Joined: 5/22/2006
Posts: 58
Location: Denver, CO USA
Bisqwit wrote:
I'll try to make mouse working.
Basically the framework is now there, but the movie file is not yet extended to handle it. And it's not tested.
well, if you need some testers, I'm down for sure. I'll take a look at the source a little bit later in the week when I'm not so swamped with work. I just tried out the windows version and I'm trying to frame advance record the initial input in dos to get frogger running but everytime I try to input a colon it makes a semi-colon, am I just not smart? That's probably the case =)
What would Mr Belvedere do? Probably eat some butter.
everytime I try to input a colon it makes a semi-colon, am I just not smart? That's probably the case =)
Probably you hit the wrong key or have a wrong keyboard layout set or have somehow managed to make dosbox think there's a key pressed that is not or vice versa.
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It is probably quite difficult to increase the alternative density of this message.
There is just so much potential in a PC emulator. There are many more games for PC than for all the console systems. How far in the future do you think emulation of Windows 98 is? Once they get it, I'm taking the Impossible Creatures campaign. Then Age of Mythology.
Well, there is a Windows emulator, developed by Microsoft. There is also Wine, which is "not an emulator", but can theoretically (as far as I understand) provide similar services. That said, the means of emulation itself are already there, but I don't think it could be used for TASing purposes any time soon.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Is it possible to remap the savestate keys and such?
Since some games actually use F1-F12 it would be awesome to remap all of the keys when needed. I haven't looked into the program to actually see if it's possible. Just popping the question.
Cheers.
Joined: 5/22/2006
Posts: 58
Location: Denver, CO USA
ya i'm sure that bisqwit has that planned for the future, ideally you'd want to put it in dosbox.conf, i'm gunna look at the code now to see if I can just make a quick fix patch for remapping those keys...
What would Mr Belvedere do? Probably eat some butter.
ya i'm sure that bisqwit has that planned for the future, ideally you'd want to put it in dosbox.conf, i'm gunna look at the code now to see if I can just make a quick fix patch for remapping those keys...
For reference, those keys are defined in sdl_mapper.cpp (search for SDLK_f1), except for F9 and F10, which are defined in simkbd.hh (the numbers 67 and 68, which correspond to the scancodes of those keys).
Joined: 5/22/2006
Posts: 58
Location: Denver, CO USA
Bisqwit wrote:
hippo wrote:
ya i'm sure that bisqwit has that planned for the future, ideally you'd want to put it in dosbox.conf, i'm gunna look at the code now to see if I can just make a quick fix patch for remapping those keys...
For reference, those keys are defined in sdl_mapper.cpp (search for SDLK_f1), except for F9 and F10, which are defined in simkbd.hh (the numbers 67 and 68, which correspond to the scancodes of those keys).
thanks, i'm probably not going to attempt to do this anytime soon, I'd like to get a good grasp on the entire codebase before I go fussing around with your work as well as theirs =).
What would Mr Belvedere do? Probably eat some butter.
I posted some DosBox-related rules on the http://tasvideos.org/Rules.html page.
It is still subject to change, but please comment on those.
No, Dosbox movies are not yet accepted. This is planning.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
moozooh wrote:
Well, there is a Windows emulator, developed by Microsoft. There is also Wine, which is "not an emulator", but can theoretically (as far as I understand) provide similar services. That said, the means of emulation itself are already there, but I don't think it could be used for TASing purposes any time soon.
There was a big discussion about this here. Based on that, I don't think it will be able to be used for TASing purposes any time ever.
Maybe, in some number of years, DOSBox emulation will be perfect, and whatshisname's law will mean that computers are powerful enough to emulate Windows 95/98 directly over DOSBox.
But if that's the case, I'd much rather see PS/PS2/XBox TASing instead.
Holy crap, a re-recording version of DOSBox?! As the webmaster for a DOS games site, I'm practically drooling at the possibilities. Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D... heck, I'd love to see someone whip through Kroz, in all its ASCII glory.
Unlike ROMs, the world of PC games is very murky. Games often went through many revisions, and it can be difficult to find original, unaltered archives of some older games. I've worked extremely hard (harder than any DOS games site that I'm aware of) to find authentic, perfect copies of every version of every game on my site. I consider my site the authority on DOS games, and I invite anyone who wants to submit a DOSBox TAS to this site to download your game from my website, so that we can all be sure that we're using the same copy for playback purposes.
Be advised that I only have legal downloads on my site, so many games are only available as shareware versions (which usually means an entire episode of a 3 or 4 episode game). Most of Apogee's discontinued games have been released as freeware, so there are lots of full versions, too. Now that TASing is possible, I will get back to work and start adding games as fast as I can.
