Tux

Most of the changes in this one are for the dos version and were released as 0.96.6 for dos anyway, but : - fixed an amazing bug for pengo which was here since 0.43.2, that was in september 2005 !!! See the thread in the forum if you want details. - galaga will now display a message when loaded if it can't find anything for the explosion sample, you can ignore it, it's for info. - gui fixes : games states, transparency, length of game title + size at bottom of screen. - a new "color theme", it was just because I noticed the dos version had actually 3 color themes, but it was done simply by rotating the colors rgb values, here it's a little more involved. Anyway the red theme had been forgotten in the sdl versions... http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

And finally fixed the text truncation, for info the string was cut at 99 characters long because we still need finite buffers to store strings, it seemed to me that 99 characters was way enough for name (size), but some crazy games like samshope seem to need more... I think this name should be shortened, but I enlarged the buffer to 200 characters to avoid this kind of problem in the future anyway.

Didn't know it neither, might be very old, it's not amongst the most played games... ! Reproducible with the asm version too... It was extremely old indeed, from between 0.43.1 & 0.43.2 ! But it was a stupid mistake, related to how regions with more than 1 gfx layout are handled, the big target here was cps2, and it got most of the work, and pengo stayed with some not totally finished code, which produced this effect. The fix is 2 lines only actually, but it took me quite a while to find out what happened ! Thanks for the report !

Updated the rained-0.96.6.7z archive on the site, the only changes inside are related to sh2 emulation explained in the previous post, date of the exe inside : 14th of January !

I had a look at this PCem, it indeed looks interesting, but where is the documentation ? Since there is no interface, how do you want to use this without any documentation ?!!! Even in the forum there is no basic documentation, no default configuration file, nothing, it's quite extreme ! I found the github repository containing all the bioses but they are useless without a minimum set of documentation... If you have a link on how to start using this thing, I am interested... ! Ok, understood, you need the windows version to get the interface, the guys who wrote this are heavily addicted to microsoft... ! But the good news is that it runs fine in wine, and so I can create the config file this way ! Crappy way to do things though... ! After testing on a pentium2-300 with pcem (splendid emulation of the machine this time, this emulator is really THE emulator for dos), gunbird2 runs perfectly with a solid 60 fps. I saw a zooming problem during the intro, specific to this dos version (the flying carpet man while he approaches), I don't know why, but at least it runs smoothly with a serious margin, even with sound (soundblaster 16, 22 Khz). For reference, this sh2 runs at 57/2 MHz, but with almost all instructions taking only 1 cycle (risc), so I'd say it's equivalent to at least twice this frequency for a "normal" cpu. Which means good emulation, raine honor is safe ! I thought about trying some heavy optimizations on this one, I didn't want to do it first because the driver would loose in readability and I didn't think it would make a big difference. After this test I am sure I don't need to do it ! Thanks for the info on pcem though, not sure it will be useful soon because maintaining the dos version today would be crazy as I said, but it's good to know there is a way to test this properly. For info the linux version sucks, no configuration manager which makes it useless alone, and when I try to run it with the config created in wine, it just crashes without any message. As I said these guys are heavily addicted to microsoft, but their program is good anyway (the windows version!) The only advantage of dosbox is that you don't need to create a disk image, but the emulation is less precise for sure on this kind of thing, I could even select a mach 64 gx to have 2d acceleration and then run univbe on it using pcem, quite impressive, even if I was limited to 512x384 16bpp for this test, but it was enough (and the resolutions < 512x384 in 8bpp are all broken in vesa3 for some reason, it seems their emulation isn't totally perfect here). But all this is quite impressive compared to what we had so far ! edit : PCem being quite fascinating to use, I fixed the crash in 8bpp, and the black sprites in 16 bpp for the dos version, this was just that color depths other than 32bpp were badly handled, and 8bpp was crashing because of an overflow in the color map. It's likely that other 24bpp games have problems in 8bpp in dos then, maybe I'll check that later. About 60% cpu free during most the intro on a pentium2-300 in 8bpp, I'd say it runs quite well ! The colors look a little pale in 8bpp, it's normal, it's the effect of the color conversion to fit all this in a 256 colors palette, switch to 16 bpp if you want bright colors ! I didn't find a way to mount directly a vhd in linux yet, I found something on the net about that but it doesn't seem to work, so I work on the vdi used by virtualbox, and then convert it to vhd for PCem using some virtualbox tool, really sub-optimal, but even if that's quite a lot of steps, it's quick to do and manageable. Oh well, I think I'll be able to stop here for now ! The proper way to mount a vhd in linux : https://devicetests.com/mount-virtual-hard-disk-ubuntu (method 1 works perfectly).

