Fbneo Full Romset
Escolastico Hall
So my doubt is: Final Burn would be the best emulator for arcades and as MAME actually works with roms, we already have a lot of problems with incompatibilities. Or does one emulator have nothing to do with the other?
If your romset works with FBNeo and not with MAME, it is possible that you have the FBNeo romset. Each system has its own romset and although they can be compatible, or even start and be playable, most likely they will give you errors. It is recommended that you have the romset of the Core you are going to use.
What I do know is that it was the first to emulate CPS2, that was a world event. And that FBNeo is a fork of FinalBurn Alpha, and this replaced the original FinalBurn, which in its early days was called FinalDave. Which had to close, precisely because of a legal problem with CPS2.
And it is very important that these things happen because there are things that we assume as obvious and do not have to be so and serves to polish / refine the documentation, which in itself, is very good.
Each file that you find inside the zip is a dump, that is to say it is a real chip of the arcade that is passed to digital. They are parts of the hardware, video, sound, etc. And these files are shared between games.
Dump the arcade is much more complicated than a console, because it is necessary to disassemble the machine, remove each chip, rip the chip file with special devices, reassemble the machine and then make the emulator compatible with those dumps files.
Extreme example: If you add a new machine with a new system, you have to modify the emulator to understand and run those files. If by chance the audio dump file is the same as the Mortal Kombat one, you have to modify it to make it compatible with the new system.
From what I've read this error can be caused by fbneo not having the correct romset but if this really is the issue then why does the same file for Golden Axe run perfectly well directly from RA (also using the fbneo_libretro core)?
FBNeo is not MAME, they are completely different romsets, you need to use the correct romset for the emulator or core. Why does it work when loaded from Retroarch and not via the commandline? sounds like a emulator bug to me, or you are loading a different version of the same game from Retroarch and Launchbox, but again if you are not actually using a FBNeo romset you are actively making things more difficult and incompatible.
I have only one copy of goldnaxe.zip on my system so yeah, it's really really weird and confusing that it works direct from RA. I guess I was just hoping there might be something obvious I'd missed here without requiring me to download afresh and, if previous romset changeovers are anything to go by, lose all my high scores (but, hey, that's a whole other thing).
When you run it directly from RetroArch, make note of the core that it's loading to make it run. Then in LaunchBox, check that that's the core you're asking it to use. If the core is different than the one you have assigned to the Platform it resides in, but the assigned core is what's needed for all the other games in that platform, edit that game and in the Launching, Emulation section, check and use Custom Command-Line Parameters to load the correct core for Golden Axe.
Okay, after further digging I found my games ROM file location as shown in LB is the Games\MAME subfolder of my LB folder. This is not where my ROMs are kept. Even stranger, there's nothing in that folder at all!
Changing the path to where Golden Axe actually is unsurprisingly made RA work. Yes, this is a solution but it's not a good one- I can't fathom manually repointing every game's file location by hand so RA works.
I'm wondering if my import is screwy somehow, I mean, how does LB even manage to load these games from this magical empty folder? Is this normal? I'm starting to think I'll have to reimport all the games again...
Launchbox does not care where your roms are, and for the mame fullset importer it doesnt actively import anything. It gets the list of what games work from the mame emulator itself, it then adds the games listed there to launchbox. When loading, no game is passed to the emulator, Launchbox just says hey mame load "game name" and mame itself finds and loads the game. So when trying to load a game in a emulator that is not mame, but using a mame romset (again like i said earlier, bad idea) it does not actually have the file to pass, because as you correctly state the roms/mame folder is empty (this is just the default location of all roms unless staed to use another location during the import process).
FinalBurn Neo (also referred to as FBNeo or FBN) is a multi-system emulator (Arcade, consoles and computers) under active development. Unlike MAME it's more focused on playability and advanced features than preservation.
It is the follow-up of the FinalBurn and FinalBurn Alpha emulators.
The libretro core provides wide compatibility with platforms and features supported by libretro.
FBNeo strives for accuracy, just like MAME. There are some arcade boards where one or the other will be more accurate, but for the most part they should be equally accurate.
The main difference with MAME is that FBNeo doesn't mind including "quality of life" hacks, while MAME is about absolute preservation. "Quality of life" hacks include things like :
From the root of the repository, run
make -j5 -C src/burner/libretro generate-filesmake -j5 -C src/burner/libretro
Note : -j5 is to optimize build time on cpus with 4 cores, you can rise or reduce that value to match your own, however a value too high will increase ram usage and might even cause your system to become instable.
Arcade emulation won't work properly without the romsets matching the emulator. FBNeo being an emulator under active development, a given romset might change from time to time to stay in sync with the best dump available for that game. All of this is to offer you the best gaming experience possible, because older bad dumps can prevent the game from working as it should.
You can download the dat files for the latest version of the core from the dats directory. Note that some devices (Nintendo 3DS) are running a "light" build with fewer supported games due to memory limitation, the dat files for that build are available from the light subdirectory.
It mostly consists of latest dumps available for MAME.
The other romsets are usually a mix of hacks and homebrews, most of them can be found in HBMAME dumps.
Having an older FBAlpha/FBNeo set among your ingredients will also help a lot.
It also requires usage of specific romsets, meaning the rom must have the expected crc/size, and be packaged in an archive with a specific name (the instructions to build those romsets don't differ from arcade's).
You can use specific folder's name for detection, it's the easiest and recommended method, especially if you are using RetroArch playlists or if your device is not compatible with subsystems (android and consoles) :
You can also emulate consoles by prefixing the name of the roms with XXX_ and removing the zip7z extension in the command line, or adding the --subsystem XXX argument, here is the list of available prefixes :
It doesn't guarantee hiscores will work for a specific game though, sometimes a driver could just be missing the necessary support code for this feature, or hiscore.dat might have a missing or broken entry for that romset. You can request support in the issue tracker.
The white screen tells you if the romset is supported at all and which files are wrong or missing.
Exceptionally there might be a false positive due to your file being unreadable for some reason.
For the unsupported romhacks, you can put the patched version of the romset into SYSTEM_DIRECTORY/fbneo/patched (NB: you can strip it of any file that don't differ from non-patched romset if you want), that method will only work if the sizes and names matches with the original romset.
The romset you must launch is still the original non-patched romset (its content will be overrided at runtime by the content of the patched one), you can disable that behavior by toggling off the Allow patched romsets core option.
Write a report here with details on the issue and your platform.
If the issue is not self-explanatory, it is important to provide a video of the PCB (meaning real hardware), any other material (remakes, other emulators, fpga, game rips, ...) will be ignored.
If the issue doesn't happen right from the beginning, please try to provide a savestate from right before the issue.
We won't accept requests for "making the core faster", as far as we are concerned this core has a good balance between accuracy & speed, and for the most part will already run really well on low-end devices (rpi3, ...).
Overall, FBNeo is slower than old MAME version, because it's more accurate, meaning graphics, sound and gameplay are more likely to be faithful to the real machine.
This libretro port also supports various features which are usually buggy or totally missing in MAME cores (runahead, netplay, rewind, retroachievements, ...), those features might require additional resources.