nesfab does nothing when trying to compile certain examples

[danielah05]

dont know why this is happening specifically but it seems like some of the examples (for example, hang_glider) does absolutely nothing when trying to run its cfg file through nesfab while others (hello_world in this case) work perfectly fine.

[pubby]

That's a strange bug. Seeing "NROM requries chrrom" implies it's not parsing the files or something. I'm able to compile the example on my own computers though.

Tell me me more about your setup. It looks like you're on Windows? Are you running the latest version (0.4)?

[danielah05]

yes i am on windows (windows 10 to be specific) and i am running 0.4

[danielah05]

the examples are also just straight from the github cuz i downloaded the full repo and then just used the nesfab exe itself from the releases

[pubby]

Thanks.

Can you verify that no .nes file was generated? On windows, sometimes the .nes file ends up in the directory of the nesfab.exe executable, while other times it ends up where the .cfg file was. It depends on how you invoke the program. If you find hang_glider.nes, the program is working correctly.

[danielah05]

nope, nothing

[pubby]

Hmm. If you don't mind trying one more thing, could you try an older version, like 0.3, and see if that works? That would help narrow things down.

[danielah05]

0.3 does the same as latest

0.2-0.1 gives me an "unknown flag error" but after downgrading the project files to 45b8ca5 it started having the same problem as latest

[danielah05]

update on this, nesfab seems to fail for me when trying to compile a project with a chrrom file getting loaded, removing this line in a thing im making makes it work instantly

[danielah05]

interesting enough after getting nesfab running on WSL trying to compile hang_glider for example gives me a new error that it never gave me on CMD just called "Illegal instruction"

[danielah05]

like mentioned earlier, if i remove the chrrom file loading part it also compiles hang_glider in this case, so something fails on that line of code for me

[danielah05]

did some experimenting to see if it was just my current windows install messing something up but even trying this both in a windows 10 and 11 vm gives the same issue

[danielah05]

same issue on a ubuntu virtual machine, this time with an extra "(core dumped)" message

[pubby]

Very helpful results :)

The 'illegal instruction' is because the executable was compiled with extension flags (-mpopcnt -msse4 -mcx16 -mmovbe) and either your CPU, or the VM doesn't support them.

I think it's reasonable to drop support for these extensions in the next release, as you're the second person to get this error.

Until then, you can compile without extensions using:

make ARCH= release

[pubby]

The CHRROM stuff is a little baffling still. Can you narrow it down even further?

For example, if this fails then it's chrrom which is the problem:

chrrom
    U(10)

If this fails then it's the PNG loader:

chrrom
    file(raw, "file.bin")

(where file.bin is some arbitrary file)

[danielah05]

swapping out the file loading line with "U(10)" makes the hang_glider rom compile, really seems like something is wrong with the png loader then

[danielah05]

Very helpful results :)

The 'illegal instruction' is because the executable was compiled with extension flags (-mpopcnt -msse4 -mcx16 -mmovbe) and either your CPU, or the VM doesn't support them.

I think it's reasonable to drop support for these extensions in the next release, as you're the second person to get this error.

Until then, you can compile without extensions using:

make ARCH= release

most likely my cpu just not supporting them as my cpu is fairly old by now, this isnt fully a problem for me as on the windows build it works fine, just the linux build has this issue

[danielah05]

also probably shouldve mentioned this, i managed to compile a rom when swapping out a png with a bin file instead by doing the "raw, "file.bin"" thing, it just really doesnt wanna do pngs for some reason

[pubby]

Yeah, sounds like the PNG loader is the problem. Nesfab uses lodepng for this, so the bug might be out of my control. But I will review the code anyway.

In the mean time, I'm glad there's a workaround. Instead of PNGs, you can load CHR graphics directly. External tools exist for this, like nexxt, nes asset workshop, or https://github.com/pubby/Ralph-4/blob/master/tools/pilbmp2nes.py