I had a dosemu env which worked not too bad to run the dos version, but dosemu seems to have a lot of trouble to reach their 2.0 version and it's getting hard to make it work, plus it was running at the current speed of the cpu, not emulated, at least it was very fast ! I didn't know pcem, emulator for ibm pc and clones ? And it can even run the dos version ? Wow, I'll have to test it one day then !

1 & 2 fixed in git, I'll keep 3 for later... !

Didn't think of anything, it can read command.dat, but not display it ! So it's enough, updated the download page, it appears below the 2 other binaries, 2.4 Mb, including history.dat and hiscore.dat, these 2 are handled. http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Well I had disabled ips support in the dos version yesterday, but after thinking about it I added it today : there is almost nothing to do to add it, but without gui of course, the dos gui is crazy to program. But anyway it recognizes the ips directory and any file it contains, which means if you load a rom whose short name is a, and you have a file ips/a.ini containing a list of files to load from ips/a directory, it will do so. I just tested it with an ips I got for bublbobl, and it works perfectly, it's primitive, but it works ! At least it will be a decent version... ! I'll keep it a little longer to see if I think about something else...

Yeah I did it for that too, still a ton of respect for it even if it's outdated now.

1) Yeah I didn't test it, it would be easier to just remove the option... ! Don't worry, I'll test it... 2) did you at least read what I wrote about editing the colors or reverting to the default themes for that ? Either edit your bg color or revert, or even better revert 1st, and if it's still not enough for you then edit the bg color manually. 3) Nope obviously, didn't do it (boring and uninteresting, but yeah should be done one day). Yeah that's what he is already, and he loves that, too bad he can't code to help to fix these things... !

And here is the conclusion : If someone wants to test this, I'll release the binary... a very last dos version, that was the least I could do ! The not maintained anymore is not totally true, I improved the message box in the allegro gui for this version, I wanted galaga to be able to display a message on a few lines and it was not supported in dos, now it is. But I won't do any major change on it despite its problems, it would be too crazy now... !

And here's a screenshot of the result, gunbird2 running in a dosbox session : It's extremely slow, 6 fps and non constant, it crashes in 8bpp for some unknown reason on the colour mapper, it requires more ram than I ever saw in a dos machine (287 Mb displayed here !), but it works !!! Well, it wouldn't work at all on an old machine because of the ram requirement anyway, but maybe it would be faster, this cpu emulation isn't really very efficient... But at least it's good to be able to optimize stuff ! (and it takes forever to load too !).

Yeah I check everything is working or at least can be compiled. This dos version is really hard to test nowdays. The good news is that it works quite well with dosbox-x, an extended version of dosbox, with cputype = ppro_slow, and memsize = 64 at least. The rdtsc emulation is broken, so you can't even access the rdtsc counter with the f11 key, but except that the rest seems to work alright. I hope that nobody uses the dos version nowadays, except me because I am curious to see how it works now ! It would need a few improvements, like that sample support from the galaxian driver, for now all this is simply disabled. same thing for the galaga explosion... But oh well too much work, not enough use, I'll probably leave it as it is now, at least it works, even if not perfect. The debug build of raine doesn't work in dosbox, it needs an optimized build otherwise it's just too slow ! That was fun seeing it running anyway !

Ok, just release 0.96.6, no new topic because it's exactly the same kind as the previous one, small things. The difference is that this time there is no new game : - what I hope will be the curl final fix, see a few posts higher in this topic for more info, everything should finally work as expected, it will create html files for index in the raine directory when needed. - a fix for savegames in the gui which showed by mistake the clones saves at the same time, this thing is never used, really. - the neogeo saveram can be saved by game to preserver hiscores, or shared as the neogeo hardware did and as we did until now. Option in neogeo/neocd options. - Fixed the colors selection in the gui (gui options / colors), they were broken since the switch to sdl2 ! and slightly improved the look of the green theme by the way. - The old behavior of the sdl1 gui where menus appeared behind dialogs in transparency is restored, it's only for dialogs, those having a black title bar. You can update the blue theme either by going to gui options / colors / revert to... and choose green, then blue, then exit and the colors are updated. Or edit the bg color in this same menu, and set alpha to 0xc0, same result. Or you can do nothing to keep the old one, but then don't complain if the transparency makes things hard to read sometimes ! The rest are super minor changes, not worth detailing here... http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Well finally I got curious about that, why not unleash all the crazy transparency from opengl instead ? And I got this : You have 2 menus and 1 dialog overlapping each other (you can see a very small part of the main menu at the very top, the top of the "Load game" line), plus some moving lines in the background, and the whole thing takes 0% cpu, because transparency was made in software mode in sdl1 but here it's in hardware mode and all this is natural for opengl... ! I had to make the dialogs more opaque to preserve some readability, so you'll have to go to gui options / colors / revert to, to reset the alpha channel to its new default value, either that or adjust the bg color manually (I fixed the color dialog, it was broken since the switch to sdl2, the colors are handled differently in sdl2 and nobody noticed, oh well...). Maybe that's a little too much ? I'll wait a bit, but for now I think it's still very readable ! edit : finally I had to limit myself and revert to something more like what there was with the sdl1 gui, that is : draw the background menu only if the top most menu is a dialog (that is, it has black title bar attached to the menu, no top or bottom frame on screen). The reason is the game selection dialog, the main menu was hiding most of the background picture, which makes the feature useless. That's that, or remake completely differently this game selection dialog. Maybe one day, but not soon for sure... !

