to different opinions, no matter how triggered we are.

Before anyone says I'm just kissing Capcom's arse.. I really couldn't care less about Capcom. They're an entity designed to make the most amount of money possible, with the least amount of effort. Though, they have started making decent games again recently (SF4, SF5, SF Collection, DMC5, RE2R, etc), so props to them for that.

Software licenses are in important thing tho, and posts like this, trying to act like they don't matter because of x/y/z are not really helpful.

The fact is, FBA and the emulation community have never been selling Capcom's work without permission.  Sure, people use Capcom's IP in their spare time, but no money is exchanging hands and the FBA devs are not distributing anything owned by Capcom.

Capcom (well Koch Media) on the other hand IS selling our (the community's) work without permission.  As above, we don't care what they're doing with our software it in their spare time if no money is exchanging hands, but in this case it is.

There's no real double standard here, it's just if you're doing something on a commercial level, and making money out of it, you need to do it right; the FBA license and copyrights are just as valid and important as the Capcom ones in that situation.

If we wanted to sell Capcom's stuff, we would need a license from Capcom, and would rightly expect to get shut down if we didn't have one or made false claims that somebody had licensed Capcom's IP to us for commercial use and went ahead with selling things anyway.  There are likely licensing agreements Capcom had that meant (in a similar way to how FBA can't be licensed commercially) that even Capcom can't offer certain licenses to commercial use any more (I was actually surprised by AVP since that one is often tricky to get licenses for) and again, those can't just be ignored either in a commercial product just because licensing them has become impossible.  You can't say that just because Capcom made The Punisher game they can ignore Marvel's commercial licensing terms, just as they can't ignore FBA's licensing terms.  Every single part holds the same value.

Emulators are not illegal pieces of software, they're compatibility layers, something closer to an media player (VLC etc.) but for software where the hardware emulations are like the codecs.  I've also stated very clearly elsewhere that the motives behind a lot of the development (at least for MAME) have absolutely nothing to do with people actually playing the games (even if some people do find this inconceivable) so the scene has never even been about 'stealing from Capcom' at least on a development level.  With CPS2 for example, the research into the encryption, revival of dead original boards etc. is a direct result of the research the community has done and on a personal level I'd say 100 times more interesting than people playing the games.  It's actually quite insulting to see the hobby dismissed as simply piracy like you're trying to do, when in reality it's an entire support network for this old tech based on software that we've legitimately spent our time (which is just as valuable as Capcom's time or Koch Media's time) researching, writing and developing, maintaining etc.

In this case, the developers of FBA / FB decided on a policy where they didn't want anybody to be profiting from the work, and all contributions were made with that understanding, and that is fair enough.

You're basically saying science is an illegitimate field of work and that the rights of those working is said field don't matter.  That isn't the case, it never has been.

If you're doing things commercially you _have to_ do things the right way.  Emulation is already saving people a ton of work and making things as easy as possible, but if lines have been drawn, they can't be ignored.

I don't appreciate you trying to basically just paint everybody as pirates stealing from Capcom just because maybe your primary reason for doing this has been playing games for free and then somehow use it to justify what is happening here.

Yeah, the current code will go through different previews if they are available.  I might take a closer look as we are already using the video for window stuff for the avi recording, so it might not be too difficult.

yea i will agree the post removed were off topic dont see it as censorship at all was just off topic. I do apologize for my part in it.

It did start by someone suggesting using the the libretto license then turned into a libretro vs stand alone nonsense thats another debate.