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Posted: 11/12/2005 5:04 PM
(Edited: 1/2/2006 8:10 PM)
Post subject: ePSXe re-recording (FFIX)
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
A while back, I used two testing plugins that could record GPU and SPU output from ePSXe to create a short movie of Final Fantasy IX. I'm able to use slowdowns and rerecords while using these plugins and then later capture the streams using Fraps when I replay them with different GPU and SPU plugins, like Pete's. I was going to play through the whole game this way, but stopped when I found out its major disadvantages and bugs. Namely, whenever you load a state, any sound or music instrument that was playing at that moment will be cut off. This makes for some very nasty sound bugs. Also, it wasn't possible to properly capture the audio and video streams (resulting in a lot of lag, as you can see during the battle). Fraps was really my last resort. The program is also very prone to "break" the audio (meaning everything will be recorded without sound, requiring that you restart the emulator), which happened everytime you loaded a state during an MDEC. Still, this video is pretty cool, especially if you'd really like to see ePSXe re-recording someday. Some features:
  • uses slowdowns and re-records
  • uses luck manipulation (to get the Mage Masher with Cinna's Steal command)
ffxi-rerecording-concept.avi 4.4 MB (x264)
Posted: 11/12/2005 5:09 PM
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AnotherGamer
Former player
Joined: 2/2/2005
Posts: 198
Don't use Roman numerals if you don't know how to. XI=11. IX=9.
Posted: 11/12/2005 5:16 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Oh dear.
Posted: 11/12/2005 5:17 PM
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Walker_Boh
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Cool movie. Does this mean that people can start TAS'ing other PS-games aswell? Such as SotN perhaps? Or Final Fantasy 7?
/Walker Boh
Posted: 11/12/2005 5:19 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Walker Boh: not really. Besides all the problems I mentioned before, the GPU/SPU dumps are huge. I think that I used about 500 MB for that little piece of gameplay (mainly because of the MDECs, though) alone. I used about 5 GB when I stopped recording.
Posted: 11/12/2005 5:20 PM
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AnotherGamer
Former player
Joined: 2/2/2005
Posts: 198
If that's doable, I've got a perfect candidate in mind, Tales Of Destiny. With the kind of potentally high-hitting combos you could perform ridiculously early on with frameadvance and rerecords, you could get a metric crapton (70000) of exp each battle you'd manage to get a 99 hit combo in. The fact that all characters are player-controlable directly in battle with the right accessories would help things too.
Posted: 11/12/2005 5:23 PM
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Walker_Boh
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Omega wrote:
Walker Boh: not really. Besides all the problems I mentioned before, the GPU/SPU dumps are huge. I think that I used about 500 MB for that little piece of gameplay (mainly because of the MDECs, though) alone. I used about 5 GB when I stopped recording.
Ah, too bad. That would have been awfully cool.
/Walker Boh
Posted: 11/12/2005 5:31 PM
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ventuz
He/Him
Player (126)
Joined: 10/4/2004
Posts: 940
I think button pressing file only should be possible, but I think we have to get our hand on open-source ePSXe to add the rerecording feature.
Posted: 11/12/2005 6:27 PM
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Maza
Joined: 5/27/2005
Posts: 465
Location: Turku, Finland
Wow, Omeg! That was really something! Would it be possible to see a longer testrun? I admit that the lagging starts to get quite annoying but hey, for seeing TAS of FF9, that is a price I'm willing to pay. And what comes to the huge files it creates while making the movie, I think it's not so big problemat least now-a-days since everyone should have pretty big hardrives. (I myself have currently a litle bit over 250gb free space)
Which run should I encode next? :)
Posted: 11/12/2005 6:47 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Maza wrote:
Wow, Omeg! That was really something! Would it be possible to see a longer testrun? I admit that the lagging starts to get quite annoying but hey, for seeing TAS of FF9, that is a price I'm willing to pay. And what comes to the huge files it creates while making the movie, I think it's not so big problemat least now-a-days since everyone should have pretty big hardrives. (I myself have currently a litle bit over 250gb free space)
I would render a new one, but this movie is actually pretty old. I deleted the original files a long time ago. I could make some test runs again someday, though. It's true that a lot of people have large hard drives, but that's not really an excuse for people who don't, nor is it useful for Bisqwit's poor server when you upload the files for a new run submission.
Posted: 11/12/2005 6:49 PM
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Bag_of_Magic_Food
He/Him
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Yeah, I actually still have that movie from a few months ago.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Posted: 11/12/2005 7:15 PM
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Maza
Joined: 5/27/2005
Posts: 465
Location: Turku, Finland
Omega wrote:
I would render a new one, but this movie is actually pretty old. I deleted the original files a long time ago. I could make some test runs again someday, though.
That would be wonderful. I'd really like to see speedruns/TASes of PSX genre Final Fantasies. (that just might be because I'm soo huge FF fan :) )
Omega wrote:
It's true that a lot of people have large hard drives, but that's not really an excuse for people who don't, nor is it useful for Bisqwit's poor server when you upload the files for a new run submission.
Well, you could compress them so that they wouldn't take as much space, with the expense of the quality. I understand that if anyone was ever to make a full run of a PSX Final Fantasy the quality of the movie would need to be rather poor so that the filesize wouldn't too inhuman. Anyways, I really hope you'll make a longer testrun of FF9. btw, why did you change the appearance of the menu and text screens? Just for fun or did it have some real meaning? I myself like it better when it's in the normal color.
