Tux

$8d5d is the real rom, not a copy, poke works because it's handy to be able to patch region bytes, but you can easily crash a game if you poke randomly to rom. But clearly you know what you're doing ! Much better with some user comments. If you want, you can take a look at scripts/neocd/ssrpg.txt for an example of a script which uses variables to make things clearer (which avoids to add comments).

Yeah well don't forget most of these games if not all of them are from Japan so they translate texts to english and so sometimes you get inconsistencies, it's probably not a good idea to always copy from them. But it's a detail you are free to choose here. Yeah I think the trigger idea is a good idea. When I did the original mapping it was without the controllers concept so I couldn't identify which control was the trigger and so I had to do all the controls with the standard directions, it's not the case anymore... But I didn't want to add yet another input just now, but I 'll probably do it for next time.

Yep I second the opinion of mer-curious : comments welcome ! Most of the scripts currently in raine are from a conversion from mame, and there are not lots of comments (sometimes there are texts introduced by comm which appear at the bottom of the screen when you select the cheat...). Anyway I added the ability to add comments anywhere on a line starting by ; or #, and here you are even patching the rom from what I saw, and I have no idea what most of these poke do, that's where I see you are an expert at doing these patches, but comments are really most welcome here...

You never know about that, they are used if they are here even if indirectly, it can be sometimes an important bug fix or a new important feature. Anyway I updated only dlls32-0.92x.7z with the previous libwinpthread-1.dll it should be ok now (on my side at least it still launches, but I don't have xp). I don't think it's worth updating the 64 bits version, xp 64 bits is a rarity I doubt anyone will want that.

Ah yes I forgot about this. Ok then it's from libwinpthread-1.dll. It should work if you replace just this dll by the previous one. I'll update the dlls packages again with the old version of libwinpthread-1.dll. It's a lost cause anyway as already said, xp is closed source and Microsoft decided it must die, so it will die, no matter what with time passing the new packages appearing will require functions which are not there. For now it should still be possible to work around it this way though.

1 Raine's romset ? That's how it's called on internet archive... yeah by the way it downloads most of its roms from there now, so the question doesn't really matter... Except that it's mostly compatible with mame, but mame compatibility is not top priority here. 2 done automatically, if you find a rom which is not downloaded automatically, post ! 3 users who tried to select some sprites where they apply transparency effects. It's not always a super choice, but it's worth testing. The option can be easily enabled/disabled so it's not a problem. I don't remember a game where I can't play without this option, but it was easy to add so I did it, mostly out of curiosity. 4 emudx was an emulator from Mike Green, the idea was to apply some more recent graphics and sounds to some very old games, but it was to disappear after a few years, so I proposed to merge some of the emudx changes in raine, he accepted, and that's the result. You can see that in dkong, pacman clones, miss pacman, frogger. In my opinion the best result for the graphics is probably dkong (and I missed some alpha blending effects which could not be reproduced easily), and the most impressive sounds / musics are for frogger !

Yeah well I won't jump on it all the time, I jumped 10 versions last time... ! Except if someone spots a very interesting change in it !

Yeah 0.94.9 was the big update on a lot of things, here it's back to normal, the latest history.dat is in extras, there : http://raine.1emulation.com/download/extras.html and I should remove the 2.40 version one day... ! If you always uncompress in the same directory, you keep the files which were included in 0.94.9, that's the idea.

The big focus of this one is the fix around the cps2 driver for the win64 binary, but since these are some bugs which can affect all the versions even if it's less obvious for the others, everyone should update. See the forum thread for the gory details about this bug. Except that : - added some rnd() function to the console to get some random number, help included, I also added some help for the basic peek/dpeek/lpeek functions. - New GUI options : "background animation" to eventually stop the background animation for those who suffer from motion sickness, and "Autostart drivers", essentially for me, when I don't want the driver to start in the background as soon as it's loaded. - some minor text changes "Action Replay cheats" -> "Game cheats". Oh yeah there is an optional update for the dlls, I removed 4 dlls from the big list by tweaking the build settings for freetype, these are not the biggest ones, but they sure were useless in windows, so it's a little better. You can keep the old version, the update doesn't bring anything except removing these 4 dlls, and I should probably rename the dlls to some other package because I am bound to have some incompatibilities with old versions, but it will be for next time... ! And I finally used a script to update the windows binaries to avoid the kind of mistake of last time ! Find the update there : http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Yeah as usual I made the update and then updated the dlls in the old package so people don't have to redownload all the dlls just for that. Yeah why not, I wondered also from time to time why it was chosen like this, probably because action replay was very famous at the time of raine creation, but it's quite a different system indeed, they usually use some kind of device... It's done, and this time the region is not broken. By the way, shouldn't it be "Game commands list" ? It's a list of many commands and not just 1... ! Hehe, sorry but not this time, because there is a difference with the keyboard : if when you move your pad or your stick on the right you are not on an item with multiple selections then the menu scrolls 1 page down, equivalent to page down key. Yeah I guess the scroll down key could be mapped to something else like triggers, we'll think about it, eventually later, but not for now.

