With Final Burn Neo in RetroArch, does creating the fbneo & hiscores.dat file cause potential issues? Some of my Neo Geo games seem to be crashing on startup, semi-randomly.

[PurpleTentacle]

So within Launch Box, I have 2 Platforms - Neo Geo AES & Neo Geo MVS. For AES games, I use Final Burn Alpha, and for MVS games, I use Final Burn Neo. These both use the 3.3 version of the Uni BIOS.  I also have a 3rd configuration for using the normal AES BIOS using the Final Burn Neo core for the purpose of using Retro Achievements. 

The problem that I've been having is that, for the MVS games using Final Burn Neo, some games are randomly crashing on startup. I say randomly because the same game will open fine sometimes & crash others. If I manually load the games in RetroArch, they work fine. Usually, after loading them in RetroArch manually, they'll launch fine next time, but after that, it's a crapshoot.

The thing is, I have a backup of my current Launch Box setup that is nearly identical except for it doesn't have a fbneo folder with hiscores.dat in it (this allows FB Neo to track high scores). It can reliably load Neo Geo games (with a few exceptions, which I assume have to do with those specific games), so I assume I messed something up on my main Launch Box collection. The only thing I can think of is that the fbneo folder with the hiscores.dat is some how messing things up. I did have different neogeo.zip BIOS files, but moving the BIOS from my backup didn't change anything, so I don't think the issue is the BIOS. Both my current & backup Launch Box collections are using the same version of RetroArch & FB Neo core, so that's not the issue either. Naturally, they're also using the same romset (they are by Ghostware, which I assume is the FB Alpha set because they don't work in MAME). 

 

So I'm probably going to revert to my backup, but I want to try to understand my current problem to avoid it (I like using the high scores, but obviously not if it's what's causing the issue). Is there anything else that could be causing this issue?

[PurpleTentacle]

Just a quick follow up, now that I'm thinking about it... I also have a copy of Launch Box on my laptop that has the hiscore.dat setup, and I've yet to have issues with games crashing on it. I should mention that I tried renaming & removing the fbneo folder on my main setup, and while the games launched after that, I think that was coincidence because they went back to crashing.

The only thing I can think of at this point is that I made a change to the core options that has caused this issue. I was going through all my games in my AES & MVS Platforms to make sure the Uni BIOS were set to the right Region & console/arcade settings (this is why I used FBA for AES & FB Neo for MVS, so that they'd retain their settings). There were a few games that didn't run (some of them were set to the wrong core, others I couldn't get running, so I deleted them & moved the MAME version to my Arcade platform). I'm not sure what changes to the core options I tried, so I can't really narrow it down. 

 

I'm kind of curious - are the BIOS files that are out there all the same? I'm not talking about the neogeo.zip files, since they often have different files in them... I mean is there one set of BIOS files that are for MAME & an another for FBA? I'd kind of like to cross check them by comparing the CRC32, but I don't know where that info is available (if it even is). I don't think my issues are related to the BIOS because I swapped the one from my backup to my main set, and it didn't fix anything. It's just something I'm trying to keep in mind.

 

I'm making a backup of my current Launch Box setup to my external hard drive, and once that's finished, I'll probably delete it & copy my backup to where I always store my main version. But I do want the backup so I can mess with it to see if I can solve the issue, just so I know to avoid doing that in the future.

Edited February 1, 2020 by PurpleTentacle