FB Alpha

FB Alpha is an arcade and console emulator. It is the successor of the defunct Finalburn arcade emulator but with more features & compatibility, like Neo Geo support, for example.

This emulator is lighter than MAME on resources, which is specially useful for low powered systems such as the Raspberry Pi.

A new version was usually released every 6 months or less, and no games which would require CHDs are emulated.

The last version released was 0.2.97.43, on 28 April 2018. The emulator is assumed dead, and FinalBurn Neo is considered its successor.

Supported arcade platforms:

FB Alpha also has WIP console drivers for:

Setting up
The last ten folders (numbers 11 to 20 in Misc &rarr; "Configure ROM paths" dialog; see image below) are special supplementary cases. Usually FB Alpha will take the first file for a ROM it finds and ignore any in the later folders. Any files placed in the last ten folders will be searched as well as the first file found. So, if you have some ROMs that require extra files than that found in MAME (the Neo-Geo bios is a good example), then you could put the extra files in one of these folders. It is recommended to put the console games in one of these special paths to prevent conflicts.



So, go to Misc &rarr; "Configure ROM paths" and configure the paths as below (console folder names are synced with MAME Software List):

The emulator may not work as expected if you didn't follow the instructions above.

Synchronized Sets
Most of the ROMs used by FB Alpha match those used by MAME, what is popularly known as "synchronized sets" or simply "synced sets".

Below is a list of some synchronized versions: