You may have already heard of NeoGeo and the Capcom Play Systems They’re excellent 2D arcade consoles – much better than most other 2D ones. Some of the titles released for these consoles are still much better than anything comparable on Windows Mobile. Therefore, if you’re into platformer or fighter games, you MUST check out the emulators running them.
(Speaking of the the Capcom Play System, it's abbreviated as CPS and should not to be mistaken for Capcom CPS Changer. There have been three major revision of them, CPS-1, CPS-2 and CPS-3 . The latter doesn’t have many games and isn’t supported on Windows Mobile).
Up until recently, it has been pretty impossible to emulate these platforms under Windows Mobile (WM for short). If you read the only related (and highly outdated) article at pdagameguide.com, dated back to 2003, you’ll see emulating NeoGeo was pretty much impossible then – all you could do is running NeoGeo Pocket Color games, which, being made for a not very powerful handheld platform, aren’t as sophisticated as desktop NeoGeo titles and should, therefore, not be preferred over the desktop versions. (Let alone their emulators being pretty outdated and incapable; for example, NeoPocott v0.38b R1 (also see THIS) hasn’t received any update for over six years!)
Pretty recently, well-known Windows Mobile coder Masterall has released the WM port of FinalBurn Alpha, the first emulator for WM that does deliver excellent emulation capabilities and SUPERIOR speed. And it’s free – as with the ROM images themselves. Finally, in addition to emulating NeoGeo and CPS-1/2, it’s also capable of running Toaplan and Cave games.
Masterall also has some other ports he can be VERY proud of. Picodrive, for example, is the best Genesis (Sega Mega Drive) emulator I've ever seen (I’ll elaborate on Genesis emulation in a later article). He’s also the author of pocketGBAdvance, a GBA emulator, of which he’s promising a usable version very soon.
All in all, he’s pretty much comparable to the other “big” names of emulator porters like n0p (Genesis Plus/Pocket PC, PocketSNES, DOSBox and Stratagus), PocketInsanity (PocketUAE) or Sunbug.net (PocketGBA).
In addition to the related pdagameguide.com article being completely outdated, I’ve decided to write an all-in-one guide on these questions because the related information currently available is very hard to digest for a non-professional Windows Mobile geek. Hope this guide will help a LOT.
Why do I recommend this emulator and these games? Why should you bother?
Because
- the emulator runs just GREAT on most current hardware, even with sound
- even the most CPU-intensive games run OK (with enabled sound!) on the (for gaming) best, fastest current handhelds (Dell Axim x51v, for example)
- the games are available for free
- many of the games are MUCH better than anything else (comparable, in the same genre) on Windows Mobile. Very few native Windows Mobile games (for example SKY FORCE Reloaded is the only comparable title, as far as, say, 1942 clones are concerned)
- if you do follow this guide, you can run these games REALLY easily - I've tried to explain it really clearly how the emulator must be configured, where to download games from, what games to get and so on
Difference between NeoGeo and the two CPS versions
Unfortunately, the NeoGeo emulation (as of the recent, 0.008 build is concerned) is certainly less featureful than that of emulating CPS games. Therefore, you will always want to check out whether a particular title is available as a CPS game and if and only if it isn’t switch to the NeoGeo version. Note that the developer has been promising fixing these problems very soon.
The problems with the NeoGeo emulation are as follows:
- with NeoGeo games, it’s not possible to save / load game states, unlike with CPS games. This is a big problem if you would like to continue your game after exiting FinalBurn
- auto fire doesn’t work with them either (while it worked with all CPS games I’ve tested)
Getting, installing
Get the latest version in the first post of the the official FinalBurn thread at Modaco – it’ll always have the latest version (you will need to register your nick in there).
That there are four RAR files there. One is named FinalBurn.rar. This is the WM executable. The other three contain the desktop Windows version of the emulator, are named fbauds.part01.rar … fbauds.part03.rar and should only be got if you will need to create cache files of the titles you’d like to play. Use WinRAR.
Note that the latter emulator does differ from the official desktop Windows version of FinalBurn Alpha downloadable here. The latter is far newer (and is, therefore, preferred to the version available at Modaco) but doesn’t support creating cache files. That is, do download the fbauds.partX.rar’s too. (And, again, you may also want to download the official desktop Windows version of FinalBurn Alpha here, should you want to play the titles on your desktop computer.)
To play NeoGeo games in the emulator, you will also need to acquire the ROM BIOS file, Neogeo.zip (you won’t need to do this if you ONLY want to play CPS games!). This ZIP is different for the desktop Windows version (downloadable here; also see THIS) and for the WM version (accessible here). Put the ZIP file (do NOT decompress it!) in the ROMs subdirectory of FileBurn (with the desktop version, you can also put it in the home directory where the main executable EXE file resides – it’ll find it. The WM version won’t), which is auto-created upon the first execution of the emulator (see later).