Ok, finally fixed everything. The trick with this kind of problem is that even if debug info is not allowed, if it crashes, you can track it with a debuger and with enough patience you finally find the cause. There were actually 2 problems here : 1) a very very old bug, there is an array for layers and layers priorities in cps1/cps2, so I reserved 3 members for these 2 arrays since there are 3 layers. Except that sprites are seen also as a layer in this driver ! So I needed 4 spaces ! And why did it crash just now ? Apparently because gcc decided to change the way variables were allocated in this version for win64, before it was harmless, I don't know where it landed but it was unnoticeable, and with this change from them, it became the end of the world ! 2) a very optimistic speed hack module, that's why save games were crashing sometimes. It was storing the data it needed in the save by assuming variables were allocated in memory as they appeared in the source. It's clearly not the case anymore in the latest gcc, and anyway it's a bad assumption. So I moved everything to a struct and now this bug is gone too ! (I don't guarantee old savegames using this module will be compatible, it's used at least by cps1/cps2, but not only). So finally gcc was not guilty, it just allowed me to find some old bugs... Now I am a little tired so I don't promise a release just now, but it should be good for tomorrow or maybe a little later... !

Well after some tries : the basic random function in C is not exactly random, it expects some random seed to be fed, so you can initialize the seed yourself, or call repeatedly the rand() function for a real random interval this time to get a chance to get some real random number... ... too complex for that. Luckily for you there is an alternative : openssl provides its version of a random number generator and random numbers are important for cryptography so it's serious this time. Since it's already used by curl, it's just a lib which was already here anyway. The result : a function rnd() which returns a random byte, that is, a number between 0 & 255. So you see, simple request, but not so easy solution... ! But anyway it's done...

oh well... ! I guess it can be done, not top priority, I'd like to find the problems with the cps2 driver 1st, but ok... !

Not really convinced here, when I use a cheat I want it to be either enabled or disabled, not 50% chance.

There seems to be an unstability with the recent gcc (12.2) in windows only and in 64 bits only, and only for the cps2 driver afaik ! so as long as there is no update on their side I don't think I will be able to do much on mine. The alternatives are indeed : switch to 32 bits, to linux, or revert to an old version. If you are happy with an old version then excellent ! I am not 100% certain it's gcc fault, there might be a buffer overflow somewhere, but if there is one, it's extremely hard to find : it happens only when the build is optimized, so no debug build allowed, and only in windows 64 bits, so far I wasn't able to find anything, but I miss a good tool to track buffers overflows like the good old electric fence which doesn't work on our modern systems... I'll try to look again later, but no promise here... !

hum, "Game command list", 3rd choice from the top in the main menu, blame mer-curious who thinks it's more obvious this way... !

specific to windows 64 bits -> don't use cps2 in windows 64 bits for now.

Oh well, wrong directory for the upload, 2nd time, I should really make some automatic script to upload this, that's what I do for the linux versions, I should extend this to include the windows versions, I'll do that next time, sorry !!!

Bigger archive than usual because new sdl + new muparser + new history.dat inside ! Except that : - it's mostly the big update of the translations. I couldn't contact the spanish or the italian translator, so only the french and brazilian ones are really updated, for the others it's just the minimum updates so that they continue to work. mer-curious sent more patches to change some texts in the english GUI too. - added some console functions to handle save states from a post in the forum, we'll see if it's useful or not - added the ability to choose a japanese font, see the thread about that in the forum for details (it's optional). For the drivers which had a japanese name, you can now see it from the About dialog, "Driver information" - fix a weird crash in windows 64 bits only when using -nogui and a cps2 game (probably related to gcc, used a dummy statement to work around it), and fix another bug related to -nogui when you call the cheat dialog using the keyboard shortcut despite the fact that you started with -nogui ! - arkangc : finally discovered that the 1st bit of the dipswitch is used for the initial ball speed in this version, it's now handled correctly (I used the cheats to control the ball speed with it so far). - fixed some bug in the controls related to mouse buttons, especially for the right mouse button (found out while trying to use the new trick to access the 50 last levels in "arkanoid returns", there is another topic in the forum about that). - fixed controller mapping while translating it : the joystick index was wrong, and the window to define the mapping only appeared the 1st time you used this function ! Which makes quite a few changes just for a bug fix release ! Get it from there : http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Err no, I didn't find a Japanese translator yet, and I don't even understand Japanese. Thanks for spotting the error, it's fixed. It's just that beside all the errors that utf8 creates, one of the very few services that it brings is to make displaying these characters much easier than before, so it would be a waste not to use it... !

