Raine 0.95.5 : big cps2 update !

[mer-curious]

😊 Hello Tux! I made a quick test with the new 0.95.5 revision and finally could load my KOF2003 IPS patches. Thanks for that fix!

This revision also allowed me to try some more games and they all seem to be working fine, except for one: Samurai Spirits 2.

This is the patch I'm trying to load and which it's not working:

3-EnHiCharV2.dat

You should find this patch in the Emu France IPS pack which I shared in the other thread (folder 4.4 test). Please let me know if you cannot find it.

This patch does work in FBNeo as you can see in the screen capture below:

You can see that the two hidden characters are shown in the character select screen, the one in the bottom left (a guy with the face all covered in black) and the one in the bottom right (a green leaf portrait).

Perhaps there's some incompatibility with IPS patches that you didn't notice yet?

Finally, there is another bug with the IPS feature: if you load a game with IPS patches enabled and then try to load another game with IPS patches enabled too, the program will crash.

Maybe you are already aware of that, but I noticed this while using Raine from a distance from the computer, and when that happens I need to get up and reach the computer in order to reopen the emulator and then load another game with IPS patches enabled. This is not so user-friendly if we are using Raine in this very situation in which we control the GUI functions mainly with the game controller, because we would need to approach the computer to restart the program in case of loading another game with IPS patches. So I would be glad if you could consider checking this issue too.

Perhaps we could see a "d" revision for this version then..? 😁

Anyway, thanks a lot again for this new release and for your work as always. 👍

Edited May 22, 2023 by mer-curious

[Tux]

After a quick look :

 - the github repo doesn't even have this file, but it has a crash when trying to select the char on the bottom left corner
 - it seems it's because it tries to patch a rom loaded with a LOAD_CONTINUE, which really makes things a lot less clear about what are the allowed offsets.

I'll try to do something about it... ! But you could have reported this earlier, once again !

After looking : it's some crazy stuff as often from this repository. For example, the .dat starts by :

#define IPS_EXTROM_INCL EXP_VALUE_002

if this line has a meaning, it's totally lost, it shouldn't be there normally, it's ignored by raine.
Then the .ips inside try to patch a rom loaded with a continue which is already a risky endeavor, but they try to patch after the offset $200000 which is totally impossible with neogeo (the rom can't physically have a size over $200000, it's already split if it goes over $100000 but then $200000 is the last limit). So these patches are lost, if they are supposed to do something here, it's less than obvious.
Anyway after playing with these patches (actually your file isn't even in the github repository anymore, but the 2 .dat files there produce a crash in the character selection screen when trying to reach the bottom left part), they always crash the game no matter what I do. So there must be some hack somewhere, but it's not obvious, and really I think I am starting to get really too much of this stuff !

Anyway I don't plan to emulate fbneo, I just wanted an easy way to handle rom patches, it was at the beginning just some support for ips files after the rom has been loaded, no .dat files. Then I added some .dat files because after this it seemed the logical next step (and I already got much more trouble with the file selector than what I had anticipated !), but here it goes really too far. So my suggestion is just to switch to fbneo and to stop to post pictures from fbneo, thanks !

Edited May 22, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Thanks for the fast reply, Tux!

I'm not sure if you tested the same patch I was trying here. It's the one in the Emufrance IPS pack, not in the Taoenwen GitHub one. Or you can get it in the attached file in this post.

Raine doesn't crash here, actually nothing happens, it's as if no patch was loaded at all. I posted the FBNeo screenshot just to show the effect on screen so you could easily check whether it worked or not. FBNeo also had some issues with the IPS feature, which I reported recently and fortunately got fixed. I used Raine in my report to show that the patches were functioning somewhere else.

Anyway, I reported this issue because I always think a fix can benefit other games and patches and users too, but personally I don't play this game very much, so I could live without this patch working in Raine. I also couldn't guess it would be so much complicated to fix it.

Do you intend to take a look at the crash with changing games with IPS patches enabled?

Thank you again for your time and attention. 👍

samsho2.zip

[Tux]

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Thanks for the fast reply, Tux!

I'm not sure if you tested the same patch I was trying here. It's the one in the Emufrance IPS pack, not in the Taoenwen GitHub one. Or you can get it in the attached file in this post.

