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:

Capcom CPS-1 Capcom CPS-2 Capcom CPS-3 Cave Data East DEC-0, DEC-8 and DECO IC16 based games Galaxian based hardware Irem M62, M63, M72, M90, M92 and M107 hardware Kaneko 16 Konami Neo-Geo NMK16 Pacman based hardware PGM Psikyo 68EC020 and SH-2 based hardware Sega System 1, System 16 (and similar), System 18, X-Board and Y-Board Super Kaneko Nova System Toaplan 1 Toaplan 2 Taito F2, X, Z and others miscellaneous drivers for lots of other hardware

FB Alpha also has WIP console drivers for:

Sega Mega Drive/Genesis ColecoVision Sega SG-1000 Sega Master System/Game Gear PC-Engine/TurboGrafx 16/SuperGrafx MSX

Setting up

The last ten folders (numbers 11 to 20 in Misc → "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 → "Configure ROM paths" and configure the paths as below (console folder names are synced with MAME Software List):

path #20	roms
path #19	megadriv
path #18	pce
path #17	sgx
path #16	tg16
path #15	coleco
path #14	sg1000
path #13	gamegear
path #12	sms
path #11	msx

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:

FB Alpha version	MAME version
0.2.97.43	0.191
0.2.97.41	0.187
0.2.97.40	0.184
0.2.97.39	0.175
0.2.97.38	0.172
0.2.97.37	0.167
0.2.97.36	0.161
0.2.97.35	0.159
0.2.97.34	0.156
0.2.97.32	0.155
0.2.97.30	0.154
0.2.97.29	0.149
0.2.97.28	0.147u4
0.2.97.27	0.146u5
0.2.97.25	0.145u7

References