Joined: 10/17/2005
Posts: 632
Location: Seattle, WA
The movie 'Alex Kidd in Miracle World (UE) [!] hey man don't be givin' me no guff 'bout no long filenames mang i gone cut you good you done do dat agin mang.mmv' worked fine when using the savestate 'Alex Kidd in Miracle World (UE) [!] jesus christmas this is a long filename how can you handle such a long filename this is amazing.dgz.'
Psycho Fox worked with the movie 'Psycho Fox (UE) [!] is a funny little orange creature with blue shirt and pink shorts hey at least he's wearing shorts not like SOME people ';';';'';';';';'';.mmv' and the savestate 'Psycho Fox (UE) [!]fdsfjsdflhldjskhfkdjlsahfkjdshfkjsdhfjklsdhfjksdhfkjlshjfksdhjkflhsdjkl fhjdskhfkjsdhfkjlsdahfkjlds.dgz'
I believe we have a success!
dega surely does not support as many games as meka does, but hey, as the speed you're going, we might get your rerecording version of this emulator accepted very soon, which is far from meka's case.
as for meka's linux issue, there are already several emulators accepted on this site, that work partially or not at all outside windows, it's not such a big issue thanks to wine.
btw, what conditions is your emulator still missing to get accepted ? some gui code would help maybe :)
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Not only it has to make acceptable movies, but it needs ease of use too, but I believe the author knows that. I'm talking about configuring hotkeys and being able to save/load when the emulator is not paused. Great work so far!
as for meka's linux issue, there are already several emulators accepted on this site, that work partially or not at all outside windows, it's not such a big issue thanks to wine.
Hmm, AFAIK those emulators were accepted before the 'new emulator' rules were established, so I guess they were grandfathered in?
SXL wrote:
btw, what conditions is your emulator still missing to get accepted ? some gui code would help maybe :)
What gui code are you referring to?
I think it currently satisfies all the objective conditions at NewEmulatorConditions apart from "author field in movie file", "possible to create avi" and possibly "OSX compatibility". But that is the bare minimum and I'm also looking to hit:
- bulletproof recording
- slow motion/fast forward
- readonly
- info display
- hotkey configuration
from DesiredEmulatorFeatures (which should be easiest/most important).
FODA wrote:
being able to save/load when the emulator is not paused
That should already work? Could you give more details?
Joined: 10/17/2005
Posts: 632
Location: Seattle, WA
It does work, for me anyway, though I'd suggest making the emulation pause when opening a menu--or at least making it a configurable option later. I didn't look up what hotkey there was for savestate loading/saving if there was one, so I had to remember to pause everytime I wanted to grab the menu.
otherwise, yeah, those conditions you're looking to hit are just what I'd want personally before I started something serious, some memory peeking would be nice but that can come later.
Joined: 3/30/2004
Posts: 359
Location: Borlänge - Sweden
Mouaahahaa... this is SO much fun.. I love the work that you have done so far and already.. :) and you are doing it with speed. Nice work, its getting better and better. :D
- hotkey configuration
I really want this one. :) I find it very hard to hit O every frame and hit all the buttons that I want. :) Guess space is more a better option :P But I dont know.
Keep it up :D
yeah, the GUI code I was referring to was those hotkeys. remove every hardcoded keys/values that the user would could/want/need to modify, and put them into menus in you application. maybe store them in an .ini file.
as for linux, yeah the conditions were not, and are still not, always perfectly respected. linux is requested mostly by the publishers (often admins) who have specific tools to produce high-quality movies.
that means that, if I'm not mistaken, if the linux version of rerecording emulator has to be accepted, it would have to include video/sound output and synched playback.
my main worry would be rather upthorn's one : the list of unsupported games (read : that don't synch enough while rerecording, or are not well emulated) might be bigger than you think. and maybe, adding rerecording to meka (which has better compatibility) would take less time than adding more compatibility/synch to dega...
maybe you both guys could work together on the subject ?
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Meka has such a terrible user interface, and i really hate the flashy backround graphics/everything how fickle it can be sometimes. Personally I love Gens now (used to hate it because of its suckiness back a few years ago) and would really rather see it have added SMS support, which would basically only eliminate Wonderboy in monster land from TAS'ing (its the only SMS game I haven't been able to get to work through a converter).
hold on, you're contradicting yourself in the same sentence.
you say gens does not have sms support (at all !) as of now, which is true, yet you claim only some sms game is not supported ? what is this converter you're talking about ? how could you know that this game won't work on an emulator that does not support any sms at all ?
I believe you're underestimating the chore a whole lot : adding a new console into an emulator is very close to write a full emulator, which takes years before being viable. whereas pcc offers us a working rerecording emulator.
let me picture this to you :
- add rerecording to dega : size 1, actually it's almost done (thanks pcc !)
- add rerecording to meka : size 10 (less for Bock if he ever comes back)
- add sms to gens : size 100 ?
so ok, gens might be more comfortable to you, but heh, pcc is here at least, so why not asking him the features you want ?
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Well, I know that it will not work because using a Power Base Converter (PCB, was released with the sega genesis to allow it to boot in SMS mode), it does not work because of the controller (for some reason, you need to use a Master System controller on the genesis with the PCB to play Wonderboy in monster land). You would have to add some different controller support to gens to get it to work. Wikipedia article on the PCB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Base_Converter#Master_System_compatibility
It is not like making a whole new emulator, because all you need to do is for Gens to disable the 68000 processor emulation and boot the game through the Z80, which is already emulated (this is what, from a non-technical standpoint at all, I understand to be true just from a hardware perspective). Gens+ and Kega Fusion (the other main Genesis emulators) already have had SMS support for many years, even though they are primarily genesis emulators. Thats what leads me to believe it wouldn't be as difficult.
