Final Burn Legends 1.7

[iq_132]

@iq_132: you've been adding alot mame titles to fba lately... is it your plan to eventually bring all mame titles (within reason) over to fba?

My main goal is to port/improve things that interest me. That's why I hop around between adding to MAME, Coinops, FBA, FBL, and various other projects.

 

also, i know you've been asked a zillion +1 times about miday titles and how you don't really care for mk games... but what about nba jam?

Basketball interests me slightly less than Curling. Sorry. :S

 

is Ninja Spirit already been ported to fba?? i know it's a irem game and i know you've been getting those ported. (edit: nevermind i see it is. )

lastly, thank you for help in arcade emulation.

I accept payment in the form of baked goods.

 

On a side note, I added the vmm routines to tkdensho. The game runs less than full speed. Probably some vmm setting tweaking can fix that or possibly ripping out the alpha blending.

[+ T +]

Wonderful news that you've been able to get some more FPS out of the M92 games. Is there any chance the optimisations could be applied to the M72 games as well? They perform slightly better so I'd think there'd be a greater chance of getting them up to full speed with just a little extra push.

 

What's the current framerate of tkdensho? I ask because with VMM games it's possible to get a few more FPS by having them run in one of the separate xbe cores. The difference is not massive but every little helps.

 

While you're perusing the source is there any chance you could take a look at Top Speed on the Taito Misc driver? I can't figure out why this one isn't working. It doesn't seem like it would be a memory issue considering the small size of the game.

[RatherAnnoyed]

Great stuff, I look forward to trying Angel Eyes out! Top stuff.

Along similar lines, is it ever going to be possible to get the cps3 stuff working in FBL on a 64 box?

Or is that similar pie in the sky stuff to me hoping that we'll someday see SH3 or the later Seibu stuff?

 

Actually, how difficult is it to get extra memory in an xbox?

 

Loving the way everything is progressing, chaps. Keep it up.

[iq_132]

Wonderful news that you've been able to get some more FPS out of the M92 games. Is there any chance the optimisations could be applied to the M72 games as well? They perform slightly better so I'd think there'd be a greater chance of getting them up to full speed with just a little extra push.

I will take a look, for sure. I have other ideas that i will try and implement there too.

What's the current framerate of tkdensho? I ask because with VMM games it's possible to get a few more FPS by having them run in one of the separate xbe cores. The difference is not massive but every little helps.

About 40 fps. I think adjusting the vmm will help more than anything.

While you're perusing the source is there any chance you could take a look at Top Speed on the Taito Misc driver? I can't figure out why this one isn't working. It doesn't seem like it would be a memory issue considering the small size of the game.

Sure.

[+ T +]

Actually, how difficult is it to get extra memory in an xbox?

My understanding is that it involves de-soldering the existing RAM chips from the mainboard and replacing them. On a personal note, I'm not keen on the idea of the RAM and CPU upgrades; for me the appeal of running emulators on a console is that everybody has the exact same hardware and the challenges are in optimising the code to get the best performance within those limitations.

 

About 40 fps. I think adjusting the vmm will help more than anything.

Something else I've been wondering about; drivers for older games from past builds of FBA always seemed to run well on the Xbox, however with this latest wave of updates the majority of newly added games don't perform too well (including the most recent Data East drivers from 0.2.97.13). Is this because they're ported from the latest MAME drivers which have become more resource intensive or is it that FBA is being coded with the current specs of modern PCs in mind, or is it simply that the drivers are new and there is room for optimisation? Just curious.

[gamez fan]

tk densho looks cool an all female lineup as well

 

in the newer mame sets alcon is now the parent for slapfight it works in my pc mame set but not in FBL

you get the hw switch error when the game has finished loading could a small driver update sort this

would be cool to play slapfight in FBL super chase crminal termination even without sound would be a bonus as well

 

BTW when i tried to load alcon in FBL 1.7 it freezes on the loading screen you then have to reboot the xbox

to get back to FBL might just be my set though

Edited November 15, 2011 by gamez fan

[RatherAnnoyed]

Actually, how difficult is it to get extra memory in an xbox?

My understanding is that it involves de-soldering the existing RAM chips from the mainboard and replacing them. On a personal note, I'm not keen on the idea of the RAM and CPU upgrades; for me the appeal of running emulators on a console is that everybody has the exact same hardware and the challenges are in optimising the code to get the best performance within those limitations.

 

About 40 fps. I think adjusting the vmm will help more than anything.

