Tux

Fixes for the left out bugs from yesterday, plus adding a last game : - fixed the bad ymf278b emulation, sound is normal again for all games using this chip which include the sh2 games - fixed the bad palette for dragon blaze - added s1945ii (including hiscore saving, cheats and there is a new history file). Which should make a much more solid version than the one from yesterday. A word about alpha blending in the psikyosh driver : currently sprites are drawn 1st, which means that if a sprite is drawn with some alpha blending effect over some layers, it won't work, you can see that for example in tgm2, the next game piece to go down is drawn over a black background instead of some alpha blending effect on top of the background layer. The idea was to make an improved version of this driver using directly opengl functions, it would simplify a lot all this alpha blending stuff and the priorities, I had a piece of code I had played with a few years ago, but I lost it ! I am not really motivated for now to restart everything from scratch, so for now I'll leave it as it is, tgm2 is very playable and enjoyable as it is anyway (by the way I thought 1st it was just a commercial tetris accelerating like crazy so that the player can't play for too long, but actually there is a trick, if you survive the big acceleration after some time the game will return to its initial speed after some quite surprising effect... ! So it's not a bad game, it's just a pity they don't explain exactly how it works during attract mode). I could have made a workaround for tgm2 to have the blending effect anyway, but as it is now this would be in software and the blending functions are super slow, so I prefer to leave it as it is now. Probably the last raine version for at least quite a while ! (and there is an optional update for the dlls for this 0.96 version, the dlls32-0.96 and dlls64-0.96 packages are here with an updated sdl2 inside, but it's not mandatory). http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Yeah sorry forgot to update the dlls packages when I added this dll during 0.95.x, if you didn't update from 0.95.x you missed it. I just uploaded dlls32-0.96 and dlls64-0.96 with lua54.dll and an updated sdl2.dll inside, refresh the download page if you don't see them : http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Sound ok for me, tested the 32 bits version (in win10). There is a bug in the ymf278b used for the sh2 games, the sound frequency is bad so if you use 44100 Hz frequency the sound is odd for some games, and totally bad for tgm2 ! It's fixed in git, sorry for that...

Useless the 7z format didn't change. And curl works fine afaik I probably forgot to add some links for the new roms oh well... For more precision about 7z, here is the commit of the latest update, 21.06 : https://github.com/zelurker/raine/commit/b0aaa110371229f9f512c53ca7662536a6167d84 It was the 1st update after 11 years ! Actually it still worked so there was no real need to update, but I was curious to see if there was a speed improvement with the update : not at all ! Oh well, finally I kept the update just in case, but so far it's been totally useless, at least it was a lesson for me, don't loose time updating this too often, it's totally useless ! sdl2 was updated in all this time though, bug fixes, I'll probably add it soon.

7z ?

Wow, this one was hard ! For those who have read the topic about the sh2 version, this is it, except finally there was no serious bug in the sh2 emulator, it was related to the cache read which is very specific to the saturn and which is useless here and which gave me an error very hard to understand, but finally it's over... So in the end the sh2 additions are for the 32 bits version only, as planned. It might be possible to add the sh2 emulator from kronos for the 64 bits version, but I lacked time and motivation to do that lately. It's still possible it will eventually happen in the future, but not guaranteed, in case you didn't notice there are things going on around here which prevent me from doing what I want lately, and it's very possible that I stop raine soon. It was an incredible adventure anyway, I would never have thought that it would have lasted for so long ! To be more precise about the new stuff : gunbird2, strikers 1945 iii, tetris the grand master 2 and 2+, sol divide, and dragon blaze are added and playable. Dragon Blaze has some serious graphical glitches, I didn't emulate everything for the video emulation in this driver, but I decided it has been long enough since the last version and it's really time to release something now. This version uses "gens sh2", which is the sh2 emulator from Stéphane Dallongeville. The new games have hiscores saving, history, and cheats. Console support for the new sh2 is partial, but it's enough to get all this. Except that the 64 bits version gets what was discussed before summer but never released in a binary form, mostly some text updates from mer-curious, the additions of some samurai shodown clones (samsh5fe & samsh5pf), some surprising fix for the neocd games with a width of 320 (most neocd games have a with of 304 pixels), sgemf region bytes and the region clones are removed for this game, and the console mode script for sgemf from ffman1985, all this has been in git since june, but if you don't compile it's the 1st official binary release. Of course all this is also in the 32 bits version, but the 32 bits version is the only one getting the sh2 stuff since it's in x86 assembly language. http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html linux builds updated, the 32 bits version obliged me to make a 0.96.0a because of a stupid bug in xgettext which refuses to accept an utf8 character in an input file when it should, and the 64 bits build obliged me to make a 0.96.0b because gens_sh2 was not correctly disabled for the 64 bits build in linux ! What a mess, but anyway everything is updated now.

Ok thanks ! Notice I don't want to do anything about the saturn though, the idea is just to find a usable sh2 emulator... By the way I am french too, and the author of gens sh2 is french too, Stéphane Dalongeville... so many french people attracted to emulation ! I'll probably go there soon !

