A lot happened since my last progress report, so it might be a good time to keep you updated about FBNeo progress.
NES/FDS support
I see most of you saying “Isn’t FBNeo an arcade emulator ?”. Well, not exactly, we do some console emulation too, i already mentioned it in my last post. You might think there is nothing exciting about having a new NES/FDS emulator, but here is the deal : it’s probably one of the best ones available, we have yet to find glitches, even on games known for glitching on pretty much every other NES/FDS emulators. The downside is that, since it’s accuracy oriented, it won’t run that well on low-end devices. The emulator was written from scratch, mainly by reading nesdev, dink worked on it for 7 months, getting tons of help/testing/code/imagery from team 🙂
If you try to find another emulator that will render the following screen without any kind of glitch, you might be in a pinch, codemasters games are generally the bane of nes emulation.
As usual, usage of specific romsets is required (dat files are available at the usual place), it’s mostly based on No-Intro dumps. If your favorite NES/FDS game (even hacks or unofficial translations) is missing, you can request support on our forum. Currently we support around 1300 games.
New arcade games
I’ll probably forget some :
- Rabbit : a fighting game from 1997, one of the only Electronic Arts arcade games
- Express Raider : a beat’em’up from 1987
- Super Dodge Ball : a dodgeball game from 1987
- Tom Tom Magic : a flipper game from 1997
- Thief : a maze game from 1982
- Shark Attack : a game where you are a great white shark who attacks divers, from 1981
- NATO Defense : another maze game from 1982
- Victory : a shooter game where you defend an island, from 1982
- Sega System 24 : a Sega arcade hardware from early 90s, you can see the list of games here
- Akka Arrh : a space shooter from 1982
- Alien Rescue : a homebrew from monstersgoboom.itch.io, running on pacman hardware
- Magic Purple : a platform game from 1996
- King of Boxer : a boxing game from 1985
- Dead Angle : a shooter game from 1988
- Buggy Challenge : a racing game from 1985
- Denjin Makai : a beat’em’up from 1995
- Godzilla : a fighting game from 1993
- Heated Barrel : a run’n’gun from 1992
- Legionnaire : a beat’em’up from 1992
- SD Gundam Sangokushi Rainbow Tairiku Senki : a run’n’gun from 1993
- Pitpat Puzzle : a puzzle game from 1997
- Berzerk : a maze/shooter game from 1980
- Frenzy : follow up of berzerk, from 1982
Here is a screenshot of rabbit
New hacks
- Final Fight 30th Anniversary Edition : an advanced hack of Final Fight, among other features/improvements it supports 3 players
- Otto Project PZ : do you know about crazy otto ? if not you might want to read this. This hack is an attempt to reproduce this game which was a prototype of ms pacman.
- Lots and lots of hacks of many popular games and systems, including neogeo, cps, donkey kong and mortal kombat
Here is a screenshot of Otto Project PZ
Improvements and fixes
There are hundreds of them so i’ll just mention the latest improvement i did : i added a Hires 1080p mode to every vector games, you can enable it through dipswitches (in core options)
You can find more about what was fixed by looking at our issue tracker
Improvements and fixes specific to the libretro port
- fixed a crash that would happen when switching neogeo bios while using readahead
- prevent user from using incompatible neogeo bios with specific games
- improved default mapping for many games, including the usage of analog triggers as default to accelerate and brake in many racing games
- added an alternative way to load subsystems, more friendly with devices using static linking like android (more details in my FAQ)
- improved & sanitized core options, one thing worth mentioning is the CPU clock feature that got fixed (previously the values displayed were different from what was actually applied) and now allows to underclock too (which can be useful to reproduce slowdowns from original hardware, or to lower hardware requirements)