The advantage to modifying GENS instead is that you get all the sophisticated TAS tools already to go. Modifying a new emulator would mean crude tools as first.
Though I am happy either way as long as we can see SMS submissions soon :P
If I remember correctly, somebody modified a version of Gens to have SMS and GG support, and called it Gens Plus. Maybe if the source was found, it could be applied to Gens?
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Sir VG wrote:
adelikat wrote:
The advantage to modifying GENS instead is that you get all the sophisticated TAS tools already to go. Modifying a new emulator would mean crude tools as first.
Though I am happy either way as long as we can see SMS submissions soon :P
If I remember correctly, somebody modified a version of Gens to have SMS and GG support, and called it Gens Plus. Maybe if the source was found, it could be applied to Gens?
If I remember correctly, the author was contrary to TASing, and the code isn't open source.
Joined: 3/30/2004
Posts: 359
Location: Borlänge - Sweden
FODA wrote:
Sir VG wrote:
adelikat wrote:
The advantage to modifying GENS instead is that you get all the sophisticated TAS tools already to go. Modifying a new emulator would mean crude tools as first.
Though I am happy either way as long as we can see SMS submissions soon :P
If I remember correctly, somebody modified a version of Gens to have SMS and GG support, and called it Gens Plus. Maybe if the source was found, it could be applied to Gens?
If I remember correctly, the author was contrary to TASing, and the code isn't open source.
The advantage to modifying GENS instead is that you get all the sophisticated TAS tools already to go. Modifying a new emulator would mean crude tools as first.
Though I am happy either way as long as we can see SMS submissions soon :P
If I remember correctly, somebody modified a version of Gens to have SMS and GG support, and called it Gens Plus. Maybe if the source was found, it could be applied to Gens?
If I remember correctly, the author was contrary to TASing, and the code isn't open source.
This is almost correct.
Gens Plus is open source, but the code is bad.
To the point that I feel it would be easier to port Meka's SMS/GG emulation core into Gens myself than to fix up Gens Plus' to be worth TASing.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
maybe could you work with pcc to make us a nice sms rerecording emulator. and if meka was the target, maybe could you invite Bock (if he's still alive...) to help you both...
what do you think the best solution would be ?
- pcc's rerecording dega, improve this
- add rerecording to meka
- add sms (from meka ?) support into rerecording gens
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Hi guys,
I have a new WIP with hotkey configuration (Windows only), read-only mode, encoding support (Linux only) and an author field. Because of that field I had to change the file format so old files are incompatible. Here is the new format:
0000: identifier 'MMV\0'
0004: dega version
0008: frame count
000c: rerecord count
0010: begin from reset?
0014-001f: reserved
0020-005f: author (UTF-8)
0060-625f: savestate if beginning from state
rest: input data, 2 bytes/frame (one for each input)
To use the encoding support build the Linux version and you should get another executable 'degavi'. degavi spawns mencoder for you and feeds in the correct audio and video data so you don't have intermediate test0.avi and audiolog.mp3 files. You only need to give your choice of OUTPUT parameters (except the filename, which is separate). Run ./degavi for the syntax.
The downloads:
Source code: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~pcc03/tmp/dega-1.12-rerecording-v3.tar.gz
Win32 binary: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~pcc03/tmp/dega-1.12-rerecording-v3-win32.zip
Thanks for all your hard work pcc, I'm really excited about SMS runs.
Is it possible for you to create a quick save / quick load hotkeys like F5 for quicksave, F8 for quickload etc. ?
OK, this WIP adds quick load/save (F5/F6 by default, Windows only for now), as well as speedup/slowdown (+ and -). You can also configure the fast forward key (previously F8).
Source code: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~pcc03/tmp/dega-1.12-rerecording-v4.tar.gz
Win32 binary: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~pcc03/tmp/dega-1.12-rerecording-v4-win32.zip
It looks like the community is divided on whether to use dega for runs. I'm happy to take bug reports/feature requests for now but I can't devote much time to this after a month or so. I don't think it would be worth me working on another emulator now. So dega is available now and obviously if a rerecording meka/gens+ is made by others then it can be used as well. The only problem with that is that it might be hard to compare times between dega and whatever emulator we use due to timing differences. I guess this issue has been considered before (Famtasia/FCEU)?
At this point I'd like to ask TPTB to have a look at this emulator and decide if it can be accepted here. Or is this done on the basis of runs being available?
Joined: 10/17/2005
Posts: 632
Location: Seattle, WA
I keep hearing about dega not playing as many games as meka and others. What games don't work with dega? Is there a list somewhere or some examples to work with?
Bug report for Windows version.
If you assign the pause emulator function to the pause key, then it becomes impossible to pause if unpaused or unpause if paused the emulator, because the emulator will receive the key assignment pause twice, once on the automatic, and once on the manual assignment.
Also, if I hit the frame advance key, I expect the emulator to advance one frame from current point, and then pause, like all other emulators do, regardless of whether the emulator was paused before.
Would also be nice to have a memory viewer, although that feature can come later, as I can use tsearch for that purpose.
