PLEX Arcade - The issues we've observed so far

Plex Labs
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So we’ve been using this for a couple of weeks now. All my (supported) ROMS have been added, organized, with all the names and art fixed and ready to go. All in the hopes that with time it all starts to work magically and flawlessly. The CTO and Co-founder has said in another topic/post of mine that there should be an update to the arcade side of PMS in the coming days, so that’s good. It’s good to see progress and forward momentum. So on that note, here are some of the issues that we have encountered so far, but first our specs, which to my understanding are within those recommended.

LATEST VERSION OF PMS
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit (v.20H2 build 19042.804)
CPU: Intel Xeon E-5-2690 v3 (x2)
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti
RAM: 128GB

– The PLEX Arcade bundled games would NOT appear or be added when following the instructions provided. I had to download the bundled games on a ZIP file (provided by an admin on one of the many topics here) and copied the games and cores manually. THEN they appeared. This issue pertains to non-standard PMS installation paths (which we have).

– Games load fine but randomly crash (usually going to a black screen, and usually when going to a new level). Observed on Super NES and N64.

– After a crash game will not resume from the last state.

– After a crash, the PLEX Game Transcoder process may need to be terminated (so that PLEX can restart it).

– Games are blurry (almost comically so)… observed on ALL games.

– “Arcade” games will NOT start. This includes CPS-1, CPS-2, and NeoGeo, all supported under MAME. The games go straight into a black screen (no sound), but the PLEX Transcoder process will be max’ed out. Quitting a game in this state will allow you to re-start or “resume”, which just leads to the spinning circle animation. I’m fairly certain my server specs can play these games with no issue (I’ve done it through emulation).

– Tried different MAME cores (same results stated above).

– Tried copying BIOS files to different locations, again, same results.

– The PLEX Arcade/Game agent seems to favor European cover art (ie. Megadrive over Genesis).

And lastly, here’s a bit of a wish-list:

– Access to games for managed users. This is ESSENTIAL. I understand licensing and the need for PLEX to protect itself, but maybe there can be more than one subscription model that accommodates this. There are 4 people in this house, I would like for at least them to have access to this. Perhaps different tiers or subscriptions that include 1, 2, 4, 6 users, etc.

– Better image quality. The concept of PLEX Arcade has been my DREAM for years now… but the games look like trash right now. Why would I play them through PMS when even a retro-console connected to a modern TV looks better? The image is WAY too fuzzy. Pleeeease fix this.

– Having CPS-1 (Capcom System 1), CPS-2, Neo Geo and everything else MAME supports LUMPED into one “Arcade” category simply sucks. PLEX Arcade needs to detect individual platforms for easier navigation and organization.

– Support for games in BIN format and for BIOS files (which some platforms need to work).

– More supported platforms. Look, I’m not even hoping for modern things like Game Cube or PS2… I’m talking retro consoles, like PCEngine/TurboGrfx, Commodore 64, Atari Jaguar, SEGA CD/Saturn, etc etc.

– More communication about what is on the pipeline, what is being worked on, and what will never come. We need this to stay subscribed honestly.

I invite others to comment, share their bugs and their wish-list features on this thread.

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just wanted to say, thanks so much for all the thoughtful feedback!

a handful of the issues are already fixed for the next release, and i’m going to share this with the team as it has some great food for thought.

in terms of the resolution, i’m kind of curious if you have any specific suggestions here. the game transcoder could render at a higher resolution with nearest-neighbor to give the more classic “pixellated” look (or where possible on the client, i don’t believe web allows anything other than bilinear/cubic, since on the server would be extra streaming bandwidth).

The only “supported” one is the “yearless” one which the server downloads. It should be the latest version available as a retro core.

i’m pretty sure i’ve gotten Metal Slug e.g. to run, with just neogeo.zip in the ROMs directory alongside the ROMs themselves.

totally get the desire for this, it’s a bit of a tough one for us as we pay per user/month. it’s possible in the future we might be able to do some sort of bundled thing, i’ll make sure we discuss.

this is interesting and something i haven’t heard before. is there a canonical list of platforms you’d be looking for at the top level? just the primary/big ones? MAME obviously supports a gazillion different platform, and e.g. we’ve already separated out the Atari ones.

i assume these will come over time, once we get the base ones working… :baby: steps.

we’re here, we’re listening, and taking notes! happy to have the discussion.

