Raine 0.94.12 : the crazy ips files !

[alocacoc]

I have nothing much to say, just my usual 1000 thanks for your awesome continues work on Raine and 0.94.12b is compiling nicely under Arch.

[Tux]

2 hours ago, alocacoc said:

I have nothing much to say, just my usual 1000 thanks for your awesome continues work on Raine and 0.94.12b is compiling nicely under Arch.

Yeah quiet around here these last days for a change... !

I finally found the reason why the windows version was slower for scripts, and I have a fix, I sent it by pm to ffman1985 so that he checks it, but he hasn't been reading his messages for 2 days ! Oh well, at least you are in linux, so you don't need this fix, the linux version doesn't have this problem. It's a crazy story about double to int conversions, I assumed they took almost no time with modern cpus, and it's the case in linux, but that's the very reason the windows version is slower, and I can't explain why, but it's a fact. The solution : merge muparser into raine (the doc encourages people to merge it in their project), and change its base type from double to unsigned int. It works, and I finally get the same speed in linux and windows, the only drawback is that float numbers are not recognized anymore in the console but it shouldn't be a problem normally.

I didn't decide yet what to do if he doesn't come back in a reasonable delay to test this, since it's a windows problem only I can just ignore it, or release it without any more testing, or simply commit it to git and start to work on something else. I think I'll probably choose the last option.

 

Edited February 23 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Hello Tux! I'm sorry for the late reply. I had a busy week but I've finally had some time to test the IPS function again. I still couldn't test it unfortunately, but here are all my comments and feedback:

On 2/20/2023 at 6:11 PM, Tux said:

I was gonna quote your 1st message but it's just impossible, you can't insert a reply in the middle, and you can't delete the end of the message, if you do it restores it in place of what you typed in the end, this stupid editor just made me loose a few minutes for nothing.

Yes, I have already noticed this limitation, so what I do is just quote parts of the message and reply them separately, which is what I'm doing now.

 

On 2/20/2023 at 6:11 PM, Tux said:

1st point about your crash which annoyed me on the .. : yeah it annoyed me because the function has become quite complex after all and it's quite irritating to see some testing stopping here, but anyway in the end I found a c++ way to fix that in just a few lines without too much fuzz so you'll just get your error message now.

Yes, I'm sorry, but as I said, I didn't have much time to thoroughly test the new function and I always try to simulate someone who is configuring the function for the first time, and that is what happened here (the crash). I can confirm however that the program no longer crashes in the new 0.95 version with the work-around you made. Thank you for that.

 

On 2/20/2023 at 6:11 PM, Tux said:

2nd point move the option to the game selection dialog : agreed good idea, it's done and pushed to git, but I think the 2 above options always appear even if there's no data, and I don't plan to loose some time trying to hide them when there's nothing. It won't crash anything, you'll just get your error message if you try them and there's no data, so there's no problem here.

I'm happy that you liked this idea. I may create a pull request later suggesting some minor edition in the new texts you added with this new function. Hopefully it will call the translators' attention in the near future.

 So now let's return to some things in my previous reports:

 

On 2/20/2023 at 2:21 PM, Tux said:

And I still didn't understand how you got 2 kof97 directories, I can't reproduce that here...

I copied the contents from the three IPS packs (the "Chinese", GitHub and Emu-France ones) to a folder called "kof97" and placed it in Raine's IPS folder, just as we do with FBNeo, and then if we open this option in Raine we have the two folders here. The first one takes to this:

 

And the second one takes me to the list of *.dat files, which is what is expected:

 

If you need I can upload my folder to Google Drive and share it with you, but the three packs are linked in the other thread in which we started discussing about the IPS feature.

On 2/20/2023 at 2:21 PM, Tux said:

About your strange looking window with the big blue area : it's because you are again at the minimum window geometry, 640x480, I should include a setting just for you that would forbid this setting, but anyway... !

I think I wasn't clear enough here. I'm not worried about the blue area, but with the way the list scrolls when you use the mouse. If you scroll down once, the list is just half updated, not entirely. In the video I recorded you see that the "2-aifix.dat" file rests in the end of the displayed list, and if we scroll the list once it is still shown but now in the middle of the list, that is, we still see some files which we had already seen before scrolling down the list once. Another example is with the "2-combo2010.dat" file. You see in the video that it rests in the bottom of the displayed files, but if you scroll down the list once with the mouse it will still be visible in the middle, as well as some other files too.

