Raine 0.95.5 : big cps2 update !

[ffman1985]

Hello, Tux and mer-curious. i think i know the reason why the sfa3 reboots if the region is changed to japanese.  But in my case, it is rebooted after selecting the ism. The reason is that this game does not included all languages in the rom. The sfa3.zip only have the english text, so when you changes the region and go to the part where texts are displayed (like the story introduction part after choosing the ism and the winner screen.), the game cannot load the text and reboot (unlike the phoenix edition which have empty text.). You can test it in the 2-players game where there is no story induction part and hence not reboots here but still reboots in the winner screen. (My script does not work when switching region, so press the start button to go to the 2-player game.)

Therefore, i don’t recommend to switch region in this game, and so i made the script for both sfa3 and sfz3jr2.

 

p.s. It is tested in 0.95.4b

Edited May 29, 2023 by ffman1985

[mer-curious]

Thank you for your help ffman1985! So the SFA3 Japanese driver must come back to Raine, right?

Do you also have any idea on the screen crop issue in Samurai Spirits 2?

Thanks again! 👍

[Tux]

Yeah I am almost sure that's the reason too, and from yesterday. But it means I need some cps2 decryption code to be able to compare the roms to see if their only difference is really this region byte, and if there is more than that then keep the region clones, it's very possible I'll be obliged to re-insert a few of them and not just one. The code in mame doesn't look too hard to port, but I have other things in my mind, so it might take a little time.

Anyway good news for the 1st report : it's actually some very old bug, it dates from the time when I started to add neogeo games on top of neoraine using the code for neocd ! There is a part I totally forgot for the initialization of the game because the width of neocd/neogeo games can be either 304 or 320, until now all neogeo games had a width of 304, which is the default, and which is obviously wrong for some of them, like here for samsho2 ! It's just a stupid bug, the big surprise is that it took us so long to notice it !

Here is a screenshot with it fixed

 

 

Edited May 29, 2023 by Tux

[ffman1985]

Although I don’t know the way to change the region by rom hack, you can use xcopy to decrypt the rom which i believe is accurate. I use this when i have to translate my script (which have rom hack part) for other region.

Also, thank you for fixing the resolution problem for the neogeo game. Can’t believe that i cannot notice this.

[Tux]

5 minutes ago, ffman1985 said:

Although I don’t know the way to change the region by rom hack, you can use xcopy to decrypt the rom which i believe is accurate. I use this when i have to translate my script (which have rom hack part) for other region.

Also, thank you for fixing the resolution problem for the neogeo game. Can’t believe that i cannot notice this.

Yeah I was surprised too ! At least it was something easy.

I tried xcopy but it's no good here, I need to decrypt the whole rom, not just 1 area. In debug mode raine saves automatically the whole rom when you quit, but with cps2 it's encrypted, that's what I need decrypted. I plan to optionally load the keys and if they are available decrypt the thing and run the game decrypted, but only if the keys are available.

Anyway for now the weather is quite warm, Roland Garros has started even if it should be a lot less interesting this year than previously, and so it's not an ideal time to code, but I'll try to do something soon.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Tux

[Tux]

I was mistaken, I thought there was a new decryption code finally allowing to totally decrypt the rom, but no !!!

In 2023 we are still stuck with opcodes / operands, and by the way raine was already using the same algorithm as xcopy when saving a cps2 rom in debug mode, but what you get are the decrypted opcodes. Some areas of the rom are totally readable directly, like the 8 1st bytes : $ff8000 this is the initial value of the stack pointer at offset 0, but if you go only to offset $60, same file, it should be the vector for irq0, and this vector is obviously unreadable, it's $14e for sfa3/sfz3j but it must be read from the encrypted area.

What this means is the roms can't be compared directly, there's still no reliable way to do this !

Ton of crap... ! When you think that the rom encryption keys were in some volatile ram using a battery and so when the battery died you got a useless machine, it would probably have been declared illegal in this time, that's obvious planned obsolescence... ! And so no surprise that you are still unable to get a fully decrypted rom from that.

Well, maybe I should just take back all the removed sets, or at least sfz3j then, I'll see... !

[Tux]

sfz3a is using english text so for this one it's sure sfa3 is totally equivalent is setting the region switch to asia.

For sfz3j, it's Japanese text which is obviously not in the rom, so I'll take just this one back for now, but I'll have to check those I removed earlier...

progearj seems ok when using progear with japan region at least, so it's probably something specific to sfa... !

1944 with japan region has almost no text from japan, it even writes USA in its 1st screen but not the copyright screen.

So I'll assume the only problem was with sfz3j, if anyone finds another problem, let me know !

Edited May 30, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

On 5/29/2023 at 11:35 AM, Tux said:

eah I was surprised too ! At least it was something easy.

On 5/29/2023 at 11:31 AM, ffman1985 said:

Also, thank you for fixing the resolution problem for the neogeo game. Can’t believe that i cannot notice this.

I'm glad that the fix was easy too. And yes, I could only notice it while testing this hidden characters patch for Samurai Spirits 2. The patch only recently got supported in Raine, so I went to test it and saw that the hidden characters' portraits were barely fitting the screen, whereas in FBNeo there was a better alignment with the picture. So I decided to come here and report it to Tux to see his comments on that.

Anyway, I'm also glad the Japanese version of SFA3 is also working again.

Should we get an "e" revision for version 0.95.5 then?

Thanks again for your time. 😊

Edited May 31, 2023 by mer-curious

[mer-curious]

Tux, I'm creating a new post because I've found a glitch:

If you have a game with IPS patches anabled and visit the sound associations menu, then "Manage associations", and then return to the game, the screen will be greenish, like this:

I'm not sure if it happens with CPS1/2 games too because I still don't have any games with IPS patches enabled for those systems.

Hopefully an easy problem to fix too..?

Thanks in advance for your checking this! 👍

[Tux]

1 hour ago, mer-curious said:

Tux, I'm creating a new post because I've found a glitch:

If you have a game with IPS patches anabled and visit the sound associations menu, then "Manage associations", and then return to the game, the screen will be greenish, like this:

I'm not sure if it happens with CPS1/2 games too because I still don't have any games with IPS patches enabled for those systems.

Hopefully an easy problem to fix too..?

Thanks in advance for your checking this! 👍

Not for me, I tried the same game, samsho2, I don't have any sound association for it but opened "manage associations" anyway, which was empty, absolutely no effect on the game (except of course it stops the currently playing track if there is one).

 

Edited May 31, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

32 minutes ago, Tux said:

Not for me, I tried the same game, samsho2, I don't have any sound association for it but opened "manage associations" anyway, which was empty, absolutely no effect on the game (except of course it stops the currently playing track if there is one).

I'm sorry Tux. I think I was too quick in my report.

It seems that the issue doesn't have to do with whether you have IPS patches enabled or not, but with the green mark in the GUI. If you have sound tracks associated to any game and have enabled the loop function, you should see a green mark in "loop" for such tracks. If you go back to the game then the picture should be greenish too.

You can also trigger this bug by visiting the IPS patches selection menu for a game and marking any *.dat files with the green X. The game picture should be also green when you return to the game.

Interestingly the bug does not seem to happen if you have a shader selected in the Video options.

Hopefully you'll be able to reproduce it this time.

Thank you again for your fast response.

Edited May 31, 2023 by mer-curious