While you are making a movie, make it a habit to periodically play through your whole movie to verify that it works, and always make a backup of the working copy.
"Periodically" doesn't mean half a week (especially for a WIP emulator).
i have backups and they all run out of synch, so what are they good for if they don't work??
mz wrote:
AVI problems could be solved using .kkapture, but that seems to be too difficult for most people, so it may not be a solution.
and where in that great documentation of yours does it say that kkapture works as a 3rd party solution for avi capturing? also, kkapture performs terribly with fba, capturing like a frame every 30 seconds, while it works great for the demos it was intended for... so no, it's not a solution. fraps would work much more reliably, but that only works with the direct3d blitter...
mz wrote:
Xiaopang wrote:
And let's not forget that this behaviour violates the license under which the source code for the emulator was released.
I don't know where you got this stupid crap from, but this is what the license says (and yes, you can read the full license within FBA-RR, using "Help"->"About"):
i was more thinking about:
"This copyright notice must remain with the code. If your program uses this code, you must either distribute or link to the source code. If you modify or improve this code, you must distribute the source code improvements."
yeah this notice is there, even though it is hidden pretty well.
still doesn't change the fact that it's impudent towards the original author if you just delete his documentation with your distribution, regardless of what the license says. his information was pretty helpful, while yours was not, or else i wouldn't have looked for the original information...
mz wrote:
Also, my release of FBA-RR had a readme.txt file with all hotkeys explained; you shouldn't need more than that to make a TAS. That text file even has credits to the original authors and not a single word about me or my name, since I couldn't care less about that.
yeah, may be it HAD this kind of textfile... may be you should also download the 0.0.0.2 release yourself, because it doesn't come with anything else, but the exe and a crappy outdated changelog.txt that only contains the changes of 0.0.0.1... but hey, go bash people for no good reason...if this txt-file was included with the 0.0.0.1 release, then surprise: the download is not available any more!
mz wrote:
But I know there are a lot of people like you who start to cry if they don't see their big names on there or something, so I put the credits there anyway.
what the hell are you talking about? what does my name have to do with giving credit where credit is due? may be you should start to use that head of yours to think before you write bs like that. anger management might help too....some people...
if you answer honest feedback with personal attacks, then you have some serious personality problems. anyway, i'm done with this crappy mod, seeing what kind of smug idiot is responsible for it...
I'm totally against approving FBA. I have been running Neo Turf Masters with it and encountered nothing but problems. I started recording on an old 32bit machine running XP with the basic DirectDraw 7 video blitter and 22khz sound. After finishing the movie, I had to find out that it didn't play back in synch! After trying out several options, I realized that I had to switch the blitter to Direct3D, or else the movie would always run out of synch. But that wasn't enough. After the movie at least finished playing, I realized that the sound of the resulting avi was always out of synch. At the beginning of the file, the audiotrack was in synch, but got gradually faster, until it reached a skew of a full second after 10 minutes. Later I realized that I had to record the movie in 48khz to get a stable audiotrack, despite the fact that the run was recorded with a 22khz setting.
I tried to record the same run on my new 64bit machine running Vista 64 and encountered the same problems, just with the difference that the movie *always* ran out of synch, regardless of which settings I used. I was able to get over some de-synchs, but had to face countless others after those, which in the end prevented a full playback of the movie on that computer.
You can check out the my run here, by the way.
Later I tried to run a new part of the game on my vista machine, because apart from the aforementioned problems I experienced tons of crashes under XP when I slowed the game down instead of using frame advance, when I navigated the menu, or just randomly after a few minutes of recording. Under Vista the emu performed stable and I didn't encounter any crashes.
After finishing half of the run, I wanted to check it out, only to run into synching problems again. This time, no combination of settings on neither computer seemed to help! The movie always went out of synch at the same spot. The work of half a week is gone thanks to this mess. So I don't think that the emu in its current state is even close to being a stable platform for running arcade games. I'm thankful for what has been achieved with it so far, but I'm also a little disappointed that no new version has been released for the last few months.
If someone wants to check out this reproducible synch problem, here is the fbm-file. The movie stays in synch until it encounters hole 4. At that point, the game changes slightly, so this might be an emulation issue. May be this is only limited to this game. In any case, this might help the devs to trace the source of this problem. This synch problem also occurred at the same location of my completed run, but at least changing the settings helped getting past this point.
Dromiceius wrote:
A determined TASer could (and has, if I'm not mistaken) produce a TAS.
Determination has nothing to do with making a run, if the emulator isn't capable of producing stable results and therefore ends up destroying the product of said determination.
A few other remarks: I don't like the fact that the modded version of FBA has the original documentation stripped. Apart from this being highly disrespectful to its original author, it also is quite a set back for user friendliness, especially since the included new "documentation" explains none of the emu's functions. I had to get the original emu first to find information about included key shortcuts and the emu's options.
And let's not forget that this behaviour violates the license under which the source code for the emulator was released.