Raine 0.98

[Tux]

This one is particular, raine was 1st appeared in 1998 after all! And I didn't think I would release another raine, but a guy from Japan (karasan0101) contacted me, he wanted to port neoraine to the xbox. I explained why it would be better to port raine instead, and he was glad to add a japanese localization. After that we added quite a few drivers (nothing too complex, mostly neogeo stuff, but still quite a lot), and quite a few fixes went in too, so it's time for another release!

New drivers : mainly some japanese games that I never added because I couldn't test them obviously, so :
Quiz Daisousa Sen - The Last Count Down (quizdais), japanese and korean versions
Quiz King of Fighters (quizkof), japanese/korean
Quiz Meitantei Neo & Geo - Quiz Daisousa Sen part 2 (quizdai2)
Mahjong Kyo Retsuden (mahretsu, playable with standard inputs, no plan to add the mahjong special inputs!)
Chibi Marukochan Deluxe Quiz (marukodq)
Last Hope (bootleg AES to MVS conversion,no coin support), with a patch so that it can be launched with any bios, even mvs.
Minasan no Okagesamadesu! Dai Sugoroku Taikai (minasan), this one is a puzzle!
Bakatonosama Mahjong Manyuuki (bakatono, another mahjong)
Golden Axe neogeo by Hoffman (goldenaxeng), he removed his rom from itch for some reason, the rom is still available at other places on internet, easy to find.
Xeno Crisis (Bitmap Bureau), this one is sold which didn't make testing easy. but karasan0101 tested it and says it's perfect.
Robocop - Neo Geo Conversion (HB, Beta 13) by Teo Tormo (robocopng) from there : https://teo-tormo.itch.io/robocop-neogeo
Double Dragon One (HB, Beta 3.2) by OzzyOuzo, sorry this one is unplayable because controls become unresponsive as soon as stage1 starts. So it's marked as "partially working". I fixed a bug it had on the fbi logo screen, but couldn't find why the inputs disappear in game so far.
The Eye of Typhoon (HB, Beta 7 Version) by OzzyOuzo (teot), I mainly included this one to see if it had the same controls bug, no, this one is fully playable, it's from there: https://ozzyouzo.itch.io/teot

Except that : I finally decided to finish the palette emulation for neogeo (!), I added some experimental support for this dark bit, I didn't want something as complex as what mame did, but the problem is that I don't have a good place to check how it looks. So if someone knows a good game to check for that let me know. And while we are at it, there is also the "shadow" mode, which darkens the palette, normally it's supposed to be used in pause, but all the games I tested didn't use it! So for now I didn't add anything for it, if someone knows for sure a place where it's used, let me know!

Fixes :
Now display curl error codes because it becomes increasingly difficult to download from internet archive these days. Oh well it was good while it lasted!
Raine is now usable with a tiling window manager like hyprland in linux, specific to linux this one.
Can now be compiled with zlilbng.
The Neogeo id is now displayed at the bottom of the screen like what is done for neocd games, it allows to remove that from the too long game titles they have.
Fix neogeo scanline counter ! This one prevented from playing robocopng at 1st, a very surprising bug which probably impacted some other neogeo games. Anyway it's fixed.
Lots of small but important fixes for the console.

That's all for this time, don't expect a lot of releases after this one though, it's just that we added a lot of things in quite a short time, so it was worth a release, have fun!

Oh yeah, just in case the downloads are here: https://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html
And if you wonder why the arch package has 0.98d version, it's because you can't test the build, you are obliged to commit the makefile 1st, and I kept forgetting things in the makefile, it shows that it had been a long time since last release!

[Robert]

I'd seen some of the Japanese neogeo games coming through, and wondered about a new release. So here it is! 

 

[Tux]

For those who have a problem with lua55.dll not found, sorry I had to rebuild a few things on my linux box to make this release, and in the end it told me it didn't have lua5.4!

So the quickest solution: just rename lua54.dll to lua55.dll. They are compatible apparently, so it works. I just tested it and it's ok.

Also karasan already found a tool to test the dark bit and the shadow palette, so I'll look into it soon...

[pmc2]

10 hours ago, Tux said:

For those who have a problem with lua55.dll not found, sorry I had to rebuild a few things on my linux box to make this release, and in the end it told me it didn't have lua5.4!

So the quickest solution: just rename lua54.dll to lua55.dll. They are compatible apparently, so it works. I just tested it and it's ok.

Also karasan already found a tool to test the dark bit and the shadow palette, so I'll look into it soon...

Renaming doesn't work on Windows. On the other hand, using the right files causes no issues at all.

LuaBinaries - Browse /5.5.0/Tools Executables at SourceForge.net  

[Tux]

Oh well thanks then !

[Neville]

I've trying the x64 Windows build and everything seems pretty solid. If that, some Neo Geo games still have raster problems, but I don't know if they were supposed to be fixed or not. Here's a capture:

[Tux]

I guess the problem was already there before, I didn't touch the raster bitmap in this version, just the scanline counter. Well sorry, I never play football games, and raster bugs are very hard to fix, so I don't think I am going to dive into this anytime soon, but thanks for the report anyway, I'll keep that in mind just in case...

[Neville]

Sure. At least you know it's there.

[karasan]

Hi everyone!

I'm karasan0101 from Japan.

I've been working with Tux on the Japanese localization of Raine and testing various Neo Geo games.

Originally, I was just trying to fix missing Japanese characters in Raine, but somehow the project became much bigger than I expected!

Recently, I discovered a very interesting thread on the Neo-Geo forums:

Neo Geo CD Conversion Project

https://www.neo-geo.com/forums/index.php?threads/neo-geo-cd-conversion-project.102645/

This thread started back in 2005 and is still active today. Many unofficial Neo Geo CD conversions have been developed, including arcade games that were never officially released for the Neo Geo CD.

I've been testing some of these conversions with Raine 0.98.

My results so far:

• Blood Bros. – Playable, with working audio.

• Street Smart – Playable, with working audio.

• Tiger Road – Playable, with working music, but some scenes appear black in my test build.

• King of the Monsters – Playable.

• 8 Man – Playable, with music working, although some intro audio may be missing.

• Xevious – Playable, with working audio.

• Galaxian – Playable, but some background sounds seem to be missing.

• Neo Bomberman – Severe graphical corruption, making gameplay difficult.

Some of these issues may be related to my modified test build, so further testing with the standard version is necessary.

What surprised me most is that developers have even converted Sengoku 3 and Strikers 1945 Plus to Neo Geo CD!

According to the developers, both have been tested on real Neo Geo CD/CDZ hardware. The amount of work involved must have been enormous!

I haven't tested those two conversions with Raine yet, but I'd love to try them someday.

It's amazing to see so much development activity for the Neo Geo CD more than 30 years after its release.

I thought other Raine users might find this interesting too.

Thanks to Tux for his continued work on Raine!

Best regards,
karasan0101