Sorry not interested at all by 3d graphics, I leave that to others. For neogeo64 I don't know anything about that. For Kronos it might be worth sending a message, I know it's almost impossible for gens, the cpu emulator itself was released 20 years ago (!), so expecting a fast reply would be crazy. About extracting stuff from mame : mame is a good source of information about drivers, to see how a driver works, but for extracting the code... the author of musashi, the 68k emulator now used in raine for 64 bits re-released an old version he had on github from before its merge in mame rather than try to extract what his project had become from mame ! That tells quite a lot about how hard it can be ! (I contributed quite a few patches adapted from mame to improve this github version before merging it in raine).

I've been thinking about the sh2 in raine for quite some years now, but I finally got a binary which starts to work. The motivation is simple : there are quite a few modern arcade games which use this cpu, and it's an interesting one, what the 68k cpus could look like if they had evolved towards the risc family of cpus. For now my choice was to use the gens sh2 emulator from there : http://www.gens.me/downloads.shtml It's a pure x86 asm emulator like in the old raine days, but the criteria of choice was that it's the only one which is open source and usable directly with some documentation and no need to extract the emulator from a big project, it's really the only one of its kind in this category. After a few expected problems I was able to add "gunbird 2" and "strikers 1945 iii", which are fully playable, but in 32 bits only then. Now the surprise is that I have some serious bugs with some more sh2 games, like tetris grand master 2, no sound at all, and the game hangs when the music is supposed to start. At first I thought it was a problem with the sound chip emulation, but after a long investigation, it's not. In this case, it's a problem in the sh2 emulation. Fixing it would probably be impossible, or I'd have to be very lucky, the 1st big problem is to find the instruction causing this, and since it doesn't crash but just has a bad behavior it's not going to be easy at all. So now I am wondering : should I release this 32 bits binary anyway now ? I think it's not a bad idea anyway, even if I later change the sh2 emulation used... There is a big heat wave here anyway for now, so I'll wait until the temperature cools down to decide, but comments welcome anyway ! If I change the sh2 emulation, my next choice would either be kronos, yabause (these 2 are actually related), or mame. 1st choice would probably be kronos, there is a "simple" sh2 emulator in it, with a more advanced one, the simple one would allow to at least test the games with problems. The version in mame might not be so hard to extract, not sure about it really, things can get really messy in mame.

Errr, maybe for Italians, but for them only !

Oh there were tools for that, html2pdf but it was made before the web became crazy and it was mainly for simple web design. Might work with zzap though, after all it's still some quite old html too. But I am sure you prefer to revise it at the same time and change a few things manually instead of having something automatic do it !

There is no pc driver, the auto detection problem is in linux only since kernel 5.16 or so, so if you boot only windows it will always be recognized as an xbox controller. And even for me, if I want the xbox controller the only reliable method is to boot windows 1st, then reboot in linux, too bad they didn't include something to force this auto detection to something... ! It's annoying, but it's just that, annoying, you can work around it.

Yeah that's the way fb is working, I stay away from them now too... !

While on the subject of controllers, I tested this cheap controller on my part : https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WBYFX24/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 The plus : it's solid. The minus : the d-pad is really not precise, not advised if you want to use this for fighting games ! Also from kernel 5.16 in linux if i remember correctly, this thing is recognized as a nintendo switch controller instead of an xbox one, which means inversion of buttons and the sticks feel slightly different (if you reboot in windows after that, the sticks are unusable, windows can't adapt to this config ! you need to turn the computer off to reset the autodetection so that it can recognize it as an xbox controler). Ah, and a last thing, it has some long usb cable to charge the battery but oddly it can't be used as an usb controller, you must use it in wireless mode, eventually charging its battery with the usb cable at the same time ! But I have it since 2021, and it still does its job, so it's not bad. You can turn off the annoying lights of course. The battery is charged quite quickly and lasts for long sessions after that so it's ok.

He added a page for the famous issue 12 which is italian only, and paper only, well at least you get a page now... ! Except that fixed some links mainly, a few typos, this kind of thing...

... and way too small pictures to read anything !

I guess you don't even read the story in these games now so you don't care about the translation, but except some sprites modifications there is also some translation for the story mode in the perfect edition... ! It seems to me something like a final++ version, not equivalent to the perfect one on other platforms, but still a little better than the basic final version.

Thanks for all the info, and your english is improving ! I guess if pf has some translations included it can be better than nothing then, even if it's not as good as the pc version. It also means these 2 games can probably accept most of the cheats coming from the special edition, but that's a lot of cheats to test... Maybe later...!

Oh finally for perfect the roms look mostly different so it's probably a worthy clone after all : most sprites are in common (except the 2 last roms), the sound is identical to what's used by fe (for the samples but not for the z80 code !), except that the 68k & z80 have totally different roms, plus the text layer has a different rom too. So it really doesn't look like a tiny clone, now you'll tell me if it's worth playing it ! Neogeo id : $273, not used until now, that's why it isn't recognized by unibios for the cheats. Added to git too (samsh5pf).

