Samurai Shodown RPG translation (Neo Geo CD) hangs RAINE.

[Tux]

7 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Hello Tux! I think ffman1985 was using this feature to mimic the NG MVS/AES game behavior in the NGCD port, so maybe there are some use cases for that? I generally prefer to use the MVS/AES version of the game to enjoy the sprites integrity, and then I use the sound associations option to add the soundtrack arrangements from the CD version, so I have "the best of two worlds". But maybe there are some NGCD games that could work well with that option...

Anyway, thanks for the new Raine version!

Eh, feedback after all ! Ok well I won't discuss this, if somebody finds it useful it stays, just be careful at your settings, and if you have a doubt erase the config file to return to default settings.

[pmc2]

11 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Hello Tux! I think ffman1985 was using this feature to mimic the NG MVS/AES game behavior in the NGCD port, so maybe there are some use cases for that? I generally prefer to use the MVS/AES version of the game to enjoy the sprites integrity, and then I use the sound associations option to add the soundtrack arrangements from the CD version, so I have "the best of two worlds". But maybe there are some NGCD games that could work well with that option...

Anyway, thanks for the new Raine version!

hello,

do you play with a game in mvs using the music from its CD version? have I understood correctly, how do you do it?

[mer-curious]

On 12/3/2023 at 1:11 PM, pmc2 said:

hello,

do you play with a game in mvs using the music from its CD version? have I understood correctly, how do you do it?

Absolutely. This was a feature originally present in the Nebula emulator back in the beginning of the 2000s. Then some years ago I had the idea to suggest Tux this feature so we could have the "perfect NG game" in terms of visual and sound quality.

You need to play the ROM sound commands in the sound associations option and then associate each command to your desired external audio file.

There is already a compiled list of sound associations for many NG games in this thread, so you can just go there, grab the list for the games you want and provide the audio files with a few changes.

The soundtracks used are mostly the ones with arrangements taken from the NGCD, but there are some also taken from Saturn or Playstation ports.

If you have any trouble with that you can post in that thread.

PS: it's now possible to even improve the visual quality of the game by using some IPS patches. For example, in KOF97 you can disable the flash effect in the game, which is really disturbing if you play in a dim room. You can also disable the timer in the character select screen and even add a practice mode.

Edited December 5, 2023 by mer-curious

[pmc2]

thanks

[Neville]

On 12/2/2023 at 1:56 PM, Tux said:

Maybe you have set the option in sound options "always stop neocd music while loading" to No ? Actually I should have removed this option long ago, I added it out of curiosity to see if it could be useful sometimes, but for the original hardware it's totally impossible not to stop the music while loading because both require reading from the cd. This option is always to "yes" by default, just make sure yours is.

After checking this option is from before 2009, which means before the start of the git log, I expected to get some feedback from it but since the feedback never came, I just forgot it. You are the 1st one who might have used it by mistake !

Nope. Just checked. Anyway, if you're not getting more users with the same problem by now it's likely my version of the game.

[alocacoc]

Awesome stuff, thanks to your emulator and to the people working on that translation, I can finally play that game again in English. I completed it in 1997 in Japanese without understanding one word and with huge loading times. I didn't think that it would be possible within my lifetime. I played it a while ago for a few hours with Retroarchs on the fly OCR feature, but that was just not the same. 

Which emulator you recommend for Android system to play NeoGeo CD while not at home? I'm sure Raine doesn't work on arm architecture.

[Tux]

47 minutes ago, alocacoc said:

Awesome stuff, thanks to your emulator and to the people working on that translation, I can finally play that game again in English. I completed it in 1997 in Japanese without understanding one word and with huge loading times. I didn't think that it would be possible within my lifetime. I played it a while ago for a few hours with Retroarchs on the fly OCR feature, but that was just not the same. 

Which emulator you recommend for Android system to play NeoGeo CD while not at home? I'm sure Raine doesn't work on arm architecture.

Yeah well the pure C version of raine would probably work on android now, but android is not exactly a standard platform, you need to use custom tools to build for it, I tried once long ago and gave up, but it was before the sdl2 version, and it should be easier with sdl2 since it supports android officially. But I'd prefer that someone who knows android building applications better than me does it, I can't say I liked very much my previous attempt...

You were a really big fan on this to play it in japenese without understanding a word ! That translation had been released 10 years ago unofficially though and it made a terrible scandal which made the original author to stop his work for a while, that's why it required 10 more years to be finished. So I did it 10 years ago, but gave up before the end, it's supposed to compare to ff7 / ff8, err no unless you really love the game franchise. Glad you loved the whole thing though !

No advice for a neocd emulator sorry, I never had the need to try to play on android, even for arcade, playing by taping on screen, I can't say I love the idea...

[alocacoc]

I don't think the comparison to Squaresofts RPGs that time is fair. The goal was a very different. The NeoGeo hardware was so widely popular all over asia, SNKs beat em up games had such a huge success. I can remember having the awesome Virtua Fighter 3 and Scud Race machines standing unused around, but the people crowd around King of Fighters machines. Specifically I saw it in Thailand and Malaysia how damn popular that SNK games were, even after year 2000 it didn't stop. I think that phenomenon of the NeoGeo also appeared with games like Daytona USA, which was strangely also so extremely popular over 20+ years or Starcraft being also unbelievably popular in asian Internet cafes like forever. The NeoGeo couldn't compare to the hardware of a PC or Playstation, so nothing in that extend could be expected. The popularity of the Samurai Spirits characters and games feeling was probably supposed to be used to promote the selling of the NeoGeo CD hardware. But it seemed that creating an RPG game wasn't as easy as producing a yearly re-run of King Of Fighters with just recycling most game content. I think they rushed production of the game and the limited copies produced had been affected by the weak market share of the NGCD and SNKs general problems. I mean I was excited to buy it as a japanese import of Samurai Spirits, so there were surely many. I also had Final Fantasy 7 for Playstation and Windows, but it didn't hook me for that long, I even didn't want to play FF8 afterwards. I loved Chrono Trigger, I loved Mario RPG, I loved Secret of Mana, and I loved Samurai Spirits RPG, but the 3D Final Fantasys were just not what I expected. Sometimes its also just what a newer generation doesn't understand, that a game worked just at that time, but today not. I still have Cham Cham as my phone wallpaper, you just love the characters. But on my desktop and laptop I have wallpapers from new games also, like Neo Monsters, which has really awesome artwork designs, so I'm not that nostalgic.

As for the emulator for Android, I got it running nicely with Retroarch and NeoCD core, that's really excellent stuff. Android emulation isn't limited to phones or touchscreen, I can run Retroarch on other Unix based arm systems like FireTV stick or Raspberry Pi. I even can run emulators on my Android based car media device playing with a bluetooth gamepad. I was used to play an emulator on my PC, playing with my gamepad on a big screen. Times have changed in many ways.

[Tux]

Yeah but the hw of the ps1 & neocd were actually comparable, both had a cd drive, and the ps1 didn't have any real 3d hardware since it had no z-buffer, it was more of a hack than anything, 3d games on the ps1 really had to be motivated to get some good result, and also they were at the same time on the market, so like it or not, they were in competition... You liked ssrpg a lot because you are a die hard fan, but really it's too simplistic compared to what sony had to offer at the time.

Good news for retroarch, I don't have any of these fancy android devices so I am not interested in this stuff on my side.