Raine doesn't crash here, actually nothing happens, it's as if no patch was loaded at all. I posted the FBNeo screenshot just to show the effect on screen so you could easily check whether it worked or not. FBNeo also had some issues with the IPS feature, which I reported recently and fortunately got fixed. I used Raine in my report to show that the patches were functioning somewhere else.

Anyway, I reported this issue because I always think a fix can benefit other games and patches and users too, but personally I don't play this game very much, so I could live without this patch working in Raine. I also couldn't guess it would be so much complicated to fix it.

Do you intend to take a look at the crash with changing games with IPS patches enabled?

Thank you again for your time and attention. 👍

samsho2.zip 31.34 kB · 2 downloads

Well you have my thanks, because I even if I couldn't make my ips work, I added some code to handle this load_continue anyway, but the ips files I had were too unstable for any testing.

This one works perfectly, I didn't need to change anything, the 2 hidden characters appear and are selectable without any trouble. Perfect !

You'll just need to wait for the next binary then...

If nothing new happens till then, next week-end probably !

(but I wonder how these files on github can work, it was updated 2 months ago so it's recent... maybe for some modified emulator ? Anyway it's from a guy from Japan so it's hard to ask questions !).

And it's normal loading this ips in the current official version hadn't any effect, all its offsets are > $100000 which means all the changes are inside the load_continue area !

Edited May 22, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Hello again Tux! Thank you so much for this fix! 😊

So I was right that you hadn't found the patch I was trying here, right? So it was good in the end to attach it to the post.

But I also get confused with these IPS collections because there are three of them in my original IPS thread. However, the ones I mostly use are the "FBA pack" (in the YouTube video description) and the Emufrance one (in the Emufrance website). These seem to have the most interesting and useful patches as far as I've tested. I didn't find many useful ones in Taoenwen's, but it's good that it's still maintained and "updated", even if you have found some kind of incompatibility with them.

Anyway, it seems now that all patches I tested are working fine in both FBNeo and Raine emulators, and the only thing left is the bug with changing from one IPS patched game to another. Hopefully you'll have some time and motivation to investigate it any time soon.

Thank you again for your great work and for your super fast support. 🙏

Edited May 23, 2023 by mer-curious

[Tux]

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Hello again Tux! Thank you so much for this fix! 😊

So I was right that you hadn't found the patch I was trying here, right? So it was good in the end to attach it to the post.

But I also get confused with these IPS collections because there are three of them in my original IPS thread. However, the ones I mostly use are the "FBA pack" (in the YouTube video description) and the Emufrance one (in the Emufrance website). These seem to have the most interesting and useful patches as far as I've tested. I didn't find many useful ones in Taoenwen's, but it's good that it's still maintained and "updated", even if you have found some kind of incompatibility with them.

Anyway, it seems now that all patches I tested are working fine in both FBNeo and Raine emulators, and the only thing left is the bug with changing from one IPS patched game to another. Hopefully you'll have some time and motivation to investigate it any time soon.

Thank you again for your great work and for your super fast support. 🙏

I didn't know there was a possible crash when loading different games using ips patches in the same session, if it's been reported it was lost, anyway I just fixed it.

Yeah from what I remember only 1 collection was serious, it must be the fba pack. But emufrance allowed to fix this load_continue thing, so it's fine too.

Found a few oddities in romhacking there : https://www.romhacking.net/?page=hacks&genre=&platform=26&game=&category=&perpage=20&order=&dir=&title=&author=&hacksearch=Go

actually you have to rebuild the .dat files manually there, they didn't even include them, the majority is clearly for consoles but there are a few original arcade ips, including :

 - bublbobl ultra : more a proof of concept than a real bublbobl extension like buble bobble redux, but it's not worthless.
 - donkey kong : this is the one which made me bring bps patching to raine, although I knew I wouldn't like the graphics, nes graphics are horrible usually, but I was still curious to see it.
 - strider : some rom fixes from a real fan. he went as far as finding there was a music which should play when out of time in the rom and which never played, and managed to fix the rom to make it play, plus improved a few of the graphics.

Maybe I should post at least some of the dat files I rebuilt by hand, but it's not very hard to do. I just enhanced the .dat parser to allow spaces or tabs as separators and any number of them.

They have a few street fighter patches which are totally equivalent to some of the cheats here, so they don't seem interesting at all.
These patches are clearly to burn some real eeprom and not to be used inside an emulator, but why not use them anyway ?