Well thanks for the info. I am afraid I won't be able to tell much about the interesting points of this rom, but I can at least tell after looking that for fe (final edition) it's an entirely new game, no rom is in common with any other neogeo game contrary to most clones usually. And it's not encrypted, logical if it was made by the community. For the cheats, unibios recognizes the game because it has exactly the same rom id as samsh5sp (special edition), that is $272. The ram usage might be the same, but the rom is very probably different, anyway there are probably only ram cheats in unibios because it deals with real roms most of the time so they are really read only for it. And by the way fbneo has some source on github too, and it's quite different from mame source actually, which is a surprise because originally it was made for afterburner before it was integrated to mame, and it was something like a showcase, just to demonstrate the game worked well. So I assumed it was based on mame source, I was wrong apparently ! But it's very readable, and this part is easy to understand since there is no crazy encryption like what the special edition has. It seems to be Japan only, it ignores the region. I'll check this perfect thing later, it sounds less interesting, this one seems to be just a hack on top of this final edition. But if it has no cheats in unibios it means they changed the id of the rom, so maybe there are some heavy changes there too... Anyway samsh5fe is added in git.

For the 1, no having a setting for default region would be overkill, the default region is set to Europe for neocd games because raine is made in Europe. I guess I could detect the current locale and use japan instead if the locale is japenese, but even that would be quite overkill. It's not a problem of correct or not, it's just the game is not recognized before the 1st part is loaded. Once it's loaded if you reset the name doesn't change, so it knows how to take the right settings. So if you really want to see this animation, there's just a rest for you. It's not an emulation bug neither, the neocd console has a fixed region so it always plays all games using the same region. Here we choose to allow the player to set the region independently for each game. So that produces a difference, but my goal is once again not to emulate precisely the console itself, but just to support neocd games as well as we can, that's all. The games are good, but the console itself is not interesting. For the 2, I'll try later without any configuration file although I doubt it will make any difference, but it's annoying, it's always longer to retrieve the files needed in this case. I reproduce it very easily with last blade 2, but not samsho3, go figure... ! Anyway, it was probably here since the beginning of the sdl2 version, so quite some time ago already, but it's right we played less neocd games with that version, and it was the kind of thing which could happen. Anyway the fix is just 1 line, very easy to fix. It affects the games with a width of 320 (although for some reason it's not so obvious for me in samsho3, there might be some other parameters there). Anyway it's fixed... thanks for the report !

For your 1 you could have guessed the reason : when you load a neocd game the emulator doesn't know which game it is before it loads at least the 1st part, and so it does not know which region to apply 1st, so you have the default region 1st, that's all. Then once the game is identified, it gets the last region used for that game or its default region. For your 2 I can't reproduce it for now, launched smasho3 with the us region in windowed mode (in linux), started the game, the picture is not cut on its right side, and displaying the gui doesn't change anything to it. If the bug is just because you are using a 640x480 window, just forget it ! I am not sure for now. edit : and after testing in wine, I still can't reproduce this. No idea how you did that. edit2 : and even in win10, and even with a 640x480 window, no cut on the right. Oh well... !

Actually this version number was displayed for neocd in the title bar until may 29th 2021, commit 90761c9f7afc679394d550c4eb4f5e6ef3b42358. The commit was not specifically about that but to fix an incompatibility between 2 games, I guess I probably took it off because I found it made too long titles which is probably true for a lot of games there. Oh well since you are the most efficient bug finder around here I can put it back... !

Ok it's fixed, ironic find, it's a specific cue file which creates the crash, and from internet archive, I hadn't even noticed they had neocd files. I won't put auto-download from there though because such a format is really a waste of space ! Anyway the indexes are taken into account that's why there was a crash here, that's indeed the index which crashed simply because it tried to seek in the file before loading it... !!! At least the fix was short. I don't plan to release a binary just now for that, this bug has been here for years ! For info to reproduce it, I had an iso + wav files dump and I hadn't even converted the wav to mp3 (lazy... !). So I just adapted my cue file to look like yours. Then I made a savegame during the demo just before the highscore screen appears. For me it crashed just after the hiscore screen. This way it was very fast to get to the crash, these neocd saves are super efficient ! And finally converting my cue file was not even necessary it would have crashed even with the one I had originally, it's just that nobody left the demo running until now, and for some reason this kind of crash doesn't seem to happen during normal play... !!! Quite crazy ! But at least it was easy to fix. It's a super old bug here again, from neoraine time, you are super efficient to find bugs currently !

Well I'll look into this eventually when the temperature will go down a little, not for now. Yes you can simplify a lot this cue file, I am not sure but I think the index lines are simply ignored for the mp3 files I'll have to double check that, and the flags lines are ignored for sure. Version is not really important in the window title, there is the nice about dialog for that with its superb color cycling despite what sdl-image did lately ! Yeah I am not sure either it's really the windows version, it's you who proposed the idea and until now I just thought it had been fixed in sdl, not even in the graphics driver. Whatever the issue, it's on your side though. You can forget it for now if you want since we can live with a white cross in windows, but it's definitely a problem on your setup.