Raine 0.95.5 : big cps2 update !

[mer-curious]

Hello again Tux! Thank you so much for this fix! 😊

So I was right that you hadn't found the patch I was trying here, right? So it was good in the end to attach it to the post.

But I also get confused with these IPS collections because there are three of them in my original IPS thread. However, the ones I mostly use are the "FBA pack" (in the YouTube video description) and the Emufrance one (in the Emufrance website). These seem to have the most interesting and useful patches as far as I've tested. I didn't find many useful ones in Taoenwen's, but it's good that it's still maintained and "updated", even if you have found some kind of incompatibility with them.

Anyway, it seems now that all patches I tested are working fine in both FBNeo and Raine emulators, and the only thing left is the bug with changing from one IPS patched game to another. Hopefully you'll have some time and motivation to investigate it any time soon.

Thank you again for your great work and for your super fast support. 🙏

Edited May 23, 2023 by mer-curious

[Tux]

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Hello again Tux! Thank you so much for this fix! 😊

So I was right that you hadn't found the patch I was trying here, right? So it was good in the end to attach it to the post.

But I also get confused with these IPS collections because there are three of them in my original IPS thread. However, the ones I mostly use are the "FBA pack" (in the YouTube video description) and the Emufrance one (in the Emufrance website). These seem to have the most interesting and useful patches as far as I've tested. I didn't find many useful ones in Taoenwen's, but it's good that it's still maintained and "updated", even if you have found some kind of incompatibility with them.

Anyway, it seems now that all patches I tested are working fine in both FBNeo and Raine emulators, and the only thing left is the bug with changing from one IPS patched game to another. Hopefully you'll have some time and motivation to investigate it any time soon.

Thank you again for your great work and for your super fast support. 🙏

I didn't know there was a possible crash when loading different games using ips patches in the same session, if it's been reported it was lost, anyway I just fixed it.

Yeah from what I remember only 1 collection was serious, it must be the fba pack. But emufrance allowed to fix this load_continue thing, so it's fine too.

Found a few oddities in romhacking there : https://www.romhacking.net/?page=hacks&genre=&platform=26&game=&category=&perpage=20&order=&dir=&title=&author=&hacksearch=Go

actually you have to rebuild the .dat files manually there, they didn't even include them, the majority is clearly for consoles but there are a few original arcade ips, including :

 - bublbobl ultra : more a proof of concept than a real bublbobl extension like buble bobble redux, but it's not worthless.
 - donkey kong : this is the one which made me bring bps patching to raine, although I knew I wouldn't like the graphics, nes graphics are horrible usually, but I was still curious to see it.
 - strider : some rom fixes from a real fan. he went as far as finding there was a music which should play when out of time in the rom and which never played, and managed to fix the rom to make it play, plus improved a few of the graphics.

Maybe I should post at least some of the dat files I rebuilt by hand, but it's not very hard to do. I just enhanced the .dat parser to allow spaces or tabs as separators and any number of them.

They have a few street fighter patches which are totally equivalent to some of the cheats here, so they don't seem interesting at all.
These patches are clearly to burn some real eeprom and not to be used inside an emulator, but why not use them anyway ?

Edited May 23, 2023 by Tux

[mer-curious]

On 5/23/2023 at 5:29 AM, Tux said:

Maybe I should post at least some of the dat files I rebuilt by hand, but it's not very hard to do. I just enhanced the .dat parser to allow spaces or tabs as separators and any number of them.

This could be a good addition to the IPS thread since I've already linked three IPS collections there. Maybe they can be useful to other emulators too.

Still talking about CPS1/2, doing my tests here with the SFA3 announcer in Winkawaks I've noticed Razoola did a great job with the Qsound chip emulation. I'm not sure about my impressions though, but the sound effects and possibly the music sounded a little cleaner than Raine and FBNeo.

By the way, both Winkawaks and FBNeo feature an option called "low pass filter" that helps my earphones a little which have poor lows. I was wondering if you had ever tried such a feature or would be interested in adding it to Raine too?

Thank you in advance for your time. 👍

[Tux]

1 hour ago, mer-curious said:

This could be a good addition to the IPS thread since I've already linked three IPS collections there. Maybe they can be useful to other emulators too.

Still talking about CPS1/2, doing my tests here with the SFA3 announcer in Winkawaks I've noticed Razoola did a great job with the Qsound chip emulation. I'm not sure about my impressions though, but the sound effects and possibly the music sounded a little cleaner than Raine and FBNeo.

By the way, both Winkawaks and FBNeo feature an option called "low pass filter" that helps my earphones a little which have poor lows. I was wondering if you had ever tried such a feature or would be interested in adding it to Raine too?

Thank you in advance for your time. 👍

Yeah ok, I'll try to post that there soon, or in the extras section of the download page.

For qsound sorry, that's the only area where we share a lot of code with mame. A long time ago the sound drivers were developed in common for mame and raine, now I just kept a thin compatibility layer to be able to use their code with as few changes as possible (but since they keep on changing their interface all the time we have an old version of their sound drivers now, but they are good enough for me for now). So the gurus who decide how to make a sound chip to sound are not here, even in the mame source there is no email, just a name, and the maintainers changed over the years. But no mention of any low pass filter here. So you can forget about this low pass filter for now.

[Tux]

And I just posted the binary for 0.95.5d, the very last update for this 0.95.5 version. Just what we discussed in the past week, some improvements for the ips support (mainly load_continue support, but also the way the .dat files text is displayed), and the option to mute the sfa3 announcer in sound options.

 

[mer-curious]

Thanks for this quick update Tux! 😊

The Samurai Spirits IPS patch is now working correctly thankfully. But now I noticed something interesting with this game in Raine: the picture is not being shown entirely. Take a look and compare it to FBNeo:

You see that FBNeo's borders are much bigger than Raine's in the character select screen. In Raine the new hidden characters portraits barely fit the screen. I noticed that the whole game has this picture crop too.

It's not something related to the IPS patch, because it works the same in the previous version. I also disabled the blend files to see if it was the cause, but no. So something strange is going on here... I wonder if it also affects other games maybe..?

 

As a second bug report, I went and tried Street Fighter Zero 3 with the muted announcer setting but found that the game is not working here. This is what I did:

1- I loaded the Street Fighter Alpha 3 ROM (I cannot find "Street Fighter Zero 3" anymore in the game selection list).

2- I changed the Region option in the GUI to Japan.

3- I select Ryu to play.

4- As soon as I choose the fighting style in the character select screen, the ROM reboots automatically.

Interestingly I don't have this issue in version 0.95.5c, so maybe it's something to do with the Street Fighter Zero 3 driver removed from the current version?

Anyway, I'll wait your comments in those issues. Thank you so much in advance for your time. 👍

Edited May 28, 2023 by mer-curious

[Tux]

Well for the 1st, yes it's odd but no idea for now.

For the 2nd it was already in 0.95.5c, so I am not the only one who didn't notice. For now no idea neither.

edit : not 100% sure but it's probably related to cps2 encryption, sorry but I don't intend to take back sfz3j without further investigation here so it will take some time. I suggest either reverting to 0.95.5c for that or use sfz3jr1 which is still here (and if you can find a difference between sfz3jr1 & sfz3j, you can post it here !).

For the 1st it might be related to the crazy way mame (yeah because fbneo just uses mame code) renders the sprites. Sorry but I don't intend to ever render the sprites using the same way, too time consuming for the cpu. Here again not 100% sure, would require more investigation, but not sure I'll want to investigate this further for now.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Tux

[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