Raine 0.94.12 : the crazy ips files !

[Tux]

Yeah this version is mainly about the support of these ips files found on the net, the best source so far was found by mer-curious, see his topic on the subject in the forum if you are interested. So the dat files and the ips must be placed in an ips directory that raine will create next time you run it, or you can create it yourself (for linux it's in ~/.raine/ips ). The format is the one already used by these packs of dat files you can find on the net, subdirectories with the short name of the game containing the dat files + ips files related. A word of caution : it's the crazy bootleg world, some patches are not stable alone, and you add to the risk if you enable more than one, raine will warn you about conflicts it finds while applying the patches though.

So the 2 ways to apply them are through the command "preload ips dat file" which appears at the top of the main menu if no game has been loaded. It opens a file selector where you can select any dat file you want to add for a particular game in the ips directory. Your choice is saved in this same ips directory in an ini file with the short name of the game. You can either return to this function later to uncheck the dat files you chose if you don't want them anymore or just delete the ini file. Raine will check for conflicts when you load the corresponding game and will warn about them at the end of loading.

And the other is once the game is loaded, it can be applied only to code roms, from ips files only, not dat files, and it works only when the rom patched is in the right format, it's very specific and it was the only thing I wanted to add at first before being convinced to add the rest.

Except these ips features, you'll find :

 - a new kof2002 clone, kf2k5uni which was mainly added to test an ips dat file... !
 - a new setting to choose to have the profiler (f11 key) to display its % based on sdl2 performance counters instead of the rdtsc. It's a good option if the frequency of your cpu changes all the time, it's a good try if you have doubts about the results anyway.
 - a new script command : stop, see help in the console for details.

That's all !

http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Edited February 20, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Hello Tux! Thank you so much for working on the final details of this new feature. Now that you have released a new version I can give you a quick feedback since I haven't had the time to test it thorougly:

- if you go to "Preload IPS *.dat file" and click on the two dots without anything in the IPS folder (or in a new Raine installation in which no files are there yet, which was my case) Raine will immediately crash.
- I was thinking if it wouldn't be a better place to put this new feature inside the game selection screen so we could keep Raine's main menu as unmodified as before. So in game selection we would have something like:

Recent games...
Most played games...
Preload IPS *.dat files...

And then there we would find the current options you have already worked on for this new feature. Of course, if there aren't no recent games or no most played games data yet, the IPS option would be the only one to show before the playing data is created in the stats file.

I don't know if that would be easily doable or not but I guess it makes sense to put it there since we are mostly talking about normal arcade IPS patches, not NGCD ones. If there are NGCD patches eventually, then we could also place such an option when we click on "Load Neo-Geo CD game".

Let me know if you would agree with these changes. I should be placing some IPS files in Raine's folder and test them soon.

Thank you so much again for your work. 😊

[mer-curious]

Ok, I finally tried placing my FBNeo's kof97 folder into Raine's IPS folder and here are some preliminary comments:

- two kof97 folders show in the menu, as you see below:

Is this right?

- when you scroll up or down one time with the mouse in the IPS menu, the page isn't changed totally, that is, it just scrolls the page partially and then we can only see some more lines instead of all new ones. Perhaps this could be changed in order to display a whole new parcel of lines since there can be a lot of *.dat files in the folder and skipping the page just partially makes it harder to see which files we have already checked and which we haven't. See the example in the video below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k3MuwncqsABwHSCRVQjghROLkmVQ3j9n/view?usp=sharing

- when I enabled some *.dat files for KOF97 I received the following message:

I don't know why I'm getting this message, but the result is that the patches aren't working for me here.

I guess this is my quick feedback for now. Hopefully you'll be able to reproduce some of those issues and possibly fix them.

Thank you so much again for your time.

[Tux]

for the last message it might be windows specific, I'll have to check in windows.

For the 1st I didn't understand half of what you did, but it looked like you tried hard to break the dialog, and you succeeded in the end. I don't really want to make something unbreakable... ! For now I'll slow down, but I'll start by checking your 2nd error, there might be a 2nd release because of that (a b version).

[Tux]

And you just won a hotfix release : 0.94.12b.

Mostly for using SLASH[0] instead of '/' to separate directories otherwise it isn't compatible with windows, but except that I had the time for :
 - Fixed a few stupid segfaults in the console due to the recent script changes
 - I had forgotten to include some cheat file for the new kof2002 clone, it's fixed.
 - while I was at it I added an experimental script to block the selection timer in kof97 since it seems it's impossible to find an ips which doesn't conflict with the training mode to do it. It works, but once you have selected your character you must disable the script otherwise the game will never start !

That's all : http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Notice that for windows their \ doesn't make any sense to separate directories, in normal scripts \ is used to quote the following character (block its interpretation). But it dates back from the dark ibm days when they wanted to make a bad machine with a bad OS so that people would not like it and would buy the super big machines from ibm instead. It failed, and after that they had to maintain their crap for many years, and they never dared to change their mind about \ to separate directories... !

 

[Tux]

And I still didn't understand how you got 2 kof97 directories, I can't reproduce that here...

About your strange looking window with the big blue area : it's because you are again at the minimum window geometry, 640x480, I should include a setting just for you that would forbid this setting, but anyway... !
It's just that this area reserves at least 224 pixels in height so that the pictures would still look like something (most have a size of 304x224, a few rare ones are bigger, for those they are resized to fill in the blue area).
Anyway this blue area doesn't look so big if you have a "normal" window area which would be much bigger than that !

Edited February 20, 2023 by Tux

[Tux]

I was gonna quote your 1st message but it's just impossible, you can't insert a reply in the middle, and you can't delete the end of the message, if you do it restores it in place of what you typed in the end, this stupid editor just made me loose a few minutes for nothing.

Anyway !!!

1st point about your crash which annoyed me on the .. : yeah it annoyed me because the function has become quite complex after all and it's quite irritating to see some testing stopping here, but anyway in the end I found a c++ way to fix that in just a few lines without too much fuzz so you'll just get your error message now.

2nd point move the option to the game selection dialog : agreed good idea, it's done and pushed to git, but I think the 2 above options always appear even if there's no data, and I don't plan to loose some time trying to hide them when there's nothing. It won't crash anything, you'll just get your error message if you try them and there's no data, so there's no problem here.

[ffman1985]

After the update, the cheats automatically disable after reset by f1, is that sth intended?

[Tux]

2 hours ago, ffman1985 said:

After the update, the cheats automatically disable after reset by f1, is that sth intended?

As discussed earlier after you asked that for the hidden scripts and I replied it should be done for all the scripts because it's what a reset is supposed to do.

There might be some way to make some chosen scripts resistant to that, but I am not sure it's a good idea, it would add to the complexity without any obvious benefit, a reset should stop anything related to the current emulation and return everything to its default state, that's how it works.

[ffman1985]

Sorry about that. But I think that it is not worth to change the default setting (about the cheat in reset) because of the hidden script function.

[Tux]

You compile from git, so do it for your version, you just have to delete or comment out the line "stop_scripts()" in source/emumain.c

After that you can eventually commit it to be sure you'll keep it :

git commit source/emumain.c

it should stay for long, this area of the sources is not modified often.