Raine 0.91.3, quite a big update again...

[Tux]

Ok, I'll start by what took me the biggest amount of time, even if it's very specific, the unicode filenames in windows !

So to see the problem you need some non-standard characters in a folder or filename, it's easier if it's on a folder containing some neocd game. I visited the wikipedia page about "the king of fighters", and got the japanese name of the game from there : (ザ・キング・オブ・ファイターズ 京). So just copy and paste this at the end of the name of such a directory. Then run any previous version of raine : the directory will be impossible to find ! It might be possible to do that with just 1 character, and less exotic, but I am not sure about this, and I am sure about the japanese name !

The reason is because microsoft has some inherently broken api to access its files, if the filename contains some non-standard character for the current code page of the system (which can't be utf8 of course !), then the usual functions to access files return a filename which is absolutely unusable. So the old versions find nothing when trying to access the dir, and forget about it. I am not going to tell the whole technical solution I found, if you want to see that, go to the git page. But shortly, the file selector now uses windows native functions to get the file listing, but since it still needs a standard file name for the file operations, it uses the short filename when available, using the usual long one just for display in the file selector. This means the workaround will work only if your volume has some short filenames, but normally it's the default for any volume created in windows - I created one in linux and used it in windows, in this case it didn't have any short file name, and it took me quite a while to find out how to reactivate them for this volume !

Anyway, after this you should see something for the directory if using this version. If you really want to see the Japanese characters in the gui, you'll have to replace the Vera.ttf in raine's font directory by some font containing these characters. All the biggest fonts in your windows fonts directory should work, assuming it's not too old. msyh.ttc for example, just copy this one to fonts/Vera.ttf in raine's directory and you are done (I prefer the look of Vera, but it has no japanese chars !). (difficult to copy that using the explorer because it doesn't show filenames from the fonts directory ! Oh well, you can always use the very outdated cmd.exe for that, dir /Os to have the biggest files, then make your choice and copy !).

Except this big annoyance, the other changes :

 - fixed again some cheats, this 0.91 version is mainly about that after all, there were some bugs for kof98 particularly, I found quite a few which obliged me to redo the conversion for most of them.

 - added some new command line switches : -nb, -wb, -rp, see raine -h for details.

 - Fixed the display when starting raine without any gui in opengl (-n switch).

So that's quite a big one, once again... I hope I won't have to deal again with these unicode characters at least, I couldn't leave it like that with some files impossible to access, but it's a mess I prefer to avoid otherwise !

Still the same page : http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

(oh by the way the previous versions had some useless xml files in the scripts directory, useful only for conversion, they are gone now, so if you unpack this version in the same directory you can remove all the xml files in scripts).

Edited May 10, 2020 by Tux

[Robert]

Another good release

I use short names quite a bit for various things. There's a small trap with them, but it's not really a problem.

If you move a file with a long name to another folder, its short name can change. Also, most likely if you delete and recreate a long-named file.

But that kind of thing shouldn't affect you.

I've had fun with utf8 and utf16 conversion in my frontends too, but it mostly just seems to work. I haven't had to think about it for a while though.

And for font names, it's another one of those things that Microsoft changes for the sake of change, and just to be annoying I suspect.

[Tux]

1 hour ago, Robert said:

Another good release

I use short names quite a bit for various things. There's a small trap with them, but it's not really a problem.

If you move a file with a long name to another folder, its short name can change. Also, most likely if you delete and recreate a long-named file.

But that kind of thing shouldn't affect you.

I've had fun with utf8 and utf16 conversion in my frontends too, but it mostly just seems to work. I haven't had to think about it for a while though.

And for font names, it's another one of those things that Microsoft changes for the sake of change, and just to be annoying I suspect.

Thanks for the info, yeah hopefully these shouldn't affect me here !
They were quite crazy to choose something like that, I don't like utf8, but compared to this it's paradise !

[pHEN2]

Hi - Good to see Raine still getting updated and improved.