Well the functions do not exist yet, but it should be trivial to do, although it's a little hard to imagine how you could use that, but I'll leave that to you... you now have : set_save_slot number : where 0 <= number <= 9, to choose save slot, like key F3 save_state : like key F2 load_state : like key F4

It's not essential at all, it's for these cases where a text containing these extended glyphs which include japenese characters is about to be displayed, since the default font does not contain any japenese character, it's a good idea to have a fallback... There are sometimes japenese characters in the history.dat file, and I also just finally found a safe way to convert these old japense long names that some drivers had to utf8, so they are now displayed in the "driver info" you can access from the "About..." dialog. And you can get japenese characters in the file selector if some rom dumps or neocd images filenames contain japense characters of course ! About these long japenese names in some drivers : even Antiriad forgot where they come from and how they were maintained ! They were displayed until now only when using the -gameinfo or -li command line switch, so on the console, and since most of these japense names hadn't been converted to utf8, it didn't display anything usable ! Now afaik they have all been converted to utf8, so they display correctly everywhere assuming you have configured a font for that. Nothing much to say about it, by default there is no japenese font, so you'll see probably empty squares instead of the chars, that's what is used the most frequently. A good selection in linux is the droid font, DroidSansFallback.ttf works well. In windows just take a very big font, malgun.ttf which is distributed as standard with windows 10 works well. If you select as japenese font a font which doesn't contain these characters, it's like doing nothing of course. There are high level APIs for that which automatically select a font installed on the system which contains the missing chars, but it would be overkill for raine, so you have to select the font manually at least once, it's better than nothing and we avoid 1 more dependency !

Yeah there is a new history.dat (yearly update), find it there : http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/history-raine-2.50.7z And there is a new trick inside for "arkanoid returns", to access the 50 last levels when you insert a coin, press button 1 3 times, then button 2, and finally start. Of course with the cheats you can select the starting stage, but it's still a cool trick to know. That's where I found there is a bug in the handling of mouse buttons in the sdl2 version ! The right button sends events for 2 buttons at the same time. It's fixed in git, and will be fixed in the next official release. Meanwhile if you want to use this trick, use the keyboard and not the mouse to press the buttons ! There are a few good updates in this history.dat, not just the update of their silly "age counter"... I thought it would have been a cool trick for zzap!raine, so I checked, and I discovered I forgot to upload their games info page, so it's fixed, the game info page works again, and no this trick was not in their test !

The french translation is finally more complete than ever, I had only started it before, but never ended it, I prefer the english version because the keyboard shortcuts use the beginning of the displayed strings, and the beginnings are all the same in french ! But anyway it's the biggest update to the translations since their creation in 2015. The most annoying part to translate is also probably the least used one : the dipswitches !!! The cheats are mostly untranslated because they depend on external files, and no I don't plan to add anything to translate this, there's a minimum english level to have here... ! Same remark for history, external file so can't be translated and it would be crazy. And the console remains untranslated, it's some dev work after all and most of the dev stuff is in english ! Except that all is translated, and quite a lot more than before for the french version !

Following mer-curious changes I had to update the translations, that's where I discovered that I lost the spanish translator mail (he didn't leave it in the header of the translation file as he should have !). And the Italian didn't reply yet. I took the opportunity to improve the french translation which I stopped way too early, but I won't be able to fix all the translations alone. The last active translator except me is the Brazilian Portuguese one ! (and it's not mer-curious !). Anyway it's not an emergency, in the worst case, the spanish and italian versions might see a few surprises appear in the next release... ! edit : actually the errors for the spanish and italian versions were because of some old text changes which were never propagated to the translations, not related to the recent changes. I finally updated both with the help of google translate, luckily it's just about very short texts so it should be ok, and it's better than an obviously bad translation !