Seems like Bubble Bobble has given us lots of problems in this tourney eh?

Yesterday BenJos informed me on IRC that my Bobble Bobble tournament entry wasn't playing back correctly, with or without sound. With sound off it breaks on Round 4, and with sound on it was screwing up on Round 3... I tried it again on mine with sound on, and it was fine. I DL'ed another m35tg3 (I'm not sure why) just to test it on a "fresh" .exe, and it was still good on there. And all this time I'd been wondering why I couldn't playback Bubble's 9,999,990 recording. I figured there had to be some other factor that affects playback...

...and after a little experimenting, I've learned that the ym3812opl was the cause. I'm not sure how most people have it setup in mame.cfg, but since I don't have a Sound Blaster soundcard (it's a crappy Ensoniq), I have "ym3812opl = no" in mine since it sounds better that way to me. Switching it to "yes" would break my recording and make Bubble's work ok.

Of course, it's not necessary to edit mame.cfg, you can also set it from the commandline. Just put "-ym3812opl" or "-noym3812opl" in at the end. If you can't playback a recording, try the opposite value from how you have it set. It might help to clarify whether or not you recorded with ym3812opl on in your recording description, provided of course you actually recorded with sound on in the first place.

Hope this helps.

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), June 27, 2000

Answers

I'm curious. I have two sound boards installed, although my PCI128 (also Ensoniq, although SB is the label) is set as the primary card. However, certain games (Bubble Bobble, Rampart, Senjyo) always have MUSIC default to the second sound card (an old AcerFX 3-D or whatever)

Maybe somebody could shed some light on this for me?

Q.T.Quazar

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), June 27, 2000.

Good job, BBH. Yes, your recording now plays back perfectly for me when I use "-noym3812opl".

QT: My guess is that even when you specify the soundcard through MAME (and I guess that both have an SB interface), MAME still has to look for the soundcard. I guess it just happens to find one of them first, and so it never looks for the other one anymore. Is that second one an onboard card? If so, and if you don't want it to be used ever, then you can probably jumper something on your motherboard to disable it.

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), June 29, 2000.