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Thank you SO MUCH for the reply. Very awesome! :grin:

So that’s interesting. Clearly other MAME cores work with PLEX arcade, and I’ve read that some people are having better luck playing certain games/platforms with different MAME cores. So much so that the third-party Core Manager for PLEX lets you switch between the MAME, MAME 2003, MAME 2003-Plus and MAME 2010 cores.

Now this personally worrisome to me because I haven’t been able to get a single arcade rom to work (other than ATARI). In fact, the first roms I added for testing were the Metal Slug roms (these are Neo Geo roms). All I get when I try to play these is a black screen. Each of my roms is in an individual folder, and I tried copying neogeo,zip to each of those folders and I still couldn’t get it to work. The Parsec website doesn’t list Xeon cpu’s under its list requirements, but even though these are not super new CPUs I would think that two of them, with a total of 48 logical cores under Windows would be more than sufficient to run MAME (which is definitely the case when running local emulation in that system). So I’ve been hoping that the upcoming fix addresses my issue. :crossed_fingers: I will troubleshoot this further.

And I get WHY you guys have that limitation in place, but perhaps you guys can pass-on that licensing hurdle to us by offering PLEX Arcade subscriptions that bundle additional users (at a reasonable price of course). So if you want the master account and 3 more managed users to have access you subscribe to a 4-user license subscription. Something like that. Just food for thought.

Definitely Neo Geo, and if possible its variants, Neo Geo MVS, Neo Geo AES, Neo Geo CD and Neo Geo Pocket.

Other than that I think the Capcom platforms are essential also; CPS-1 and CPS-2. There’s also CPS-3 but that might be harder to emulate and would require powerful systems to do so. Still, it’s worth having PLEX recognize it. I’m sure there are other important “arcade” platforms/systems that other’s might want PLEX Arcade to recognize, so I invite othere’s to chime in.

YAY! hehe :love_you_gesture: :grin: :tada:

And THAT means everything. Thank you!!!

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I don’t understand why there’s a subscription on games and roms we already have? I get if plex provides them but for our own content that we can already play free with other emulators? What am I missing?

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Obviously you can play your ROMS locally using other emulators, for free, but in order to provide the ability to stream and remotely control your games PLEX partnered with a game streaming service/company called PARSEC. The use of their technology as part of the PLEX Arcade back-end incurs a cost, per user, that PLEX has to pay. The PLEX Arcade subscription covers some of these costs. That is my understanding of it anyways.

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If Plex can allow us to remotely watch our own content why can’t we remotely play our own games? It’s already doing the transcoding and streaming.

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It’s because of the complexities involved in streaming a game, with real-time synchronization of controller input, not to mention the fact that a game is not a video file, it’s a piece of software that needs to be played virtually and rendered. PLEX has amazing video transcoding technology, but dealing with ROMS and game streaming is probably outside of their wheelhouse, which is why they partnered with Parsec. I do wonder if there’s a future in which PLEX is able to manage all of this in-house which in turn may mean a lower user subscription fee for us, if any.

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you, sir, are entirely correct.

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a suggestion for managed users having access to Arcade

Have the server account be the parent/arcade subscription
Have all accounts parent/managed use different save directories for save states

this way managed users access arcade via the master account but have a save folder of their own

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Managed users would definitely need their own save states, but I think PLEX is limiting Arcade to only the main server account because of their licensing deal with Parsec and not because of technical limitations. A revised subscription model might someday allow that, hopefully.

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You still can’t play games on android TV either, because the games don’t scale. Good luck playing GBA games with 1/16th of a TV screen.

Definitely need SOME sort of settings/options for games, the only three being ‘resume, restart, delete’ for the most interactive of all media on plex is a big problem.

Seen other people with this problem as well.
Observed on Sony X800H

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New version is out with lots of fixes. Available through the beta channel for now.
Will be coming to public soon. Plex Media Server - #400 by StSimm1

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To be clear, we already save the state in per-user areas! There’s no reason why multiple people can’t play games from a single server, we just don’t have a way of offering a deal on the sub at this point.

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yeah, this sucks, we’re working through the issue with Parsec :+1:

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  • Newest version of PMS/PLEX Arcade seems A LOT more stable when playing NES and SNES roms. :+1:

  • ATARI 2600 and 7800 roms play perfectly. Everything is still blurry but I know they are working on resolving that.

  • I also noticed the PLEX Game Transcoder process ends and starts on queue much smoother and it doesn’t seem to hang as much as it used to. Awesome!