Something else I've been wondering about; drivers for older games from past builds of FBA always seemed to run well on the Xbox, however with this latest wave of updates the majority of newly added games don't perform too well (including the most recent Data East drivers from 0.2.97.13). Is this because they're ported from the latest MAME drivers which have become more resource intensive or is it that FBA is being coded with the current specs of modern PCs in mind, or is it simply that the drivers are new and there is room for optimisation? Just curious.

 

Me too, man, but it kinda winds me up a bit that I have roms on there that just plain won't work, you know? I like to feel I can just go pick a game even at random, and check it out. (Perhaps "winds me up" is a bit strong; let's just say that I like to know all the games I have sitting there will just work.) I guess I could just delete them when I come across them, but I'm never sure if a game just plain didn't work because I was doing something daft!

 

As for your other point: I'm under the impression that with every iteration of MAME, drivers/roms are "improved" in such a way that emulation is more accurate, which is usually more resource intensive. That is to say: accuracy is paramount, even to the detriment of raw performance. Is this the same ethos for FBA? i.e. are we going to soon get to the point where the xbox will struggle even to emulate stuff it's been handling in its sleep the past few years? I note you're having trouble with the neogeo stuff in the new build; would I be correct in assuming these issues are related to said performance degradation?

[+ T +]

BTW when i tried to load alcon in FBL 1.7 it freezes on the loading screen you then have to reboot the xbox

to get back to FBL might just be my set though

I'll look into the problem with Alcon. In the meantime though, the Slap Fight bootleg clones all work fine in 1.7.

 

As for your other point: I'm under the impression that with every iteration of MAME, drivers/roms are "improved" in such a way that emulation is more accurate, which is usually more resource intensive. That is to say: accuracy is paramount, even to the detriment of raw performance. Is this the same ethos for FBA? i.e. are we going to soon get to the point where the xbox will struggle even to emulate stuff it's been handling in its sleep the past few years? I note you're having trouble with the neogeo stuff in the new build; would I be correct in assuming these issues are related to said performance degradation?

It's not so much the same ethos for FBA as it is the fact that FBA drivers are ported from MAME drivers so the "ethos" is carried over in a sense. But you're right that if the most recent version of MAME were ported to the Xbox, many games that ran perfectly well in older builds would run poorly due to increased accuracy in the drivers at the cost of performance. This is partly my thinking as to why these new FBA drivers for older games struggle to get a decent framerate on Xbox hardware.

 

The new NeoGeo code has no performance issues at all. I compiled a working build of FBL with the updated driver and it runs just as well as the previous driver. The problem is that without VMM, only the smaller games load and anything that requires more RAM than the Xbox physically has won't work at all. It's beyond my ability to code new VMM routines for the updated driver and at the moment there's no real benefit to doing so since the only major additions are multi-slot support (which would be unsuitable for the Xbox anyway) and the NeoCD support (which should theoretically work without VMM).

[RatherAnnoyed]

Ah, I see. I got the wrong end of the stick. I mainly use FBL for neogeo stuff (and Cave, obviously), so I get a bit twitchy if there is any sort of indication of it just suddenly not working. (Once again, a huge thankyou to all concerned for allowing me the facility to play these games.)

 

To be honest, though, I'm wondering what is actually left for neogeo emulation? That is, are there improvements left to make? Even on the old xbox (using your latest release) it seems nigh on perfect to me? We still don't have save states, is that correct? But then, that's not really "emulation", which is what I was really talking about.

[+ T +]

To be honest, though, I'm wondering what is actually left for neogeo emulation? That is, are there improvements left to make? Even on the old xbox (using your latest release) it seems nigh on perfect to me? We still don't have save states, is that correct? But then, that's not really "emulation", which is what I was really talking about.

NeoGeo savestates apparently caused problems in early builds of FBL and so nes6502 disabled them. Other than that I think there are some graphical effects in the driver that aren't emulated 100% correctly but my info could be way out of date there. Rest assured though I won't be updating any code in FBL if it's detrimental to the performance of existing games, in fact astute users may have noticed that I even added an additional xbe core to v1.666 specifically for the purpose of running older drivers that perform better than their newer counterparts. So you can update with confidence that existing games will always run as well as or better than in previous builds.

 

EDIT: I just checked Alcon and it's flagged as not working in the driver. So there's your answer. Play the bootleg clones for now.

Edited November 15, 2011 by + T +

[RatherAnnoyed]

Thanks man, it's reassuring to know that you are indeed "future proofing" your emulator!

 

Heh.