Can I please report that when I attempt to play any of the games that use the EmuDX files (e.g. Frogger), Raine pauses for a few seconds then automatically closes down. If I remove the EmuDX files then I can play these games, without the improved sounds/graphics. Are the EmuDX files no longer compatible?  Sorry, but I'm not sure if there is a way to generate an error report from Raine to provide some more information regarding this, if there is let me know. Thanks

[Tux]

Ok, I confirm there is a crash, specific to windows again... sigh, sometimes I wonder why I still try to make this work in windows... ah yes , because most people keep on using it !

Ok, I'll look into it later...

edit : it's fixed, both problems, the crash was because this version of sdl-1.2 in windows doesn't behave like the one used in 0.64.16, I guess a patch has probably been lost somewhere, but it's easy to workaround the bug. Then the broken ratio is because of a very old bug in the way the geometry of the screen to display is decided.By the way if you wonder what Mike DX and his team are becoming, you can have a look there :
http://div-arena.co.uk/games/view/104/

This is the page about dkong, but most games there are remakes and not emulation, but it's worth a try !
and most of them are playable online !

Edited May 13, 2020 by Tux

[Tux]

... and uploaded 0.91.4, aka the return of emudx !

the bug fixes are generic but it's really mainly for emudx, not sure they could be triggered elsewhere...

on the todo list :

 - update the linux build, but it won't be on debian this time, it will be arch, and since I never made any arch package it takes time to find the motivation... it shouldn't be hard anyway, it seems to be easier than for debian ! (and the result is a tar.xz, so other distribs can extract it directly and try to run the binary, it should work on most distribs this way).
 - the old versions page is stuck on 0.64, I had scripts to handle versions automatically, but they don't work anymore since there are 2 binaries / version, should take the time to fix that one day...

Edited May 13, 2020 by Tux

[pHEN2]

Thanks for fixing it so quickly!  😊

[mer-curious]

Hey Tux! I've been playing with some NeoGeo games recently and for those games I've changed some configurations in the Unibios. For games such as Metal Slug I prefer to play in the Arcade mode and Euro region. For others, such as Art of Fighting 3, I choose Console mode and Japan region. No problems with it so far. Except that suddenly my hiscores for some previously played games have disappeared! Hopefully I have a backup folder with most of my savedata, but I suppose something may have happened to trigger this issue.

I've been playing with some Raine installations and found that even if you have the *.hi and *-neogeo.bin files for the games the data won't be loaded if you don't have a neogeo.saveram that matches those info. So what I'm guessing is that some of these new played games might have messed up with the info in this file, causing all the scores for the other games to vanish.

So I'd like to know if this would be a bug to investigate and if it would be doable to have a per game neogeo.saveram file to save the corresponding bios options and game saved data to prevent this from ever happening again.

Unfortunately I can't provide any file for testing because I don't know when exactly this happened. But recently I replaced my neogeo.zip file for one which is provided to the FBNeo's Retroarch package and this one has all the UniBios files dated from 1996. My previous Unibios version 3.1 was dated from 2014 and this was the one I used. Perhaps this caused a change into the RAM info?

Also, when I went back and tested version 0.91.2 again to see if my saves were good there Raine started showing some weird messages about script errors (something related to colons in a string, I don't remember exactly) when I loaded some NeoGeo games for the first time, and my saves didn't show there either! So maybe this new bios package really did change something in the RAM file, although the CRCs are exactly the same.

Anyway, it's really disappointing to lose all this data like this. 😢

Thank you in advance for your time.

PS: would it be possible to show all the Unibios in the release order (from the most recent to the older one) in the bios selector? Currently some of them are separated.

PS2:

On 5/13/2020 at 3:10 PM, Tux said:

 - the old versions page is stuck on 0.64, I had scripts to handle versions automatically, but they don't work anymore since there are 2 binaries / version, should take the time to fix that one day...

Yes, that would be really handy. While making this testing I felt the need for the old 0.90 and 0.91 versions and couldn't find them anywhere in the internet, lol.

Edited May 16, 2020 by mer-curious

[Tux]

Ah ah, yeah well still thinking about fixing this page for now taking a little break !

