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Zzap! Raine
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Why a neocd emulator using the raine engine ?

  1. A few years ago, I worked on neocdpsp, a neocd emulator for the psp. And after a while I wanted to run this in linux, and by the way finish the emulation which was never completely finished at that time...
  2. There is no decent neocd emulator for linux (and don't tell me to run it in wine !)
  3. Neocd is about running some of the best neogeo games, with cd-quality music. I noticed last summer that a few neogeo games were running very badly on a 1 Ghz computer pluged to a tv, so it could be interesting to have a fast one for a change...

Status

The emulator had to support the format supported by the psp for the games, that is a zip for the game files, and some mp3s for the music. Neoraine also supports a few other formats listed further in this doc, but if you try to use an original neocd cd, it will run the game without music ! That's because I don't support cd music, mainly because I have no easy way to play an audio cd in linux with sdl and hear something (the cdrom drive has no cable to the sound card), and there is no way to play it digitaly. So you'll have to rip the cd in this case, more about this later.

The emulation is fast, but it doesn't try to emulate the raster effects. As a result, "riding hero" is unplayable because they simulate 3d effects using raster interrupts in this game. There might be a way to emulate this without slowing down too much, but sorry I don't have the motivation for this now (and ridhero is not a very good game anyway, which doesn't help the motivation at all !). This is the only known neocd game which can't be played.

Differences with raine

I made a separate executable, and a separate makefile (makefile.neocd), but finally there are very little differences :

  • There is no game list. When you try to load a game, you just browse files, and select a file to load, there are no known crcs to be checked
  • If you change the sample frequency, you'll have to restart neoraine to apply the change. It's to avoid to restart the cd track everytime you call the gui from neoraine. Anyway you should always play at 44 Khz since the audio tracks are at 44 Khz.
  • In "Sound options" you can choose music volume and sfx volume now. It's because depending on the game, music can be too low or too loud so it can be usefull to make adjustements. Notice that if you put these 2 to 10 (maximum), you will probably get some distortion...
    That's all ! At the begining there were no cheats and no hiscores but finally I noticed that a few neogeo cheats/hiscores work also for the neocd version. Not all of them are working, but quite a few do. The neocd cheat file is named "neocheats.cfg" instead of "cheats.cfg" to allow to have raine and neoraine in the same directory, but they have the same format.

    Formats supported for the games

    The games are all in cd format, so neoraine accepts one of these :
  • If you have copied the cd files somewhere, there is an ipl.txt in these files, so neoraine accepts the ipl.txt file directly, this is the most basic format (direct file access).
  • You can also zip the contents of the cd, and pass the zip file to neoraine. The zip file must contain an ipl.txt file in its root directory to be accepted.
  • Cds in a ripped form will have a cue file, an iso/bin file, and some wav or mp3 files for the audio. So the cue file is supported.
  • For the audio files they can be in mp3, ogg, or wav files for the hysterics of the "accurate" audio ! I recommend mp3 for the tracks. So basically you should have 1 directory / game, with game files + audio files in this directory. Then when you load a game, you browse to this directory and pass the required file (zip or cue usually).
    For compatibility with neocdpsp, audio files can also be placed in a neocd.mp3 directory in the game directory. So for example you would have :
    Directory: Metal Slug
|- mslug.zip or mslug.cue
|+
 |-neocd.mp3
 |+ track01.mp3
  |-track02.mp3...

    If you don't use a cue file with the exact file names of the audio tracks in it, then you must have the track number on 2 digits in the filenames. So track1.mp3 won't be accepted, but "Metal Slug - 01 - Opening.mp3" will be accepted. If you use a cue file then audio filenames can have any format.

    links

    List of games. There are also a few reviews, and some FAQs
    Wikipedia page about neocd
    French site about neocd. The interesting point is that there is a section about non official neocd games...

    Thanks

    Thanks go for this version to : the neocdpsp community, for the motivation at that time, Yoyo for the original neocdpsp version 0.5, Stephh for his very good beta testing job.

    • Raine WIP


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