Finally, for the desktop version, you will also need kailleraclient.dll. It’s for example available in the official desktop FinalBurn Alpha distribution - just download the ZIP file and it’ll be right in it. You won’t even need to start the main executable, fba.exe. Or, alternatively, get it HERE as a separate download. Again, this only applies to the desktop version – with the WM version, all you will need to do is getting Neogeo.zip and copying it to the ROMs directory. Note that you may also need to download and install the free DirectX 9.
Game ROM’s you download must be put under the ROMs dir as ZIP files (that is, you don’t need to decompress them). This directory will be automatically created when you start the executable on both the desktop (fba.exe with the official FinalBurn version, fbaud.exe with the cache-generating debug version) and mobile (FinalBurn.exe) Windows.
Getting games (ROM images)
Probably the best ROM source is emuparadise.org, where you can download a lot of games from. The games there are all in a format compatible with the emulator. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean ALL the available titles are indeed compatible: it’s only with CPS games that they are. There are still a lot of NeoGeo games that are just plain incompatible (and aren’t even listed by FinalBurn as compatible). Nevertheless, the ones that are recognized are, in general, really worth playing.
CPS-1 ROMs should be here (but seems to be empty now); CPS2 here. Finally, NeoGeo ROM’s are here.
Keep in mind the following while downloading files from emuparadise.org:
- you can only download one ROM image at a time. emuparadise.org, in addition to checking the same browser instance, also check for the same IP. That is, you can’t fool the server into thinking it’s serving another completely independent user when you leech images from IE and Firefox at the same time.
- don’t use Internet Explorer to download images because it’ll very often time out. Prefer Firefox (Mozilla) – it has never timed out on me, as opposed to (the latest version of) Internet Explorer.
There are a LOT of very cool games in there; games that are MUCH better than most (or, with horizontal scrollers, ANY) comparable, native titles on Windows Mobile. There is nothing on Windows Mobile comparable to, say, Metal Slug. Yes, FirePower-onrush uses a lot of textures / graphics from Metal Slug (see Sponge’s comments HERE, after my review, for more info on this) but is still WAY worse.
I’ve also tested many titles under the emulator, in the next subsection, I list and elaborate on them.
NeoGeo titles, links & compatibility reports
Captain Tomaday: works great (kids’ vertical scroller)
Ghost Pilots: great, even at 44 kHz (let alone 8!) (vertical scroller)
NAM – 1975: Operation Wolf clone: works great, even at 44 kHz, highly recommended if you like
Metal Slug 2: One of the BEST! A MUST!
Metal Slug 3 : in order to run this title on anything with less than 128M RAM, you will also need to download the non-encrypted version in addition to the default one. Make sure you run the latter on devices with free RAM less than 40 Mbytes.
Metal Slug X: Great game, working also great
Samurai Shodown: works great, even at 44 kHz
King of the Monsters: OK, even at 44k
A list of, as of the current version, some non-recognized games:
Metal Slug 1
The Last Blade
Blazing Star
Metal Slug 4
(both versions of PocketCultMAME recognize them but can’t run. The desktop MAME runs them all. The desktop FinalBurn Alpha doesn't.)
As of now, it’s pretty futile to try to download these games. The situation may change in the future, though: FinalBurn Alpha is constantly been updated to support as many NeoGeo games as possible.
CPS-2 titles, links & compatibility reports
1944: a really good 1942 clone! A must have!
19xx: another excellent 1942 clone, works great even at 44kHz! Another must have!
Alien vs Predator: fighting, not that good IMHO
Armored Warriors : not very good either
Battle Circuit: side scroller, not very interesting
Dimahoo: too, another good 1942 clone (not as good as 1944 / 19xx though)
Eco Fighters: side scroller, not very interesting; you still might want to give it a try
Night Warriors: typical Street Fighter clone
All these games run flawlessly, mostly with 44 kHz sound, on the x51v – and even on the HTC Wizard (with, particularly with 19xx, 8 kHz sound). The 520 MHz WM5 VGA HTC Universal is pretty bad (very slow) for emulation, so is the 624 MHz WM5 (2.01) VGA HP iPAQ hx4700 (which is only a tad better and DOES require and external BT game pad because of the completely gaming-unfriendly touchpad). The WM2003SE VGA Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720 is acceptable (but, of course, visibly / audibly worse than the x51v), so is the WM2003 QVGA HP iPAQ 2210.
Also note that FinalBurn Alpha supports (almost) all CPS games, unlike with the case of NeoGeo.