Todo as of September 1

The only thing accomplished in August was adding hitboxes for Real Bout Special, RB2 and MotW, and getting throwboxes out for the Garou Densetsu and early King of Fighters series. It's not much compared to the prior body of work, but it proved to really taxing because of the need to dig every little thing out of the innards of the code using asm traces. (However, anyone considering getting into this kind of work shouldn't be too put off: hitbox systems are generally more sanely designed in later games.)

The scripts are now about as good as they can get, at least given the precarious state of MAME-rr and FBA-rr. With this done, I feel I can leave behind the hitboxes to work on other things. I'm leaving next month open-ended, but there's a Lua project with 3rd Strike and a cartography project I want to try.

---

This month's banner was from the intro movie of Rakugaki Showtime, the little-known, seriously fun, and Japan-only Treasure title published late in the PS1's life in 1999. It's somewhere between a fighting game and dodgeball.

The object is to KO the opponents. You can use the character's own attacks and throw weapons. The most prominent weapons are smiley balls that grow more agitated with handling and eventually start flashing, making the next throw a character-specific super. There's a block button for defense, and timing it just before an attack arrives will reflect thrown objects or stun attackers. Double-tapping jump can dash to any item or corner of the field, which helps keep the action going.

Many PSX titles went all-out on the 3D graphics, only to look horribly dated years later, despite being well-recieved at release. RS circumvents this by using sprites for the characters and putting them in a 3D world. Not just any sprites, but drawn in the eponymous sketchy style to look like paper cutouts, similar to Paper Mario. The 3D models are also deliberately clunky to match.

RS supports up to four players with any combination of teams and CPU players allowed, similar to Smash Bros. However, the multiplayer stages are kind of bland compared to the single player missions, which feature locales like a suburban backyard for an ESP-wielding dog and a dance hall for a squad of disco-bots. After the first few stages, there are three self-adjusting difficulty levels with different enemy lineups and BGMs.

Since the soundtrack by Konami/Treasure composer Nazo Suzuki seems to have never been released commercially, I don't think it's a problem to share the whole thing here. These aren't analog rips, but are streaming files from the disc image converted directly to PCM and then encoded. There are some duplicates for some reason.

Comments

[error1]

8bit Bifröst

[dammit]

Pretty much, but Oriental.

[Aerendir]

Hey Dammit' !
Thanks for the awesome work dude.

I have 2 questions :
- Is there any way to slow Mame-rr down ? We want to do MOTW Hitboxes but some moves are too fast to screen cap them.
- When we pause the game or go to Frame by Frame mode, the screen turns black. But someone told us that for him the screen stays normal, do you know how to fix it ?

Thank you in advance :)

[dammit]

It's not supposed to black out during pause. Does it still happen if you pause:

without running a script?
after removing mame-rr.ini?
in non-NeoGeo games?
in vanilla mame?

[CWheezy]

I dunno if you know anything about this, but a lot of roms are not working for me now, the neo geo ones specifically.

I was trying to look at sam sho and last blade 2 hitboxes and kept getting bios errors, do you know what is happening? These games still work on ggpo and supercade

[dammit]

What exactly happens when you try? Is it with FBA or MAME?

[Craig PurpleCity]

I would guess MAME, fba-rr worked fine straight away for me...
CWheezy, i had much trouble getting neogeo games to run on mame-rr (with my GGPO roms) but had success with the same roms when using an updated bios file, size 1,397kb (1,430,239 bytes)
It was sent to me by a friend so i don't have a link unfortunately, but i hope this helps....

[Craig PurpleCity]

Might i add that my brother and i have put some serious hours of battle into Rakugaki Showtime since reading this... loads of fun! I had no idea this game even existed. As massive powerstone fans this game is a brilliantly cute alternative and helped us settle some sibling disputes haha.
Now if only it wasn't over £100 to pick up a legit copy...!

[CWheezy]

It is with FBA, it doesn't show up on the list of available games, and when I select it manually, it says this:

samsho5.zip was found (C:\Users\Thomas\Desktop\Hitbox Tester\roms\samsho5.zip).
samsho5.zip was found (roms\samsho5.zip).
neogeo.zip was found (C:\Program Files\GGPO\roms\neogeo.zip).
neogeo.zip was found (roms\neogeo.zip).

The following ROMs are invalid:
• essential BIOS program ROM sm1.sm1 has a CRC of 97CF998B (correct is 94416D67).
• essential BIOS ROM 000-lo.lo is 64k which is too small (correct is 128kB).
• essential BIOS program ROM sm1.sm1 has a CRC of 97CF998B (correct is 94416D67).
• essential BIOS ROM 000-lo.lo is 64k which is too small (correct is 128kB).
• BIOS graphics ROM sfix.sfix was not found.

The ROMset exhibits the following problems:
• essential data is missing, the game will not run!
• program data is invalid.
• graphics data is missing.

I actually get the same error for third strike and 2nd impact

[dammit]

CWheezy: Those problem files are all components of the NeoGeo BIOS. So ultimately you need to find the right neogeo.zip for FBA-rr and MAME-rr. (It should be up to date with respect to mainline MAME, which means that GGPO's is different somehow.)

Looks like FBA is finding the same ROMs in three locations: your Hitbox Tester folder, FBA's roms folder, and GGPO's roms folder. That's way too confusing. The clearest way to organize it is put all non-bios roms in one folder, then have another folder for the MAME/FBA bios, and another for the GGPO bios. Then point all emus to the non-bios folder and also to their respective bios folder.

Can you say what the SF3 error is? It's not going to be exactly the same since it doesn't use that bios.

Craig PurpleCity: That's awesome. It's great isn't it? Apparently RS was close to being canned for some mysterious reason, which is why real copies are so rare. One of these days I have to try the Power Stone games, and Tobal for that matter.

[CWheezy]

sfiii3n.zip was found (C:\Program Files\GGPO\roms\sfiii3n.zip).
sfiii3n.zip was found (roms\sfiii3n.zip).
sfiii3.zip was found (C:\Users\Thomas\Desktop\Roms\sfiii3.zip).
sfiii3.zip was found (roms\sfiii3.zip).

The following ROMs are invalid:
• essential program ROM 10 has a CRC of 77233D39 (correct is BA7F76B2).
• essential program ROM 10 has a CRC of 77233D39 (correct is BA7F76B2).
• essential program ROM 10 has a CRC of 77233D39 (correct is BA7F76B2).
• essential program ROM 10 has a CRC of 77233D39 (correct is BA7F76B2).

The ROMset exhibits the following problems:
• essential data is invalid, the game might not run!
• program data is invalid.

And then the game runs normally (I think), but i have to select teh japan, no cd 990602 (might be wrong number) and it loads the 990512 version

[dammit]

There were some rom renames within the sfiii3 set in the 1.29 change, and I guess GGPO is based on something before that version, so that's the conflict.

In this case you don't need to download anything new if the zip files are renamed properly. (The most efficient way to do this is with clrmamepro. You can output the datfiles needed directly from the emulators.)

Since they are not based on the same versions, it looks like GGPO roms should be kept totally separate from MAME roms, and don't tell them to look in each other's folders.

[CWheezy]

Thanks for all your help dammit!

I separated the roms like you said