flyinghead
(Bug) Napple Tale (English fan translation patch)
The game Napple Tale has an English patch. https://www.romhacking.net/translations/5091/ And the patch notes state the following:
"Moving platforms in certain levels were reported to not appear when playing in Flycast, Reicast, or any of the emulators from that particular family. No crashes or bugs have been reported in NullDC or other emulators. All playtesters were able to play the game to its completion either on NullDC, or on console. However, we did not try every Dreamcast emulator, so there may be others that do not work. "
This makes some levels extremely hard or extremely easy to beat
I need more information than that to work on the issue. Ideally a save state of one these problematic levels.
Since this is about the same game (but maybe not the same issue) I thought I rather add my info here instead of opening a new issue. This was tested in Android, with a Mali-G57 GPU, and it happens in both the Retroarch core (last version) and standalone app (last version)
This game needs per-pixel alpha sorting selected to be able to render correctly some objects in many scenes. In OpenGL per-pixel is not available (actually, if you happen to have first selected Vulkan, and then switch to OpenGL then the per-pixel setting is still selected somehow even if it does not show in the UI but then whole objects disappear, for example the chair just simply does not show up, i think this is an UI problem, OpenGL doesn't seem to be meant to support per-pixel alpha sorting). So this report is about Vulkan's per-pixel alpha sorting.
With per-pixel alpha sorting in Vulkan those objects render correctly now but there are some artifacts that are shown in the image attached. I tried different resolutions and other settings but they don't make a difference.
The per-pixel artifacts are due to a GPU driver bug. Recent Flycast versions have a work-around for Mali GPUs that might fix it.
I wish i hadnt deleted my save file before making this issue. Ill replay the game soon to make a savegame and savestate and upload it here.
But the issue i was describing isnt a graphical issue (i say this because i see the 'graphics' tag applied to this issue), the physical platforms just arent moving, so my guess is its more likely a timing related bug or something, that causes the platforms never to start moving.
Thanks! I tried the latest build from https://flyinghead.github.io/flycast-builds/ both for the master branch and the dev branch and in my device the artifacts persist with the Vulkan per-pixel alpha sorting option. In case it is helpful my exact device is a Galaxy Tab A9 with a Mediatek Helio G99 (Mali-G57 MC2). And Flycast reports as the driver version "32.1.0". Is there any setting somewhere that activates the fix or should have been working as it is?
The artifacts do look quite different from what I see in the video here https://github.com/flyinghead/flycast/issues/1014#issue-1669004352
Here there is a little recording of the issue in my device:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/133cbf36-5ea8-4e24-91db-f044593b9ebd
I also tried with the same settings to play a bit of Sonic Adventure 2 and there are no artifacts in that game even with per-pixel alpha sorting selected.