Feedback from a dedicated Famicom player

[Bro3256]

I thought I would give some feedback in regards to using RetroAssembly out of the box within the context of the Family Computer (Famicom). I own roughly half of the entire cartridge library and out of that library I have around 270 of those as backed up ROMs (I used the OSCR device to dump my cartridges).

To get this out of the way, one feature that would solve a lot of my issues is the ability to modify metadata within the web app. I would imagine it's already possible to tweak this by manually editing said metadata internally when setting up but a user friendly version would be appreciated. With that said, the default description for the Family Computer is clearly copied from the Nintendo Entertainment System. It would be wise to change this to a description that talks specifically about the Famicom and not the NES. The release date for the NES within the NES platform category should also be changed from 1983-07-15 to 1985-10-18.

Regarding the box art images, while most of them appear to be correct others are either using their NES equivalents or lack box art entirely and use a screenshot instead. Even for some of the correct box arts the orientation is incorrect such as Exed Eyes being flipped counter clockwise by 90 degrees. I don't really have a concrete solution for this problem but I'll leave some valuable sources for where you can get box art for Famicom software (and more!).

• FamiWiki
• Gaming Alexandria
• LaunchBox Games Database

The icon for "Family Computer games" appears to be of an NES cartridge. Worth considering tweaking that to be a Famicom cartridge instead. Outside of that nitpick, most of my ROMs appear to work fine. However I did notice a select few ROMs that would not boot. The Famicom version of Contra uses the VRC2 mapper and attempting to load it with the fceumm emulator results in a grey screen and quicknes doesn't appear to load anything. The nestopia emulator appears to work fine for this title. I've noticed similar issues with the Wagyan Land trilogy of games (which use custom Namco mappers) where nestopia was the only emulator that worked with those titles. I do want to note that nestopia appears to have weird echoing in its audio emulation that is not present in the other emulators and I couldn't find a setting to tweak that.

And that's the end of my feedback, thank you for taking the time to read this and I wish to those contributing to this project well. I do hope you found this insightful in some form.

[arianrhodsandlot]

Thanks for your invaluable feedback and insights as an expert on Famicom! Definitely some of them need to be improved or fixed.
And here are also some quick facts, FYI:

• Customizable metadata is on its way and will likely to be released in next major version.
• Images are loaded from libretro-thumbnails . I'm going to add a link to invite users to contribute missing or mismatch images so we can also benefit.
• We can do nothing on emulation bugs as emulators are developed by others.

[arianrhodsandlot]

A pull request to upstream thumbnail repository has been created to fix the wrong orientation libretro-thumbnails/Nintendo_-_Nintendo_Entertainment_System#96