My idea is that with just one mouse scroll either up or down the full list shown be changed/updated for the next pack of strings. This could also be applied to the game selection list. I think that the more ROMs one has, the easier it will be to navigate through them if the list is updated faster with just one mouse scroll either up or down. I don't know if this would be easily doable though, but it would certainly come in handy especially now with this flooded lists of IPS files.

Anyway, I'll wait your comments on that. I'll continue my feedback in a following post because this one is already very big.

Thank you so much in advance for your time reading it.

[mer-curious]

So, continuing from my previous post, unfortunately I wasn't able to enable any of the IPS files yet. I copy and paste my kof97.ini from FBNeo to Raine's IPS folder, and all I get when I start the game is this message:

And then I have to click "Ok" a few times in order to finally start the game.

For information, this is what my FBNeo's kof97.ini file has inside:

// FinalBurn Neo v1.0.0.03 --- IPS Config File for kof97 (The King of Fighters '97 (NGM-2320))

2-Stage1.dat
3-hchr2ps.dat
97lx.dat
k1-TimePS.dat
k4-flash.dat

I can see the "X" mark in those *.dat files when I navigate the list in Raine, but interestingly they don't seem to work.

Finally, I need to report a GUI glitch which I found in the IPS menu. If you scroll the list all the way down, click on the final *.dat file to select it and expand Raine's window, the file selection won't resize with the window expansion and will stay small. Here's a quick recording showing the issue happening:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tJRLyayBAP-FafJCqPPf_5Ue20YI9yH1/view?usp=sharing

Also, if you pay attention, the "X" mark in the file is lost either maximizing or restoring down the window size.

I think these are my comments for now on this new feature. Hopefully you'll be able reproduce and possibly fix some of them.

Thank you so much again for your continuing work in the emulator.

[Tux]

1 hour ago, mer-curious said:

So, continuing from my previous post, unfortunately I wasn't able to enable any of the IPS files yet. I copy and paste my kof97.ini from FBNeo to Raine's IPS folder, and all I get when I start the game is this message:

And then I have to click "Ok" a few times in order to finally start the game.

For information, this is what my FBNeo's kof97.ini file has inside:

// FinalBurn Neo v1.0.0.03 --- IPS Config File for kof97 (The King of Fighters '97 (NGM-2320))

2-Stage1.dat
3-hchr2ps.dat
97lx.dat
k1-TimePS.dat
k4-flash.dat

Didn't I mention that this file is very sensitive to what's inside and is not supposed to be edited by hand, even less copy a file generated by something else here ???

No other comment about that, the parsing would fail at the very 1st line of your file here !

1 hour ago, mer-curious said:

I can see the "X" mark in those *.dat files when I navigate the list in Raine, but interestingly they don't seem to work.

Finally, I need to report a GUI glitch which I found in the IPS menu. If you scroll the list all the way down, click on the final *.dat file to select it and expand Raine's window, the file selection won't resize with the window expansion and will stay small. Here's a quick recording showing the issue happening:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tJRLyayBAP-FafJCqPPf_5Ue20YI9yH1/view?usp=sharing

Also, if you pay attention, the "X" mark in the file is lost either maximizing or restoring down the window size.

I think these are my comments for now on this new feature. Hopefully you'll be able reproduce and possibly fix some of them.

Thank you so much again for your continuing work in the emulator.

Easy fix : just don't do that ! (usually people start by choosing a window size, usually fullscreen and don't ever change after that). I'll look into that later...

[mer-curious]

On 2/26/2023 at 4:10 AM, Tux said:

Didn't I mention that this file is very sensitive to what's inside and is not supposed to be edited by hand, even less copy a file generated by something else here ???

No other comment about that, the parsing would fail at the very 1st line of your file here !

Hello Tux! I'm sorry for taking long to reply. I was hoping you would eventually try to investigate this a little further and post anything later about it, but since you didn't I left this feature for another time then.

After rereading your reply I noticed that I forgot to mention that I also tried a kof97.ini file with just the *.dat files in the very beginning, and sadly they still won't load in the emulator.

