After almost 2 decades of Final Burn Alpha, the multi-platform arcade emulator was recently pronounced dead by all developers behind it, except for one. The team has since announced and released their new-born emulator named: Final Burn Neo.
Shortly after Capcom’s Home Arcade trailer and website went live, speculations arose about the fair use of Final Burn Alpha as the system’s main emulator. Barry Harris, head developer of FBA left this following statement on Twitter:
FBAlpha has been licensed by Capcom Home Arcade.
— Barry Harris (@fbalpha) April 16, 2019
The rest of the FBA team were apparently left out of this entire deal as explained by MVG in this video:
Enter FBNeo, a Barry Harris-less project, with great new features and improvements over its predecessor. A new page was created on Libretro to briefly address the FBA issue and unveil the new emulator.
Support for some of Midway/Williams/Atari arcade classics was added (screenshots of Mortal Kombat 2, Tapper, Killer Instinct and Klax are posted on the page). Also, Neo Geo CD games are now fully playable under FBNeo.
Here is a list of improvements listed by the team:
- Many of you might not know, but this core also supports a few consoles as subsystems, and it does it pretty well, recently we even added “Super Game Module” support for CBS ColecoVision.
- Many control schemes were added to the core recently, you can now play with mouse, trackball or lightgun, there is also keyboard support for ZX Spectrum.
- There was a major improvement to QSound emulation a week ago, now CPS1/CPS2 sound is clear as day. Actually there was also sound improvements for a lot of other games, leading to faster emulation and clearer sound.
- There is now RetroAchievements support for popular arcade games, this implementation even added support for cheats as a side effect.
The FBNeo team is looking for developers to help them add exciting new features to the already feature-packed emulator.
Kudos to the FBNeo team for keeping this legendary emulator alive and open-source.
Check out the FBNeo Libretro page here: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/goodbye-fbalpha-welcome-fbneo/