It's because with the sdl1 gui you saw the video options menu behind it and for more readability you needed to have this one non transparent. Now I hadn't even noticed that now that the desktop background is drawn (the lines), we don't see anymore the background menu ! Oh well, this gui is not really a multi window system, so I am not going to try to recover the disappeared menu in the background, it would be outside its scope, but maybe restore the transparency here now yeah... !

The Shared, yeah probably right, I'll see that eventually. SDL2, it's the 2.28.3 in raine for now, 2.28.5 on the site, so these are just minor fixes. You have the list of changes displayed in the release page in github : https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases and they also list the changes in their whatsnew file inside the archive if you get it from somewhere else. Nothing major for us, these are just minor bugfix releases. Apparently their main branch is switched to sdl3 so I guess they will probably release that in a not too far future... Hopefully the switch will be less painful for applications... ! For the way too long name of the game : yeah I thought about that when copying and pasting the info from fbneo, I am tempted to just cut some part from it, but I can also remove any restriction on the length in the gui, now that it's fully opengl there is no risk to display off limits... I'll see, minor problem anyway.

Yeah the soft dips, I forgot the soft dips are stored there too, but not all the neogeo games have soft dips.

... and I disagree ! But, if you want, you can update the brazilian translation and put that in CAPITALS then (for the brazilian language only) !

Well it's done, you can choose to have the Neo-Geo saveram shared or per game in the neogeo options now. The default remains shared because the original hardware works like that, and I never missed any neogeo hiscore so far, but I agree it's a design mistake, these scores should go to the memory card and not to the shared ram. Too bad we don't get our hands on the source code of one of these games, but it's probably horrible to read, they probably had crazy delays to release stuff as fast as possible, but it's too bad to have lost all that anyway. the design mistake is probably because at the time even if the games are on some big cartridges, they didn't change that often and when the owner changed a game usually it didn't go back to the previous one, it was just to make some money with a new game. But they missed the point that the saveram should get exploitation info only (how many games for how much time), the hiscores are more player related and should go to the memory card. Oh yeah, for the transition if the file <game name>.saveram doesn't exist yet, the saveram is read from neogeo.saveram, it's just saved in the end into <game name>.saveram. The .nv files you found are probably compatible if their size is exactly 65536 bytes.

I had a quick look at what mame does, and they save this "nvram" (that's how they call the saveram) separately for each game, no option there, and since fbneo is based on mame, they do the same. Oh well, might do the same too, I'll think about it. Well if you can use a mouse reliably in your living room you are more lucky than me, on my side keyboard only !

I would advise a cable-less keyboard for this kind of case ! I hate this kind of keyboard for normal use, but for this use specifically it turns the keyboard into a remote control ! If you also install some dvr program which can run without any mouse, it can become quite awesome !

It doesn't say anything like that ! The eeprom is saved by raine too but there is no eeprom in the neogeo. Its nv files are probably the contents of the memory card. The neogeo saveram is bigger, 64k, nowdays 64k is nothing, but at the time non volatile ram was very expensive, it was the same thing for the ps1 "card" where it stored its saves, it was a few kb also at the time. Well I never understood why the games don't save their hiscores in their memory card, would seem more reasonable to avoid any overwrite. Plus it seems it has a memory card for both modes, aes/mvs here (for samsho2pe). Well I am not a super big fan of 64k files / neogeo game where only a tiny portion of the file would be used. Eventually an option by user, default being share everything.

And bam ! The curl system is a little broken again ! I was too fast to think the file sizes were correctly reported by internet archive, they are correctly reported only for the fbneo archive probably because it's the only one which is not inside a zip file ! It would be nice to take this one as the main archive except the neogeo games inside this one contain all the neogeo bioses, which makes them quite bigger ! So, ultimate solution in git : re-create the index html I had before, but this time on the fly, saved in the raine directory, 2 indexes now, one for the raine archive, the other for the finalburn archive, no need for fbneo since it reports correctly its sizes. Then use the html files to extract the sizes when they are needed. It works, there won't be an update just for that because the current version seems usable anyway even with this. The progress dialog looks bad because the size returned for everything which is not in the fbneo archive is -1, but it works anyway. So it will stay like that for now, update next time for finally a solid curl solution for all this mess ! Notice there are obviously multiple servers serving internet archive requests, some are very fast, but some are very slow, the download speed can change hugely depending on the server you get... !