Edited May 23, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

On 5/23/2023 at 5:29 AM, Tux said:

Maybe I should post at least some of the dat files I rebuilt by hand, but it's not very hard to do. I just enhanced the .dat parser to allow spaces or tabs as separators and any number of them.

This could be a good addition to the IPS thread since I've already linked three IPS collections there. Maybe they can be useful to other emulators too.

Still talking about CPS1/2, doing my tests here with the SFA3 announcer in Winkawaks I've noticed Razoola did a great job with the Qsound chip emulation. I'm not sure about my impressions though, but the sound effects and possibly the music sounded a little cleaner than Raine and FBNeo.

By the way, both Winkawaks and FBNeo feature an option called "low pass filter" that helps my earphones a little which have poor lows. I was wondering if you had ever tried such a feature or would be interested in adding it to Raine too?

Thank you in advance for your time. 👍

[Tux]

1 hour ago, mer-curious said:

This could be a good addition to the IPS thread since I've already linked three IPS collections there. Maybe they can be useful to other emulators too.

Still talking about CPS1/2, doing my tests here with the SFA3 announcer in Winkawaks I've noticed Razoola did a great job with the Qsound chip emulation. I'm not sure about my impressions though, but the sound effects and possibly the music sounded a little cleaner than Raine and FBNeo.

By the way, both Winkawaks and FBNeo feature an option called "low pass filter" that helps my earphones a little which have poor lows. I was wondering if you had ever tried such a feature or would be interested in adding it to Raine too?

Thank you in advance for your time. 👍

Yeah ok, I'll try to post that there soon, or in the extras section of the download page.

For qsound sorry, that's the only area where we share a lot of code with mame. A long time ago the sound drivers were developed in common for mame and raine, now I just kept a thin compatibility layer to be able to use their code with as few changes as possible (but since they keep on changing their interface all the time we have an old version of their sound drivers now, but they are good enough for me for now). So the gurus who decide how to make a sound chip to sound are not here, even in the mame source there is no email, just a name, and the maintainers changed over the years. But no mention of any low pass filter here. So you can forget about this low pass filter for now.

[Tux]

And I just posted the binary for 0.95.5d, the very last update for this 0.95.5 version. Just what we discussed in the past week, some improvements for the ips support (mainly load_continue support, but also the way the .dat files text is displayed), and the option to mute the sfa3 announcer in sound options.

 

[mer-curious]

Thanks for this quick update Tux! 😊

The Samurai Spirits IPS patch is now working correctly thankfully. But now I noticed something interesting with this game in Raine: the picture is not being shown entirely. Take a look and compare it to FBNeo:

You see that FBNeo's borders are much bigger than Raine's in the character select screen. In Raine the new hidden characters portraits barely fit the screen. I noticed that the whole game has this picture crop too.

It's not something related to the IPS patch, because it works the same in the previous version. I also disabled the blend files to see if it was the cause, but no. So something strange is going on here... I wonder if it also affects other games maybe..?

 

As a second bug report, I went and tried Street Fighter Zero 3 with the muted announcer setting but found that the game is not working here. This is what I did:

1- I loaded the Street Fighter Alpha 3 ROM (I cannot find "Street Fighter Zero 3" anymore in the game selection list).

2- I changed the Region option in the GUI to Japan.

3- I select Ryu to play.

4- As soon as I choose the fighting style in the character select screen, the ROM reboots automatically.

Interestingly I don't have this issue in version 0.95.5c, so maybe it's something to do with the Street Fighter Zero 3 driver removed from the current version?

Anyway, I'll wait your comments in those issues. Thank you so much in advance for your time. 👍

Edited May 28, 2023 by mer-curious

[Tux]

Well for the 1st, yes it's odd but no idea for now.

For the 2nd it was already in 0.95.5c, so I am not the only one who didn't notice. For now no idea neither.

edit : not 100% sure but it's probably related to cps2 encryption, sorry but I don't intend to take back sfz3j without further investigation here so it will take some time. I suggest either reverting to 0.95.5c for that or use sfz3jr1 which is still here (and if you can find a difference between sfz3jr1 & sfz3j, you can post it here !).

For the 1st it might be related to the crazy way mame (yeah because fbneo just uses mame code) renders the sprites. Sorry but I don't intend to ever render the sprites using the same way, too time consuming for the cpu. Here again not 100% sure, would require more investigation, but not sure I'll want to investigate this further for now.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Tux