Raine takes a lot more care about the hiscores than most emus I am sure, I have some code in place to survive a reset (f1 key), and even survive loading a save state, but I guess maybe I missed this one, if the bios reads its eeprom and overwrites the hiscores from the eeprom content, this time the scores are lost, yeah ! If you don't have a backup, the scores are lost. The error message in the old version is "normal", there were lots of bugs related to cheats fixed, if you go back, you hit them again.

I'll have a look at that, but it's not sure I'll be able to do anything here, even if you give it a default eeprom, it will still overwrite the hiscores with the default content... Tricky ! Not sure there is a solution, but I'll have a look. But not now, in a few days then... (maybe earlier !).

edit : I had a look, it was quick because scores are not even saved in the hiscore.dat for these games (mslug, and the kof games). They are just saved in the eeprom, and when you change the region, the eeprom is cleared, all the games do that, even the taito f3 ones, too bad ! There is not much which can be done about it then... !
You can either open your hiscore.dat file in a text editor or look at the github version there, the format is easy :
shortname:
then the information, so just search for mslug: or kof...

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/plugins/hiscore/hiscore.dat

Edited May 16, 2020 by Tux

[Tux]

I took a while longer to look into this : the fact is that some time in the past, we had some hiscore support for some of these games, actually I think I edited the hiscore.dat myself to have these scores for the neocd games, but it should work also for most of the neogeo ones (not all of them, some have a different memory map).

Anyway if you add back this data in the hiscore;dat, it will save you from the eeprom erased, because the hiscores will be reloaded after the game has rebooted (I just tested it with kof96, and it works - I edited the hiscores directly in ram, made sure they were saved in my .hi file, then changed the region in the bios, and the scores got properly reloaded after the reboot).

You have the old hiscore.dat which is still on the site there :  http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/hiscore.7z

if you need to search for some score in a game not in this file, I can give you a few tips to do that with the console !

Edited May 16, 2020 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Hey Tux! Thanks for your checking this issue. So, should we download this new hiscore.dat file from GitHub? Also, wouldn't it be better to have a per game save ram file? Because I guess the ram also stores the bios options which we may want to be different for different games. Some games (such as KOF98, 99 and 2000) also save some of the game's internal settings to this file (for example, the level and language selection to play with and some other available in-game options), which I'm afraid the hiscore.dat file doesn't save, does it?

Anyway, I'm just worried that it may happen again with a bios reset especially if someone is new to Raine.

By the way, you forgot to comment on my postscript observation about the bios selection window. 😅

Moving on to another bug report, I am experiencing some weird behavior in Art of Fighting 3 when using the sound associations. The associated sound files randomly changes during the game. I'm providing three savestates to the game which may trigger the bug:

aof3.sv0 - in this savestate you just wait the round count down time reach 35~34 and at this point you should see the track change.

aof3.sv1 - in this save just wait the "how to play" demo run until you eventually hear a track start playing (when it shouldn't, because this demo doesn't have a track - it is silenced).

aof3.sv2 - in this save just press the D button and it should trigger the track to change. You can press the D button as many times as you want to trigger the track change, as weird as this may sound, lol! 😂

Here the saves are: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TDv6oGWIgVEBuUqeX5SFij9-HET-OB06

I'm also providing the tracks together with the config file with the associations (all the tracks are from the NGCD version, but since I've renamed them to something shorter, it may be easier for you to use my version - just change the folder address in the games.cfg file).

Here they are: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1I5lp5SueypJSk2S8724o_mIjwysLh4vk

I can reproduce this bug very easily in the three save files, so I hope you may too (at least in one of them).

Except that, I've experienced one garbage screen when doing a save/load state in this game, but since I couldn't reproduce it again, I'm not providing a savestate yet. Perhaps it has to do with the associations bug? Anyway, here it is a screenshot:

Sorry for the long post again. Thank you for your time and support. 😊

 

PS: would it be possible to add the version info to the window frame, for example, Raine 0.91.4 - game-title. I've just realized Raine doesn't do that whereas most other emulators do. Sometimes it helps to identify which version I'm using when doing a lot of tests with different builds.

Edited May 17, 2020 by mer-curious