Joined: 3/13/2004
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Location: Kansai, JAPAN
Does anyone know of any other re-recording emulators besides Famtasia? Especially ones for other systems? I'd like to try my hand at other classic games and give 'em what fer!
ZSNES doesn't support rerecording, the movie will simply stop upon loading a state. The only other emulator I know of that enables rerecording is VirtuaNES. Though it is another NES emulator.
Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
Does anyone know how to play the movies in ZSNES? Do I have to rename the movies to match the names of the ROMs? Because there is no option to "look" for movie files, just play, record, and stop.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
What is clumsy about ZSNES movie support?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Irrelevant if it doesn't support rerecording anyway.
I was thinking about hotkeys or some other mechanism that allows to use the stop/play/record/quicksave/quickload+rerecord keys *instantly* (from the game perspective), without having to go searching the menues while the game is running.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I'll talk it over with pagefault.
Keyboard shortcuts shouldn't be a problem.
Adding rerecord...
Not sure how I'm going to do that.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Pagefault said he'll try to add keyboard support.
For rerecording, he said we'll have to redesign the movie format. I'll see what I can do.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
For rerecording, he said we'll have to redesign the movie format. I'll see what I can do.
The movie format doesn't have to be changed.
The change has to be in the quicksave format - it must include a frame counter that can be used to seek in the recording when loading the quicksave.
That's what I think - I'm not a zsnes developer or affiliated with the author of Famtasia.
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In zsnes, a movie file contains a savestate for the beginning of the recording. In famtasia, movie file doesn't contain that - the movie starts always from reset, or from "current" position which rarely has any use.
It would be useful if zsnes also had that "always from reset" option to make it easier to compare the durations of game completions.
Though - my snes emulator of choice is snes9x - I would like to have those features in that instead :P
Irrelevant if it doesn't support rerecording anyway.
I was thinking about hotkeys or some other mechanism that allows to use the stop/play/record/quicksave/quickload+rerecord keys *instantly* (from the game perspective), without having to go searching the menues while the game is running.
Zsnes does have shortcut keys. Just click on MISC and then GAME KEYS and you can see what they are and change them if you want.
Joined: 3/9/2004
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Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
pagefault and I spoke it over, and we will try to add movie support which I think will blow away anything you've seen in any emulator.
We will have a feature which will protect against bad movies, missusing a ZMV, chapter support, and hotkeys.
Of course rerecording will be in there :)
What do you mean by quicksaves affecting a movie?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
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Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
You can't quicksave in middle of a movie.
Our new method has chapter support, which will allow you to rerecord from any chapter point you previously defined.
Maybe that's what you mean by quicksave?
When you rerecord, everything that previously was after is erased.
We'll also be doing it in GPL'd C, so anyone could try improving it.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
You can't quicksave in middle of a movie.
Our new method has chapter support, which will allow you to rerecord from any chapter point you previously defined.
What does this mean?
When you rerecord, everything that previously was after is erased.
Joined: 3/9/2004
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Bleh, having a hard time explaining this, I'll see you on IRC ;)
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Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
As requested, I will try attempt to explain chapters.
A normal movie is a save state followed by button presses.
A chaptered movie on the other hand will have multiple save states in it.
Chapters can be inserted at a fixed interval (say every two minutes) or at your choosing.
Chapters allow a few things. You will be able to watch a movie, and jump foward or backward in it via the chapters. It also ensures a smoother movie, as desyncing is less likely when states are restored transparently during playback.
From any chapter point, you will be able to switch from playback mode to record mode, which will erase everything from the start of that chapter till the end of the movie, and replace with what you currently are doing.
Clear?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
What is needed is the ability to make quicksaves during the movie recording (or replaying) *any time* - like you'd do when you're playing normally, and the ability to load any of those quicksaves while recording *any time* so that the recorder will automatically also undo the relevant length of the recording.
Desyncs should be impossible with this method (I don't know why they happen in Famtasia, probably some bug).
The only thing you have to safeguard against is for loading a quicksave that wasn't made during the recording of this movie.
Grain of 2 minutes is highly useless in my opinion.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
You can insert a chapter anywhere, and you can jump to one at will and if wanted, to go back into recording mode.
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I think those are enough, provided that saving and loading quicksaves affected the movie recording as it should :)