Genesis-Plus-GX graphical issues

[Retromancer]

So this seems to be a very specific issue, but I was wondering if anybody else has experienced something like this. I’m using libretro Genesis-Plus-GX on Batocera v40 on a RPi5 and everything seems to look and run well except for one game: Mega Man - The Wily Wars. No matter what settings I change, and I’ve gone through just about every setting possible, there are horizontal dotted lines going across the screen. I’ve tried multiple versions of the game (both the original PAL version and the Genesis Mini re-release version) but I get the graphical issue with all versions.

The intersting thing is I have an old Retropie build on a RPi4 which uses the same emulator and the game looks just fine on that one. They are both running Genesis-Plus-GX v1.7.4. I’ve tried all of the different video drivers, various different resolutions, etc. I just can’t figure out why this one particular game is having this issue. Any help is much appreciated.

[GemaH]

Which part of the game is this?

[Retromancer]

The images I posted are at the beginning of the Wily stage in Mega Man 2, I just chose them because it was easy to see the lines there. However it happens throughout the entire game, for example here’s an image from the title screen.

[GemaH]

Ok i was asking because the game looks fine on my end. I don’t get those likes anywhere.

I’m also using GenesisPlusGX v1.7.4. but on Windows. So maybe this is a Linux issue.

[BarbuDreadMon]

v1.7.4 doesn’t mean anything, it was released in 2013 and there have been hundreds of changes since then.

Batocera seems to be using a specific version from 6 months ago and i suppose that specific version had that bug.

[Retromancer]

Yeah I figured it was specific to the Batocera version since the Retropie version didn’t have the issue. Unfortunately there isn’t an option to update individual cores in Batocera (that I’m aware of). However I can always fall back to Picodrive which doesn’t seem to have this issue. Thanks for the replies!

[GemaH]

@Retromancer

Unfortunately there isn’t an option to update individual cores in Batocera

You can’t just go manually in the cores folder and replace it with a newer version?

[BarbuDreadMon]

@GemaH

You can’t just go manually in the cores folder and replace it with a newer version?

No, that’s what’s incredibly bad with retrogaming distributions like batocera : those are made with buildroot whose main partition is uncompressed at runtime and read-only, meaning you are stuck with outdated software until they decide to provide a new distro version.

Well, i guess they have their own appeal for users who have absolutely no intention to tinker with anything.

[md2mcb]

Very interesting. But is there any benefit in choosing to create a distro with buildroot?

[GemaH]

Not being able to tinker with things, especially in a multi-emulator setup environment, sounds completely crippling to me. I can’t think of any user case for this other than the most casual users who don’t care about bugs, lag, etc.

There is an alternative to Batocera for Windows, called RetroBat. It uses the same programs, same frontend, etc. I also don’t care about it because it’s another pre-configured setup, but i’m pretty sure you can at least tinker with it. I do love it’s EmulationStation frontend though. It’s the only thing i use for my setup.

[BarbuDreadMon]

@md2mcb

But is there any benefit in choosing to create a distro with buildroot?

Well, by mounting the filesystem as read-only, i suppose you are less likely to wear down the sd card you use as a disk ? Theoretically you are also supposed to avoid potential issues “from updating to a bad commit” (this is a hobby for developpers, regressions happen), but the problem is that they don’t really curate the commits they are using so you might actually end up stuck with the bad commits you are supposed to avoid, this is exactly what’s happening here.

[md2mcb]

I understand. Thanks!