Which run should I encode next? :)
Posted: 11/12/2005 7:19 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Maza wrote:
Well, you could compress them so that they wouldn't take as much space, with the expense of the quality. I understand that if anyone was ever to make a full run of a PSX Final Fantasy the quality of the movie would need to be rather poor so that the filesize wouldn't too inhuman.
Well, I'm talking about the GPU/SPU dumps, which are lossless and can't really be compressed. There are always two versions of a run on Bisqwit's site: the original input file (which already rules out this method of ePSXe re-recording, since the GPU/SPU dumps are output rather than input) and the AVI. The AVI would still be on a decent bitrate, though. 3D RPGs don't have much tiresome things in them to make them difficult to compress, especially with x264. EDIT: I changed the menu color because I like the blue version more than the grey one. :P
Posted: 11/13/2005 2:52 AM
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nesrocks
He/Him
Player (247)
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
this could be used to record some demonstration psx movies... cool. i'd like to record a perfect lap using the white car in ridge racer revolution. hmm ok i can do that in mupen64. but there are many other aplications while we don't have the input recording rerecording emulator
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 11/13/2005 3:20 AM
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RT-55J
Player (150)
Joined: 11/27/2004
Posts: 688
Location: WA State, USA
Wait a minute... GPU/SPU dumps?! Does this mean that I can hex-edit the movie file to automatically beat the game if I feel like doing so?
Nach wrote:
I also used to wake up every morning, open my curtains, and see the twin towers. And then one day, wasn't able to anymore, I'll never forget that.
Posted: 11/13/2005 3:51 AM
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nitsuja
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Computer TASer of 2011 TAS of 2011 First edition TAS of 2011 Computer TAS of 2011 Sega TAS of 2010 Sega TAS of 2008 Sega TAS of 2007 Glitchy TAS of 2007
Huh? It'd probably be very hard to hex edit GPU/SPU dumps to do anything. Except maybe you could remove segments to make the movie skip ahead faster, like cutting out the middle of an AVI, or other things like that. I think it would be way more trouble than anyone is willing to go to to figure out how to do it, considering how huge the files are. Anyway, even if a PSX emulator recorded input, in most cases the only one who would be willing to verify and encode the movie is the one who made it, so you'd still be in the same situation that people would only be able to watch the AVI's, not view them in an emulator.
Posted: 11/13/2005 9:46 AM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
RT-55J wrote:
Wait a minute... GPU/SPU dumps?! Does this mean that I can hex-edit the movie file to automatically beat the game if I feel like doing so?
No. The fundamental difference is that such a dump is solely output, and what you want to hex edit is input. Output is more or less uneditable unless you, like people something think we do, create the movie frame by frame in an image editor. Even then, you'd have to cope with the strange format. The GPU/SPU dumping plugins were never made for speedrunning. They were made to test your GPU and SPU plugins with; since once you've got the dump, you can apply any normal plugin on it to see if they render the stream correctly.
Posted: 11/13/2005 11:36 AM
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Highness
Player (71)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Wow! This is cool. I'd love to see real input-re-recording though, instead of GPU/SPU dumps. But still.. Oh.. If someone manage to produce a full run, I my self think that we should cut out the loading parts, since that can differ from computer to computer I suppose. A funny thing is that it only looks like a pure animation, because if you use frame skip the loading goes alot faster! :D I'd love to see runs of Casper the friendly ghost and Super puzzle fighter!
Posted: 11/13/2005 12:14 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Highness wrote:
Oh.. If someone manage to produce a full run, I my self think that we should cut out the loading parts, since that can differ from computer to computer I suppose.
An emulator emulates something at the same speed as the original hardware, so if the emulator is correctly written, then loading times will take exactly as long on every computer.
Posted: 11/13/2005 3:22 PM
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Highness
Player (71)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Try it your self then. I know for sure when I played Casper. It has alot of loading in it. When I played it on ePSXe last time I accidently hit the frame skip which cut the loading time down to virtually nothing.
Posted: 11/13/2005 4:53 PM
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nesrocks
He/Him
Player (247)
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
loading time differs from playstation to playstation and from cd to cd. it's far from being frame precise.
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 11/13/2005 4:57 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
FODA wrote:
loading time differs from playstation to playstation and from cd to cd. it's far from being frame precise.
It does differ between CD ISO dumps, but I'm certain that the error correction that's dumped along with the ISO files will correct any such differences. And if everybody uses one certain BIOS file, then there should be no problem.
Posted: 11/13/2005 6:53 PM
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Highness
Player (71)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Still I think that the loading scenes should be cut out from the AVI if ePSXe for example get's proper re-recording that is submittable.
Posted: 11/13/2005 6:55 PM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Highness wrote:
Still I think that the loading scenes should be cut out from the AVI if ePSXe for example get's proper re-recording that is submittable.
Why? They're part of the game. I don't think that any of us should have the right to remove parts from a game as we please. Unless, of course, there are extreme circumstances (like the 30 minute wait in Secret of Evermore).
Posted: 11/13/2005 6:58 PM
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DeHackEd
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Former player
Joined: 11/6/2004
Posts: 833
How about the open-the-drive-door trick for FMV skipping? And would we allow using it for the regen glitch in FF7? :)
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