  • I’m STILL unable to properly play Neo Geo games. Rather than having each rom in its own folder I placed all the Neo Geo roms in the same folder and I placed the BIOS file (neogeo.zip) in there as well. That seems to have helped. I still get a black screen, no sound, with the mame_libretro core, BUT… I get a scrambled or distorted image (still no sound) when I switch to the mame2003_libretro or the mame2003_plus_libretro cores! That’s progress! hehe Games tested: Art of Fighting and Metal Slug // PS: I used the third party Core Manager by Vanstinator to switch between cores.

QUESTION:
Has anyone been able to get Neo Geo roms to play without issue? And if so, what games? with what core? I’m really hoping it’s not because of some hardware incompatibility on my side. I can’t imagine it is.

Yet to test:
SEGA roms
CAPCOM CPS-1 and CPS-2 roms

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What a difference an evening makes! PROGRESS! Two things, in regards to Neo Geo MVS/AES and Atari 5200…

For those of you having trouble getting Neo Geo to work:

The Neo Geo BIOS file (neogeo.zip) needs to be in the same directory as your Neo Geo roms. In my case, that meant dumping all the roms into a singular directory (rather than having individual folders for each game). One thing of note is that there have been MANY updates to the contents of neogeo.zip throughout the years, some changes (or additions) are pretty recent. Make sure your copy of neogeo.zip includes:

000-lo.lo
japan-j3.bin
sfix.sfix
sm1.sm1
sp1.jipan.1024
sp1-j3.bin
sp1-u2
sp1-u3.bin
sp1-u4.bin
sp-1v1_3db8c.bin
sp-45.sp1
sp-e.sp1
sp-j2.sp1
sp-s.sp1
sp-s2.sp1
sp-s3.sp1
sp-u2.sp1
uni-bios_1_0.rom
uni-bios_1_1.rom
uni-bios_1_2.rom
uni-bios_1_2o.rom
uni-bios_1_3.rom
uni-bios_2_0.rom
uni-bios_2_1.rom
uni-bios_2_2.rom
uni-bios_2_3.rom
uni-bios_2_3o.rom
uni-bios_3_0.rom
uni-bios_3_1.rom
uni-bios_3_2.rom
uni-bios_3_3.rom
uni-bios_4_0.rom
vs-bios.rom

I was able to get this working with the dateless/main MAME core (mame-libretro). :love_you_gesture: :grin:

I couldn’t find a version that included anything higher than uni-bios 3.0 so I tracked down 4.0 and added it manually. Please remember that you’re not supposed to expand/decompress neogeo.zip. Just add it as-is to your Neo Geo or “arcade” roms folder.

As for Atari 5200; The standalone Atari800 emulator requires keyboard input to navigate a menu in which you select the bios file and also “insert” the rom as a “cartridge”. Its complicated, but the main problem is that the Atari800 core doesn’t seem to allow that keyboard input so you get stuck on a screen that tells you “atari 800/OS emulation halted”. On the standalone emulator you can press F1 which brings up a menu you can use to load the bios rom and load the game, but on RetroArch or PLEX you can’t seem to do that. Has anyone been able to get 5200 roms to work on PLEX? What core did you use? More testing to come…

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Interesting, for me the 5200 (using the atari800 core) boots to this, which I assume is a bad/missing bios/boot-rom or something.

a5200
a5200992×504 77.3 KB

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So I was really curious as to what that screen was which led me to test that core on RetroArch. I’m not sure why that loading image gets corrupted on PLEX but that’s the screen that reads “atari 800/OS emulation halted”. It also states that you need Atari software to run the program or something like that… When you use the Atari800 emulator, like the actual standalone emulator, and you get this screen, you’re supposed to press F1 which brings up a menu in which you can then open the BIOS file and load or “insert” the game rom. The reason for this is because the 5200 was essentially a stripped down Atari800 computer and the emulator… umm… emulates both. The CORE version of this emulator doesn’t enable keyboard support (not sure if that’s a limitation of the core itself or PLEX Arcade’s implementation of it), so you get stuck on that screen. On top of that it gets distorted making the text displayed unreadable.

It also seems that in earlier builds of the PLEX Game Transcoder 7800 games were playable using the undated/main MAME core, but the later and latest build(s) only load a black screen. This is actively being investigated.

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Ah, nice work, that explains it. Thanks

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I am still getting screen blanking after about 5 minutes on all MAME/Arcade games. Tailing Game Transcoder Logs only shows inputs and FPS values during this. No errors. Version 1.21.4.4079