If viewers can have a reasonable assurance of being able to play back DOS TASes, by disclosing all in-game and DOSBox settings used, I would also gladly host any movie files on my site, with the author's permission. I'm not sure if DOSBox movies are going to be a big thing on this site, but I really want to encourage people to make these movies, so I'll do my part and host any deserving movies, even if no one here is interested in them.
TASing or playing back a DOS game? Make sure your files match the archive at RGB Classic Games.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Bisqwit, this is the single most awesome piece of software that I've ever seen on this site. Once this stabilizes sufficiently for Jazz Jackrabbit to be TAS-able, I'll start working on it immediately. (I haven't tried it yet, but I soon will.)
I tested this program under Windows for a while.
It seems that F5-F10 don't work. Nothing happens when I press them (no status window change). Only F1-F4 and the savestate slots work.
Also, only the "ZXCV..." row has immediate shift-key registration. The other keys (for shift variants) require registering shift one frame before that key.
I tested this program under Windows for a while.
It seems that F5-F10 don't work. Nothing happens when I press them (no status window change). Only F1-F4 and the savestate slots work.
Tried holding the shift key? (Read the first post of thread.)
FractalFusion wrote:
Also, only the "ZXCV..." row has immediate shift-key registration. The other keys (for shift variants) require registering shift one frame before that key.
Probably because the scancode of the shift key is a smaller number than the scancode of ZXCV… keys, but bigger than the others.
Hence, if Shift + A are pressed on the same frame, first the game is reported about A being pressed, then about Shift being pressed, but if the key is Z instead of A, the order is reverse.
(The keyboard input is serial, not paraller, and my patch serializes the events in the order of scancode.)
Tried holding the shift key? (Read the first post of thread.)
Thanks. It works now. :)
The first post says this:
Bisqwit wrote:
This version of DosBox redefines the following keys:
Shift+1 to Shift+0: Select savestate slot (to type numbers (instead of selecting savestates), you must use the numpad)
F1: saves savestate
F2: loads savestate
F3: frame advance
F4: pause/unpause
F5: ask & load movie (untested)
F6: ask & create movie (untested)
F7: toggle movie readonly access
F8: close movie
F10 + key: Toggle "permanently on" for the selected key
F9 + key: Change autofire function for the selected key
There is no way to feed these keys directly to the game.
I only see "F5", "F6", ..., not "Shift+F5","Shift+F6", ...
By the way, one of the games I'm testing is running unnaturally fast no matter what number for cycles I use. For cycles=100, the loading times are slow but gameplay is fast. Is this supposed to be OK?
Skiessi wrote:
how about QEMU? it has disk images and everything ^^
By the way, one of the games I'm testing is running unnaturally fast no matter what number for cycles I use. For cycles=100, the loading times are slow but gameplay is fast. Is this supposed to be OK?
I have deleted all emulation speed throttling code in this dosbox version for the purpose of maintaining a consistent movie sync that is not influenced by the host computer's speed. Meaning that what you observe when you run dosbox, is only limited by the speed by which your computer can emulate.
It is really confusing to explain (I hope someone can explain it better), but what you may observe is:
― When you increase the cycles, the game may appear to run slower (because the emulation load becomes heavier). However, by doing so, the actual game will experience a faster emulated computer, and in fact, you're therefore speeding up the game (or at least making it run more fluently) even if your own experience is that it now runs slower.
― When you decrease the cycles, the game may appear to run faster (because the emulation load becomes lighter, hence dosbox emulates faster), but in fact, the game will run slower (most noticeable when the game loads something), because the computer that is emulated, is now a slower one.
― Because all changes to the number of cycles may cause both increase of speed and decrease of speed as explained above, it may appear as if the speed does not change at all.
To only way to show the real speed on which the game runs, is to make an AVI, because only the AVI is synced into the emulated timestream (the real time from the game's perspective) as opposed to your own timestream (the real time from emulator user's perspective).
The actual rerecording emulator is designed primarily for movie making in frame advance mode, not for a real-time gaming performance.
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― If the game is designed to only become more fluent when played on a faster computer (such as Doom), as opposed to becoming eccentricly fast (such as Alley Cat), your safest bet is to use a large value on the number of cycles (such as 40000 or 90000). This will give the game a fairly fast computer and dosbox a fairly large load, meaning it will appear fluent when viewed as AVI, and it will not be too fast when you watch it in dosbox.
― If the game however does not understand the concept of faster computers, and becomes twice the faster when played on twice faster computer, you should set the number of cycles by guessing which value is the most natural for the computer of the era of the game. Yes, it may look quirky in dosbox (at least the rerecording version), but the AVI product will look perfect.
