New Zealand Story - cannot play

General Games
#1

Hi all

So continuing my mission to go back to my 16 yr old self, I am trying to get New Zealand Story working in RetroArch. I just cannot do it though, I have tried getting hold of every version and it crashes on start up or doesn’t loads at all? I used to play the Amiga version but I get thrown by using RA to play those games.

Is there anything else I can try please?

#2

If you can post a log of you trying and failing to load the game, we can take a look.

#3

Hi

I’m not sure how to do that? I have the log file but I can’t seem to do or upload it?

#4

copy/paste its contents somewhere like pastebin.com / hastebin.com and then post a link to it here.

#5

Thank you! I hope this helps?

#6

For FBN, it looks like it’s the wrong ROM type. Does that zip file contain a bunch of bins? If not, it’s likely not compatible with FBN.

I didn’t see anything obviously wrong the px68k, unfortunately. I’m not sure why it’s failing for you :man_shrugging:

#7

Thanks anyway for having a look :slight_smile:

#8

You need a FinalBurn Neo romset. Many times, games don’t work when using a MAME set. If you want to scan a FBN romset, you can use the manual scanner in combination with a FBN dat file from here:

https://github.com/libretro/FBNeo/tree/master/dats

If you have an arcade-only romset for example, get the “arcade” dat file. Then go to “Import Content/Manual Scan” and set it up like this:

image
image1920×1404 162 KB

Then select “Start Scan” and wait.

1 Like
#9

You are trying to load random roms with random emulators, without even knowing for what system are those roms and emulators. With a game ported on dozens of systems, there is no way it’s gonna work except if you have the luck of the devil.

You need to stop “trying”, and decide what version of the game you want to play instead, then pick the corresponding rom and emulator for that system, maybe even spending a few minutes reading the documentation for that emulator because some of them might require basic knowledge about bioses and rom requirements.

FWIW, this video shows most versions of the game : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzBJUouqzXI

1 Like
#10

Hi @RealNC

Thank you for getting back to me, I have tried that, scanning the directory I have extracted it to and no joy?

@BarbuDreadMon Sorry I am still all new to this world, I downloaded several versions and thought I had made the right core association. I was really after playing the Arcade version or the one I know best from years back which was the Amiga one, the arcade version would be my favourite. I will watch the video, thank you.

#11

For the arcade version, you’ll have to find a rom named tzns.zip, you must neither rename nor unzip that file, and you must absolutely read https://docs.libretro.com/guides/arcade-getting-started/ because arcade is what requires the most knowledge about bioses and roms requirements (basically, each arcade emulator requires a specific version of the rom).

#12

@BarbuDreadMon Hi, so I do have that file and it is still zipped. I will read the section you have pointed me to, thank you.

#13

Sorry @BarbuDreadMon I still don’t really understand after reading that, sorry :frowning: I did download the .dat file but it didn’t seem work when I did the scan, and pointed it to the directory I had saved to? Is there something else I need to add alongside to the tnzs.zip (Sorry for more questions again)

#14

“Extracted?” You don’t extract FB roms (nor MAME roms, for that matter.) A romset is a collection of zip files. In this case, tnzs.zip is the ROM. You must not extract that. It might depend on other ROMs as well though, so make sure you have the entire romset. Currently, the FBNeo arcade-only romset is about 15GB.

Edit: OK, I just tested tnzs.zip on its own from the fbneo romset, and it works fine. So you should be able to use just that one zip file on its own as it doesn’t depend on any other roms. Note though that this is listed as “The NewZealand Story (World, newer)” in the playlist. Do not try to play any other variation of the game, as that would need other files from the romset besides tnzs.zip.

#15

This documentation explains that each arcade emulator uses a different version of the rom, basically it means mame2000, mame2003, mame2010, mame2016, mame, fbalpha2012, fbneo, … might (or might not) use different version of that same rom. clrmamepro is only useful at checking if your rom is compatible with the emulator you picked the dat for, and tbh it’s not really meant to check the compatibility of a single rom, it’s more targeted at checking the compatibility of the full collection of rom for that emulator. I never tried but using it for a single game is probably really awkward.

Well, you are lucky because in the case of tnzs.zip it’s pretty straightforward : it seems there are only 2 dump versions of this game, with the more recent version dating from around 2008, so basically there are 2 groups of emulator :

  • mame2000, mame2003 and mame2003plus will run the older version
  • mame2010, mame2016, mame, fbalpha2012 and fbneo will run the newer version

It’s always recommended to use newer rom/emulator if you want better emulation, so the best pair would be the newer version + fbneo/mame (with fbneo generally being the recommended emulator since it has better integration than mame with retroarch), but if you can’t find that version the game should still be playable with older version + mame2003plus, it’s just that you’ll encounter glitches you wouldn’t have with the newer one.

And yeah, as already said you must not unzip tnzs.zip

#16

Thank you, that worked straight off and I think I have a better understanding now of how it all ties together.

1 Like