FinalBurn Alpha on my X1000
This week I decided to take a look at Final Burn Alpha, released by HunoPPC for AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition on my AmigaOne X1000!
Final Burn Alpha is the swiss army knife of arcade machine emulators, capable of emulating lots of different arcade architectures, and even some home console systems as well for good measure! ColecoVision, Sega GameGear, Sega Megadrive, PC-Engine, SG1000, Arcade boards, Sega Master System, Neo Geo, TurboGrafix 16, and plenty more too!
The program uses SDL so you will need Warp3D with PCI Radeon 9250 or Warp3D Southern Islands, Radeon HD and capable Southern Islands Radeon graphics card if you don't have it already - you can get the newest Warp3D drivers and Radeon HD v1/2 drivers from AMIStore. Southern Island graphics cards are available on Ebay and elsewhere. I have previously covered models that work under AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition with the latest drivers on this very blog.
To say that this install is large is an understatement! Allow plenty of time to download all the parts from HunoPPC's website here and makes sure you have 20GB+ free space to put all the files in.
Be sure to download the instructions on the site that explain how to extract the various packages to the Final Burn Alpha drawer once it is installed. Here are those instructions:
As you can see there is a lot of files and they are big, and this does not include the game roms:
The full set Final Burn Alpha ROMS can't be included in the archive for copyright reasons, but can be found easily enough with a quick Google...about 15GB's worth to download the complete set!
Having eventually done this, I then move onto the main Final Burn Alpha lha archive, which should be extracted to RAM:
The installer is easy to step through:
I installed into Work:Emulation, since this is where I keep my other emulators on my X1000:
All done:
Here is the resulting FinalBurnAlpha drawer:
Here is the readme-first which explains about just how many emulations Final Burn Alpha supports and lots of helpful tips - well worth reading:
In addition to this I needed to install LibBoostyGfx V2 library, which is used by Final Burn Alpha - you can download from os4depot here. This library is DonationWare and so a donation via PayPal donation to HunoPPC (the author) should be done, with online registration and activation to use it once the key has been received:
Here is the LibboostyGFXv2 drawer once extracted:
Walking through the installer is straightforward:
By default it installs what it needs into SYS:Sobjs and I left it as default:
Once installed you get the window below to activate your copy of LibBoostyGFX V2, which requires internet access to activate:
As mentioned earlier there are multiple archives for bezels, wheels, previews and roms that also need to be installed into the Final Burn Alpha drawer - most go inside the .FBA drawer in the appropriately named drawer:
The roms though go into the roms drawer in the main Final Burn Alpha drawer:
Problem number one I found is that I don't have anything to unrar on the AmigaOne X1000!
Generally I do this kind of thing on the Mac first, but I thought I would see if I could do it on the X1000. I quickly found unRAR on OS4depot here, downloaded it and extracted to RAM:
I then copied unrar to c: and checked out the options to use it:
I then got to work extracting the RAR archives to the right places. I subsequently found out you can download a XAD Unrar program on os4depot here that works with the Unarc GUI program!! Wish I knew about that first - anyway!
You don't need to unzip the individual zipped ROM files within the massive 15GB complete rom archive - they should be left as .zip as the Final Burn Alpha program will deal with that.
With that done, we now have a fully functional FinalBurn Alpha. Next we need to run the "Please !!! run this if you have all ROMS" icon which populates the Final Burn program configuration with the full list of roms to avoid having to add them in yourself manually.
Because I have an X1000 and all the roms, I can run the "Start-TTF-GUI-All-Roms_Altivec" program.
However I did hit some problems at this point, specifically a conflict with the Catweasel joystick driver which is included in the CatWeasel MK2 driver for AmigaOS 4. Even though the Mk2 doesn't have a joystick port on it, the driver includes it.
This is the first program I have run since installing the Catweasel Mk2 in the X1000 that has had issues with it. HunoPPC let me know that the driver causes issues with the Amiga Input he uses for the joystick support in Final Burn Alpha. I found I had to rename the LIBS:catweaselmk2.library to catweaselmk2.library.off and move the DF0 mount from the Devs:DOSDrivers to fix this. Which means I can't use my Catweasel with Final Burn Alpha.
That done, I could then launch Final Burn Alpha, which looks very impressive indeed:
After the intro it goes to the main selection screen as below:
Pressing Escape brings up the credit screen and pressing Escape a second time quits the program:
You can navigate the rom list with the usb joystick or cursor keys. Pressing Space allows you to customise settings for each title. You can also filter the list of titles by hardware or genre to speed up scrolling through the list:
Here is a Megadrive ROM preview:
This is a ColecoVision ROM:
When I press fire on the joystick I get to play with some options as below:
I can full screen or not, filter effects, add the ROM to my favourites list, etc. I hit CTRL to launch the game to try it out:
Next I try some NeoGeo titles on Final Burn Alpha:
It is easy to get sucked in trying some classic games from systems of the past for sure!
I also tried some games I didn't play before, like this one for the Sega Megadrive:
Arcade ROMS are of course well represented, and work well in Final Burn Alpha:
I tried some SNES games but the ones I tried didn't seem to work well for some reason.
Megadrive games on the other hand work great, and quickly found another favourite to try out on Final Burn Alpha:
I even tried out a Sega Master System ROM or two:
One of the nice things is the ease of which you can switch between completely different systems within the same Final Burn program. I hit Escape and went back to arcade ROMS in Final Burn to try another favourite:
Next game I tried was a 2004 Neo Geo game rom, which runs very well like the others I tried (excepting SNES stuff):
Lucky last was an Arcade Rom called UN Squadron - I played this game a lot on the Classic Amiga too back in the day - still as much fun as ever:
Final Burn Alpha for AmigaOS 4.1 runs very well on the AmigaOne X1000 and definitely worth trying it out!