Has Anyone Successfully Played Back Bubble's Alpham2 Recording?

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In recent times I've had no trouble playing back most of the submitted recordings on MARP. Alpha Mission 2 recordings still seem to give me a lot of trouble though. Bubble's recently submitted recording goes out of synch after the first couple of minutes. Has anyone managed to play it back?

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), March 04, 2000

Answers

alpham2 does have it's problems i haven't tried the recent bubble recording but his previous mame34 recording played back fine, i think the recordings are "iffy" from this game since bubble also recorded a mame35 that wouldn't play back for me (it would get out of synch after a certain point no matter what i changed) but it played back for bbh just fine....

I'll bet some people will playback this particular recording fine and others not, i'll have to try it when i get home...

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), March 04, 2000.


Here we go again :) Alpham2 always seems to give problems while playing back. The new recording actually scores 100k less than the previous one, and I sent it since I thought it might play well with more recent MAMEs. From what I tested with other persons (it always plays back in my machine btw) it does seem to play alright with speed throtling on, that in, playing back at 100% speed. I guess I'll give it another go within a few betas...

-- bubble (bubble@mail.pt), March 05, 2000.

Interesting... I hate to say it, but it played back fine for me, at least until got bored of watching it - which was somewhere around area 8 or something. Certainly not the couple of minutes mentioned... For the record: I used MAME 0.36 beta 16, sound on, no frameskip. I seem to remember switching off autoframeskip (by using F9) and using frameskip 0.

-- Barry Rodewald (bsr@hn.pl.net), March 05, 2000.

Ok, I tried it with -frameskip 0 and it didn't make a scrap of difference. It goes out of synch at exactly the same place (ships dies after about 30 seconds). Alpham2 seems to be inp unfriendly. A shame because I've been waiting for years to see someone play right through this game. I'm curious to know exactly what it is that makes one PC play it back ok and another to reject it. I've got a P2 450, 128Mb ram and I'm using a NVidia RIVA TNT card. I'm running Win98.

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), March 05, 2000.

Well, I tried to play it back again, under DOS mode this time, and it still works fine. All areas finished, with 4 lives remaining (only one lost that I saw).

I used MAME 0.36 beta 16 under Win95 OSR2.1 in DOS mode with sound ON. Auto frameskip, 100% speed. My system is a P2/233MHz, 64MB RAM, Win95 OSR2.1, nVidia TNT2 Model 64, Yamaha OPL3-SA3 soundcard.

I'll send you a screenshot of the highscore table if you want.

-- Barry Rodewald (bsr@hn.pl.net), March 05, 2000.



Actually, the old recording didn't work completely for me. What happened is that it went all the way through the game the first time, and then mysteriously lost sync on 2-2. (or whatever the stage number is). I had sped up most of the recording on the early levels with acceleration throttled at fskp 11, but slowed it down on later levels.

As for the new one, I've had no success whatsoever. I've tried a combination of sound on and off, throttled acceleration on and off, and frameskip - and no combination has gotten past the Stage 1 boss.

We KNOW Bubble can do it though. :)

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), March 05, 2000.


Thanx for the confidence BBH. I promise not to go after your scores for...hmmm...30 minutes at least :) Anyway, I recorded it using mame36b16, win98, cheap 16-bit sound card, banshee agp 16MB video card, PIII 500 cpu. Here's my config part of mame.cfg:

[config] scanlines=yes stretch=yes artwork=yes samples=yes vsync=no waitvsync=no triplebuffer=yes tweak=no vesamode=vesa3 antialias=yes translucency=no vgafreq=-1 alwayssynced=no depth=auto skiplines=0 skipcolumns=0 beam=1.500000 flicker=0.000000 gamma=1.200000 frameskip=0 norotate=no ror=no rol=no flipx=no flipy=no ym3812opl=yes soundcard=1 samplerate=22050 samplebits=16 stereo=yes volume=0 mouse=no cheat=no debug=no cheatfile=CHEAT.DAT historyfile=HISTORY.DAT mameinfofile=MAMEINFO.DAT profiler=no resolution=auto monitor=standard centerx=0 centery=0 waitinterlace=no joystick=4button hotrod=no mmx=auto dirty=auto

Hope that helps you folks who want to see the game. I DO promise I will re-record it as soon as mame's inp recording for the neogeo improves, maybe when last blade 2 finally plays back?

-- bubble (bubble@mail.pt), March 05, 2000.


Thanks for posting your cfg file Bubbles - it helped me work out what was going wrong!

Let me explain what I did to make it work. First I looked through both cfgs (yours and mine) and noticed several differences like triplebuffering, translucency, beam, flicker, gamma, ym3812opl, samplebits and several others. Your cfg also has some cfg strings that I don't have at all. Anyway I tried tweaking them one at a time and trying them out with no success. After a few I just copied your entire cfg replacing mine and ran it. It worked perfectly...

Now I really wanted to know what the offending cfg difference was. It turned out it wasn't the mame.cfg that was at fault at all.

After trying your mame.cfg and getting the inp to work I restored my original cfg and ran it and was astonished to find that it worked too (previously it didn't). I double checked that I did have my original cfg - yep! I then figured that something in the alpham2.cfg or alpham2.nv or memcard.000 had to be stuffing things up. I ran the inp again with my mame.cfg and it failed which corroborated this theory. I deleted the 3 files and reran the inp and it worked.

Conclusion - the problem is with the 3 files above and not with mame.cfg at all. Deleting the 3 files prior to each playback works perfectly. Hope this works for others trying this inp. Let me know. Also if anyone can shed more technical light on what is actually happening I'd love to hear it.

Oh and thanks for the awesome inp - it was great. Like I said I've been waiting to see someone finish this game for years. I didn't actually know that it finished after the second time through. That second pass through the game is positively wicked. Well done!

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), March 06, 2000.


I can concur with Tim's findings except that the only file that seems to make it muck-up for me in the nvram file. Removing that seems to be all that I needed to do to get the game to playback properly.

I wonder if the same will happen with some of the other Neo-Geo games that have not played back previously such as LB2 etc, or perhaps the nvram and memcard files should all be deleted prior to recording and prior to attempting playback ?!

BeeJay.

-- BeeJay (brianjohnstone@jade.co.nz), March 06, 2000.


Thanks Tim, That'll save me 2 hours of re-playing it :)

-- bubble (bubble@mail.pt), March 06, 2000.


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