This is how I have them here:

2-Stage1.dat
3-hchr2ps.dat
97lx.dat
k1-TimePS.dat
k4-flash.dat

There is something still wrong with Raine detecting and loading the IPS files. I still get the same error message below:

 

Perhaps this error has to do with the two folders it shows in the beginning which you didn't reproduce yet?

This is what I have in my IPS folder:

Hopefully you'll reproduce this eventually.

  

On 2/20/2023 at 2:21 PM, Tux said:

And I still didn't understand how you got 2 kof97 directories, I can't reproduce that here...

Yes, I simply have my kof97 folder in the IPS folder and this is what Raine shows me:

 

And finally there is the GUI glitch, which I show in this capture:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tJRLyayBAP-FafJCqPPf_5Ue20YI9yH1/

By the way, here Google Drive is rendering the video in low resolution. If it happens with you too, just download it and it should be in the correct resolution.

 

All in all, I guess you will need to try all of these reports in Windows in order to reproduce them since you aren't being able to do that in Linux.

Hopefully you'll have time and motivation for that in the near future.

Thank you so much again for your attention.

Edited March 31 by mer-curious

[Tux]

I was about to reply that too much time passed and I lost all motivation for that, but I got curious how you could mess up your things so much... !

so all interest is not gone yet it would seem... !
Anyway, the 1st point is that I told already twice that the .ini file SHOULD NOT BE EDITED BY HAND, it's in bold and in uppercase, if you still don't understand, I don't know what I'll be able to do after that ! You are sure to make it fail if you edit it by hand, said twice, ignored twice. Here it's probably because of an empty line you added at the end of the file!
Yeah I will eventually add some at least basic parsing so that you are able to copy directly your precious files... ! But for now, just avoid that.

After that the double kof97 is because there were a few bugs in this new file selector in case there is only 1 directory in the ips directory. And why didn't I see it while I tested ? Because I unpacked the whole archive I got from the internet, and didn't try to do any subtle stuff here, I guess you didn't do the same because it was already unpacked somewhere on your disk... we have symlinks in linux for that to avoid to have to copy things over and over, microsoft says it's too risky for security reasons... !!! Anyway... The bugs are fixed, and that's where you see that I added that in a hurry, there were quite a few for sure, all small, but if you were in this specific case, it exploded. You are really a bug magnet to get all the worst stuff all the time, there was even a linux specific bug when doing things like that !

Anyway so it's fixed here, but for you for now : just put more than 1 directory in your ips directory, avoid to edit this damned ini file by hand, and it should finally work!

[mer-curious]

2 hours ago, Tux said:

Anyway, the 1st point is that I told already twice that the .ini file SHOULD NOT BE EDITED BY HAND, it's in bold and in uppercase, if you still don't understand, I don't know what I'll be able to do after that ! You are sure to make it fail if you edit it by hand, said twice, ignored twice. Here it's probably because of an empty line you added at the end of the file!

Thank you so much for your continuing work in this feature.

I forgot to mention that I had already tried to create the *.ini file from Raine without touching anything in the file later, and had the same results sadly. That's why I kept waiting for a further investigation from you on that issue. I did everything you recommended in the past comments but couldn't make the patches to work no matter what I tried.

Anyway, now I created a kof98 folder in the IPS folder to see if it would finally load those patches but incredibly it didn't. Actually I can't even see the *.dat files anymore using Raine. This is what's happening here:

- Raine is always crashing whenever I click on the empty kof98 folders (in the plural because now there's two of them)

- No *.dat files are shown in the kof97 folder

A screen capture of the issue (download the file if it renders in low resolution in the Google player):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CXdag2sQMdvI5tC7jq4uJIPLrJE4Yvm5/view?usp=sharing

I don't know why it is not showing the dat files anymore in the kof97 folder. Even if try to navigate into the IPS directory, the program crashes, as you see in the video. Hopefully you have already stumbled upon that issue too and fixed in your recent reviewing, but if not, it would be good to try to reproduce it so the next version is indeed free of bugs.

But I'm really looking forward to finally seeing this feature working in Raine (in Windows, I mean, because in Linux it seems OK at least).

Thank you so much again for your work.

 

PS: could you also reproduce the GUI glitch in the IPS file selector?

[Tux]

Ok, I surrender, you get your update, 0.95.1 released !