Sorry to rebump such and old topic, but I think it's the best place to ask.
I'm a total noob when it comes to arcade emulation. I don't have any experience either with PC or Wii. For the last few days I've been reading and it's absolutely intimidating. When you think you start understanding something, then another thing pops up and you are clueless once again:
Old retroarch versions vs new, recompiled cores, custom cores, Frankestein RA, HEXAECO RA, MAME, MAME2000, MAME2003, MAME2003+, different mame romsets for different families of cores (0.37b5, v0.134u3, v0.135), merged romsets, split romsets, FBA, FBA Neo, FBA own romset... it's too much to zoom out and see the full picture.
I know tracking best compatibility/performance is impossible because there are so many combinations and games to try. But please help me avoid obsolete/incorrect info and point me to the right track.
I'll just focus on Arcade emulation. I guess standalone apps are obsolete and RetroArch or some of its variants is the way to go. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if there are special cases like large roms not supported in RA but supported by a standlalone app.
For what I gathered, the best RA version is 1.7.6 since later revisions break essential things like controller support. I think it's also the most stable? I remember way, way back, that RetroArch didn't save settings and crashed constantly, so using it was infuirating. After all this years my assumption is that that doesn't happen anymore, or at least 1.7.6 is safe in that regard.
So RA 1.7.6 is at least a good starting point. What is the difference with Frankestein RA? Does it have any advantages? Same with RA-HEXAECO.
The next thing to see are the cores. This is very tricky because it seems you can grab cores from a more recent RA and use them in 1.7.6. Doing it just like that might work fine, improve things or get things worse. I guess that's what saulfabreg's recompilation cores are all about: to bring the improvements or more modern cores to RA 1.7.6 (or other old versions) even if not always things get better.
But cores need specific romsets to work. Some cores have more compatibility/performance/aquraccy with certain games than others, so you end up with 2 or 3 different romsets.
FBAlpha2012 cores need the fba-arcade-v0.2.97.29 romset
MAME2000 needs 0.37b5 romset
MAME2003+ needs 0.78 romset
There's also SDL MAME Wii 0.6.0 mod by saulfabreg which uses romset 0.134u4
And MAME4Wii which uses romset 0.135
That's a lot of romsets and space needed. I haven't take a look into it but I guess RA and the other apps can use the HDD for roms even if they are installed in the SD card. Are all these romset really needed?
I know you can convert mame romsets with the correct files and tools. I guess it's better to go from a more modern romset to an older than viceversa.
Between merged and non-merged romsets which one suits Wii the best? Can romsets be merged or split too?
I think that's all. My head is still spinnig.
Hahaha, what a display of questions and doubts! Great memory and summarization skills. I'm not going to answer each of your questions individually. I'm going to talk about my arcade projects for the Wii, and you'll surely draw your own conclusions from what I say. The diagram that Oo_Ice_Deep_oO made in his post, even though it was made in 2022, still makes sense in general terms, although things have changed a bit. Before I go into detail, I'd like to explain why we want to play arcade games and how to do it on the Wii. I think it goes beyond simply being able to play the game. I'm referring to how the game is played and under what difficulty conditions. For example, I play games on the hardest difficulty level, and being able to play them on normal doesn't interest me. So, if a game runs perfectly but you can't change the difficulty level, for me, that game is as if it couldn't be emulated on the Wii. Therefore, for me, being able to choose the difficulty level is vital. In MAME 2003, some FBA Alpha games, particularly FBA Neo, Neo Geo, and MAME Wii, allow you to choose the difficulty level. Fortunately, FBA Neo can play CPS1 and CPS2 games, although FBA Alpha CPS2 games also allow you to change the difficulty level. Similarly, in Neo Geo and even some MAME 2003 games, you can choose the game's region, as certain features vary depending on the region. You might say, "Sure, if I download the ROM for each region, then I'll have the game in that region, or if I download the ROM with a certain difficulty level, then I'll have the game at that difficulty..." No. That's done using the MAME BIOS and menus, which are accessed through the emulators. To say that MAME 2003, in its Frankenstein version or the official one, has greater compatibility than the HexAeco SS version is an understatement. However, HexAeco allows you to change practically any configuration parameter, save it permanently, and have it executed exactly the same way every time with incredible ease. This cannot be said of the other versions, which are a real pain in the neck... And in my projects, I've managed, through the use of Wiiflow (an indispensable program for anyone with a Wii, especially for its game configuration capabilities), to make games directly executable with a single click of the controller in their different regions and difficulty levels. Now comes the problem, which has to do with which arcade emulators are the most optimal for running the games as close as possible to the original arcades... First, I should say that I don't use Double Strike resolutions. I use the original resolutions and adjust the CRT TV's geometry by increasing the horizontal range. That is, if I want to play Gradius 2 Arcade, I don't set the Wii resolution to 320x2 224p, which would logically be 640x224p, but rather I set it to 320x224p, increase the width through the emulator to 720, and expand the horizontal range on the CRT until the image fits, respecting that original resolution. The difference in quality compared to Double Strike is overwhelming... For example, in Street Hoop, when you use this "trick," artifacts appear in the player sprites... In the other games where I use this trick, I haven't encountered any graphical problems. Now, you'll notice that if you run Neo Geo games, for example, you won't be able to play the entire catalog on the same emulator. For instance, if you use RetroArch Hexaco SS as a RetroArch compilation, you won't be able to play, for example, Sonic Wings 3... But if you use the RetroArch Hexaco standalone emulators, you will be able to play that particular game... There are games that supposedly can't be played on the Wii, but they can; I've already encountered several... You just need to find the specific emulator in one of its versions, depending on the author, and the appropriate ROM... I've modified WiiFlow to run only vertical games on a rotated CRT TV and another version for horizontal games, containing only vertical and horizontal games respectively. From my experience after emulating arcades on Wii for quite some time, I would say that probably the best emulator there is FBA Neo and then FBA Alpha.
I'm referring to the performance level when running the games, since with heavy ROMs you can overclock up to 200, making the experience closer to the original machine. The problem with FBA Alpha, as I mentioned, is that you can't change the difficulty level in almost all games... maybe it is possible, since I recently discovered a game that made me think it might be possible... Super Pang... In this game, you can access the system menu from FBA Alpha, and by changing the configuration, a file is created containing the DIP switches for that specific game... perhaps by replicating these DIP switches for another game, knowing the position of those specific DIP switches in the new game through documentation that usually exists for each game, and modifying the file that gives the position of these DIP switches, you could manually change the difficulty of each FBA game... I haven't seriously tried it yet since I don't have a program that allows me to do that... I've used one that lets me see the DIP switches and their positions, but I don't know how to manipulate that data...
It's just theory... it would be great if someone with programming knowledge implemented difficulty in FBA Alpha so it could be selected, and also added an option to change and save the settings for those of us who aren't NASA engineers.
Regarding the emulation quality, I'll tell you about a game that can run on both MAME 2003 and FBA Alpha. You can see that the closest quality to the arcade experience is achieved with FBA Alpha, not MAME 2003 (in less demanding games, the difference may be negligible or very close). In my experience, this game is Zero Wing. If you emulate it with MAME 2003 HexAeco SS, you'll see that the game runs reasonably well and everything seems fine. But if you run it with FBA Alpha HexAeco SS, you'll see that everything flows with a quality and smoothness that's beyond MAME 2003's capabilities. On the other hand, some say that certain games run better when launched by WiiFlow because the game launcher itself must implement some kind of improvement... I don't know for sure, but that's what I've heard. Beyond the capabilities that WiiFlow allows... as you can see, things are complex on the Wii. Cheers.
