beatmania III running & playable on MAME (please read the description!!)

EDIT/NOTE: much of the description is outdated here. if you wanted to play this right now, just grab any relatively recent copy of MAME and make a visit to your local redump archive of ROMs and CHDs and you'll be able to play beatmania III juuuust fine. for the sake of archival, though, i'll leave the original description here.
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a recent PR for MAME (github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/...) has been introduced that refactors a very large portion of the firebeat driver, the PCB used for beatmania III, pop'n music, ParaParaParadise, and KEYBOARDMANIA games. before then, practically none of the games were running. however, as of recent, this PR resolves many issues with the original driver, and has allowed for the beatmania III series to run, fully working, with a few things not quite implemented. this has also resulted in a new set of dumps of hard drives, ROMs, etc. being made, invalidating a lot of the older dumps that used to be around, and also dumps for games that never had them before, such as the very first beatmania III!!
the following issues are of note:
- pop'n music will not boot as of yet due to how it lacks support for DVD CHDs.
- for all beatmania III and all pop'n music games, the game will be locked behind a randomly generated password you were meant to attain from KONAMI. this is easily resolved thanks to a RTC password generator created by the same person who did the PR: 987123879113.github.io/firebe...
- effectors don't seem to work yet in bmIII. this also breaks FAST PLAY by not having audio at all during gameplay with it active
- the spectral analyzer/SPE-ANA theme/frame in bmIII doesn't work on this PR, however it is being worked on
- floppy disk drive isn't implemented yet. as a result, unlocks can't be attained through the usual methods.
aside from that, the game runs amazingly well and i'm so glad to finally see this in working order. you have no idea how happy i am that to see this. i would highly suggest reading the PR link above if you want to see more in-depth explanations, or just want to check out the code.
as of writing, this PR is not merged into the master branch yet, and as such, isn't on any current mainline builds of MAME. however, if you'd like, you can download MAME's dev tools, the PR's branch of source code, and compile it yourself.
github.com/987123879113/mame/...
www.mamedev.org/tools/
i'd recommend building with only the firebeat drivers to save you a lot of headache of compiling times. your command of choice when using the mingw64 environment you're provided with by MAME's window build tools is
make SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/firebeat.cpp TOOLS=1 REGENIE=1
that's about all i have to say. enjoy the video, and enjoy this very new version of beeeeeatmania!
timestamps:
00:00 - launching of MAME, boot test fast-forwarding
00:22 - RTC password generation and entering
01:51 - quick game settings & RTC config
02:37 - attract mode
04:10 - gameplay of kobako (basic) mode, including the game's tutorial
12:25 - game credits, aka mnemoniq
14:19 - gameplay of shikomi (hard) mode, including foot chart gameplay and fumbling around with the controls after i realized the foot lane was on the left side oops
20:07 - gameplay of tsunagi (expert) mode, the game's free-form course/nonstop mode where you can pick your own songs
26:44 - game credits, featuring me messing around with the keysound samples you're allowed to toy with
like my vids? consider throwing me a coffee: ko-fi.com/infinitephantasm

[@Ashura96]

Congratulations! It's been a long time coming.

[@TuetanoRoto]

What a time to be alive. And it runs perfect!

[@_lun4r_]

10:34 - 12:08 now that's a Perfect Play

[@gametechchris]

There are operator unlock codes (try the wayback machine), then setting to Event Mode unlocks all songs. No need for the FDD!

[@infinitephantasm]

yeah, that's entirely true, although i'm one of those weirdos that wants to clear through everything and have save progress and song hi-scores :P

[@voids49]

It's happening. So nice to see it.

[@jasonartamis2655]

ive been waiting 15 years to play this!!

[@Dj.D25]

Nice to see it running smoothly, since it seems most videos on KZbin showing Beatmania III don't have the video quality of the game running as smoothly as when playing the actual machine in person. (Isn't it running at 60fps?) I played this game years ago and loved it, especially with how smoothly the game ran compared to Beatmania and Beatmania IIDX at the time. And also how clear the music was compared to other arcade games. It's pretty amazing how an emulator can make the game run this well.

[@infinitephantasm]

it's honestly impressive! i've never been able to play this game in person (but have wished to for years), so this is basically a whole new opportunity for me! the game runs at a nice 60hz, which equals smooth clean gameplay

[@nate567987]

update it's in main mame and popn will work if you remake the CHDs per this NOTE: Even with this PR, pop'n music will not boot as-is currently due to lack of support for the DVD CHDs. The CHDs are made as HDD CHDs which can't be loaded by the CD-ROM emulation code. The pop'n music games will work if you extract the raw data from the existing CHDs and rebuild them using chdman createcd but that is just a workaround. I will try to fix this in a future PR.

[@nate567987]

if you do that you can run the popn music games from cmd

[@cryztalmixx]

Hey, I'm glad that firebeat is finally working in MAME. I already compiled the MAME, downloaded Beatmania III THE FINAL ROM and CHD, since I can't find the OG Beatmania III ROM and CHD online, but it seems that MAME can't recognize the ROM files (972maina01.21e NOT FOUND, gcc01-jc BAD DUMP, a21jca03.3q NOT FOUND). I can't find 972maina01.21e and a21jca03.3q anywhere online. Does that mean I have to wait for a new ROM dump? I can't wait to play beatmania III!

[@infinitephantasm]

yep, some new ROM dumps were made for various so you might have to wait until those pop up, whenever that is. not sure when they'll be publicly available as of yet?

[@nate567987]

@@infinitephantasm they are out now

[@KyureiProductions]

how do you input turntable keys? i've been trying to figure it out and can't

[@kaboomgamer333]

Not bad. Runs really good! Aside from some crusty graphics.

[@jppassos8035]

Is anyone here experiencing some lag in specific moments? for me the game gets really choppy on the warning and title screen, when the song is loading and on random gameplay moments.

[@TuetanoRoto]

Same happened to me, i think that it has something to do with v-sync? I dont think my setup is weak to run this game (1660gpu + 16gb of ram and a ryzen 3600 cpu)

[@jppassos8035]

@@TuetanoRoto Yeah, i tried turning v sync off but i didn't work

[@NexuStreamOfficial]

Runs a FDD image and running in mame

[@emaybietobungi7879]

19:05